Modern Data Protection

Chapter 13. Commercial Data Protection Challenges

Before describing the different kinds of data protection solutions in the next two chapters, I want to give you a brief history lesson and explain what life was like before we had commercial backup products. You young whippersnappers don’t know how good you have it.

I’ll follow this history lesson with a comprehensive overview of all the challenges found in today’s backup and recovery systems. Think of this big list as the problem statement in a typical technology presentation. This list of everything wrong in backup and recovery will be followed with two chapters of all the different kinds of commercial backup and recovery systems you can buy to solve one or more of these problems. Each solution category will include advantages and challenges of that particular architecture, followed by my analysis of the current state of that particular category of the backup and recovery industry.

A Brief History of Backup

To understand how important commercial backup software is in the world of data protection, you have to look at how backups were before they came along. Commercial backup software products for Unix and Netware started to appear in the mid-1980s, but it was not the prominent industry we have today. It was not an assumption that a large commercial Unix environment would be running a commercial backup product or any kind of tape automation system.

I know this because I lived in that world. In 1993, I worked at a $35B bank that ...