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Tape Backup vs Disk Backup

Revinetix' goal is nothing short of the replacement of tape backup with superior disk technology. While the vast majority of today's enterprise solutions rely on tape as their backup and archival media, a movement exists in the storage industry towards reliable disk-based backup. Major players in the enterprise tape backup market have only partially embraced this evolution to disk, due to historical revenue streams from their installed customer base of tape users. The trend towards disk backup is being influenced, in part, by the increasing affordability of high capacity disks, as well as two notable challenges facing tape backup solutions - frequent failures and slow data transfer.

Tape backup is prone to failure. According to a 2003 report in Computer Technology Review, restoring data from tape can fail up to 70% of the time. These tape backup failures are attributed to a myriad of causes - ranging from failure of the media itself to user error. Regardless of the reason, data that was thought to be backed-up is partially damaged or completely lost up to 70% of the time using tape backup. In the current era of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and HIPAA compliance, this result can carry stiff penalties.

Another major weakness of tape backup technology is speed. Data transfer rates for disk backup are two to four times faster than tape backup, which delivers a clear time advantage when replacing, recovering, or repairing files. Speed is also particularly important when considering that network data volume is continuing to expand, yet the time available to execute a data backup (the "backup window") is decreasing. This window has typically been the time when the server or data is not needed, such as overnight or on weekends. However, in today's global economy where many businesses operate 24/7, system downtime is becoming increasingly rare. As a result, a premium exists for accomplishing backups and restores quickly.

Revinetix combines the advantages of Disk2Disk2Disk® backup and archiving with its own powerful, intuitive RevOS® software so that SMBs have a user-friendly, highly reliable, and cost effective data backup solution.