Is there an industry in which tape backups still exist even hip enough to have trends? At first glance — not really. There's a lot of the same old thing. "Save it all, save it fast and save it cheap!" has been the motto forever, but technology has finally caught up with the plea, and the game is starting to change.
Urgency
The disaster recovery rules really aren't any different — there's just more on the line. Every action in the data center carries more urgency and weight than it used to, for several reasons. First, Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) are blurring. A server meltdown doesn't just affect payroll and billing. It can hamstring your knowledge workers, disrupt your customer interactions and threaten your partners. It can also land you in hot water with government regulatory bodies.
The upshot of these risks is a greater dependence on the departments responsible for BC planning, greater freedom for the CIO and CTO to make decisions, and increases in budgets and staffing to match their expanded responsibilities. In the end, that means massive changes in a fairly short period of time — and a corresponding opportunity to replace aging infrastructure with new technology.
Clouds
It's been coming for several years now, but this is the decade in which most DR services will move to the cloud. There will always be holdouts and few businesses should outsource their entire DR infrastructure, but in terms of cost, breadth and ease-of-use, clouds are hard to challenge. The old saying about software is "cheap, fast, and good-pick two!" Clouds are already dirt cheap and fairly good, and they're getting faster.
Disk
Tape is dying — not because it isn't evolving, but because it's evolving to meet the demands of an old paradigm. It has faster I/O than ever before, which is a godsend when you really need a sequential restore of an entire file system. This is helpful, for example, when a data center is melted by lava or swallowed by a giant sinkhole. It's less useful when a power supply blows at bank's branch office at lunchtime or when a virus takes down a workgroup three hours before a presentation to the board. Tape isn't gone yet and it will stick around for several more years, but disks — both inside the enterprise and inside the cloud — are destined to win this fight.
Virtualization
Just as KVM switches revolutionized data center management decades ago, virtualization is doing the same today. Virtualization saves power, space and time. It wastes fewer CPU cycles and allows businesses to replicate servers more easily and quickly. All of this ties perfectly into DR planning. Expect to see more virtualization offerings from every DR and BC provider over the next 24 months.
Appliances
When disaster strikes, you want your team executing your DR and BC plans, not playing hide-and-seek with data. Appliances, whether physical or virtual, are the simplest path to an end result, whether that's de-duping data for export to off-site storage or a continuous backup of remote servers. Expect to see more appliances popping up soon. Focus on choosing appliances that play nicely with your existing infrastructure and limit the number of vendors involved.
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