Chapter 11: Major Players in the Backup Arena

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Summary

Well, this was a fun chapter…all of the speculation and conjecture one can muster without having to apologize. Just as in any other industry, the future is uncertain; however, the forecast becomes a bit easier when we talk about the near future. We have tried to give you some of that in this chapter, and we have also taken creative license to speculate on technologies that would be nice to have in place to improve the climate for the backup administrator. While our crystal ball may have some flaws, we think the future should at least include some of what we discussed here. We will definitely see more integration of software technologies in the backup arena, and we will see disks being utilized more as their costs keep coming down. It will make the future very interesting. Perhaps in the next edition of this book, 'The Future of Backup' chapter will be titled 'New Technologies.'

In the next, and final, chapter, we look at several of the primary backup and recovery application providers.

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