The Data Protection Benchmark Report

The Data Protection Benchmark Report The Road to Recovery September 2006 — Sponsored by — The Data Protection Benchmark Report Executive Summary n the beginning there was tape ─ and only tape. For years, most companies’ idea of data protec-tion focused largely on backing up bits and bytes to tape cartridges and either shelving the tape I or storing it offsite. Tape is a stable and mature technology for sure, but it has its tradeoffs. If disaster struck a business, data was retrieved just as quickly as the storage administrator could gather the tapes containing the needed data sets; fire up the backup application to catalogue those tapes, and build an index of data sets. Once the index was built ─ a process that can take hours or days, depending on how many tapes need to be catalogued ─ the administrator selected the data sets that needed to be restored and picked a target location to execute the restore. In a best-case scenario, the backup application already indexed the data sets into a database ─ meaning the process could take only hours. In a worst-case scenario, it could take days to fully re-store lost information. That’s assuming that any of the past full and incremental backups hadn’t failed; in which case, the data was lost for good. Much has changed in the last five or six years. Data protection is no longer just an afterthought ─ a task relegated to the IT administrator on the graveyard ...