SMB storage explosion

"If they need to recover their data within seconds or minutes then D2D is really the only option," says Sargeant. "But if they can afford to recover their data overnight or in 24 hours, then from a cost perspective D2T might be fine.

"As a general observation, many SMBs have gone to D2T because of the cost reasons. As their information holdings grow however, they’ll suddenly discover it takes a heck of a long time to recover their data. That doesn’t mean to say that tape is disappearing.Tape becomes the final archive of data," Sargeant says.

Tape has been in use for decades and is cost effective and reliable. Peridata Communications’ MD, Divo Cipriani, says some call tape archaic, but it’s familiar to SMBs; they know how to use it, it hasn’t let them down.

"A significant number of SMBs place a great deal of reliance on hard disk to hard disk backups. This is nothing short of false reliance and can scarcely be defined as backup. Utilising mirrored hard disk to hard disk offers no security or protection against virus -- which is neatly transferred from hard disk to hard disk -- or fire, theft or natural disaster."

"Tape backup offers a range of benefits over HD to HD. It offers higher storage capacity; speed of backup can be upwards of 160GB per hour; automated tape libraries still offer the lowest cost per Gigabyte; media is interchangeable; data backup on tape can be easily stored off-site; it has a claimed shelf life of over 15 years," he says.

D2D versus D2T is very much dependent of the business model, says SLI Consulting’s Goldmann.

"A very effective means to do back-up and restore is with local D2D, it’s very fast in restoring data. Then have a second level of backup for business critical data sent encrypted electronically to a remote site via the internet. This allows us to retrieve corrupted, lost, or deleted data very quickly from our D2D appliance and in worst case (fire, floods, earthquakes, break-ins) to retrieve businesscritical, encrypted data from our secured remote site anywhere in the world."

Goldmann says 1GB of disk space -- enough space for financials, company reference data, templates, customers addresses -- can be stored remotely for less then $200 per annum. "That works out to be less then $17 per month and we have piece of mind that we are able to retrieve company critical data any time, any place with any device which can connect to the internet and download data."

Basically it comes down to what the customer’s expectations are about having access to that data, and secondly how much they are prepared to spend. If they want everything available real-time, then they have to be prepared to pay for it.

There aren’t many SMBs that need a fivesecond recovery of files, says Quantum’s Tamlin. "Vendors are pushing backup to disc, backup to disc, when in reality it’s not an appropriate solution for many clients."