DZone

The backup industry has always had a compelling hypothesis: First, integrate the “control plane” and the “data plane” into a media server and second, optimize the data plane with variable length dedupe in the form of a backup appliance. Presto! Now, you can greatly reduce both capital and operational expenses. This hypothesis has served the traditional vendors well — they are still selling in the billions of dollars! However, the fact of the matter is that they are on the wrong side of technology trends: both in terms of the emergence of the cloud as well as cloud applications and workloads.

Let’s head back a couple of decades when tape was the king of secondary storage. The arguments brought forward against tape were the following: Although much cheaper than disk, the operational complexity was very high. For example, tapes have high seek times compared to disk, cannot handle more than one stream reliably, and have high operational maintenance overheads (e.g, temperature controlled environments). As a result, tape never graduated out of the high end enterprise, and did not have an answer to the fundamental advantages of de-duplicated disk: the capital expenditure was comparable and the operational expense was much less. In short order, a combination of Veritas media servers and Data Domain backup appliances became the de-facto standard for backing up Oracle databases.

Source: DZone