Summary

This chapter discussed the wide variety of technologies and approaches used in backup technology. For many years, backup to tape has been the basis of data management and disaster recovery operations and will continue to be an important storage management application for many years to come. Backup technology has a long history of adapting to new technologies and requirements.

With the advent of SAN technology, backup has changed to take advantage of the new architecture possibilities. LAN-free backup and serverless backup are two examples of new backup architectures that leapfrog the capabilities of legacy backup systems. While some believe tape will be replaced by disk storage soon, tape will likely continue to be used for many years due to its portability and ability to store historically relevant data for many years. Combinations of disk and tape will evolve to significantly change the capabilities, but not the goals, of backup.