Section 4.6. Future Plans

4.6. Future Plans

One of the main challenges in IT today is the overall security of systems. Since security is such a fundamental part of backup (especially when people lose unencrypted tapes), the Amanda community plans to continue hardening all aspects of Amanda security.

There is a fundamental shift in the backup industry, with disk becoming the primary media for backups. Even though Amanda was designed for backup-to-disk from the very beginning, the Amanda team plans many backup-to-disk improvements, such as providing multiple simultaneous backups and restores from disk.

Many Amanda users have a constant battle with overwhelming data growth. Amanda has to be up to the task, and the Amanda team is working on increasing scalability and performance.

Wide adoption of open-source products (especially Linux) brings Amanda to production environments with Oracle, MySQL, SAP, and many other applications. Many users successfully deploy Amanda in such demanding environments, and the Amanda team is working on an application API that will simplify backup of those applications.

Amanda has always strived to simplify the life of the system administrator, and the project continues to work on the simplification of installation, administration, and recovery while giving the system administrator full control of how to do backups.

As you can see from this short list, the development of Amanda continues addressing of real-world requirements of real people. The Amanda development team and the Amanda community will further maintain and enhance this powerful and well-known software suite.

BackupCentral.com has a wiki page for every chapter in this book. Read or contribute updated information about this chapter at http://www.backupcentral.com.