I ran across a post in the Hardware-Storage section of The Register called "Removable hard disks make a come-backup" that made mention of a company marketing a backup solution that uses removable hard drives in lieu of tape. The company, Idealstor, was founded in 2002 by Nezzen Systems in Gaithersburg, MD. Their homepage talks about "Achieving Backup Nirvana":
"Idealstor develops backup and storage solutions that are geared to take advantage of the increasing capacities and decreasing costs of hard drives. Disk to Disk Backup (D2D) was developed to speed up the process of backing up data. Rather than sending the data from disk to tape, Idealstor lets you eject the disks like tape for a tape free backup solution."
This approach, according to Idealstor, offers the following benefits:
- Ejectable Disk to Disk Backup
- Removable Hard Disk media for archiving data
- Speed of disk with the portability of tape
Now I don't want to naysay anything, but I would be concerned about the long-term reliability of this solution. Many hardware vendors offer data storage servers, D2D appliances and Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs) that will actually mimic an autoloader/tape library, so I ask where the Idealstor solution fits.
I'm still under the impression that tape is still the cheapest form of backup media. Could you see a solution like this replacing tape?
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