Summary

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Disk and Solid-State Devices

Well, this isn't a future per se, but it isn't something we would call an available commodity either. The proliferation of disk-based and solid-state devices will hinge upon the backup storage companies, both software and hardware, having the ability to adequately integrate hierarchical storage management (HSM) features into the use of these devices. Perhaps, the backup software will rely on a finely tuned hardware solution that manages the migration of the data to tape for you without having to worry about the backup application integrating with an HSM tool. This would help to untie the vendor-specific solutions and allow you to choose based on best of breed.

Time to recovery will continue to be the biggest hurdle for us in the future; therefore, disk or solid-state devices may be the answer. As we all know, these are not limitless devices; we must have the tools to manage them effectively and with limited administration intervention. This again speaks to the intelligent software we hope to see in the future-built-in management of the storage from a much higher level. When disk or solid-state devices are integrated with a backup solution that provides some of the HSM technology, it becomes that proverbial bottomless cup of coffee that we long to have available to us for backup and, more importantly, recovery. High-speed recovery won't come from tape. As much as we love tape devices, we do not foresee a tape device that will be able to match the speed of disk or solid-state disks. However, since we are in the chapter about the future, perhaps we will see a nice implementation of a 'RAID' tape solution that would provide those kinds of speeds. Unfortunately, you will still be required to mount those tapes, and since it is a sequential media, you will be able to perform only one restore at a time. That's the beauty of the disk-based solutions for recovery: It is a random access device capable of serving many, many requests at once; the only limitations would be I/O and other factors.

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