A couple months ago at Storage Networking World I saw a new storage product with great potential, but I couldn't talk about it because it was not announced yet.
Prostor, a startup in Boulder with a team of industry veterans has developed the ultimate tape replacement product - a removable disk cartridge that operates like a tape. In other words, it is a virtual tape cartridge that looks and feels just like a real tape cartridge, but it has a 2.5" disk drive inside. That means instead of having a complex and costly tape transport to deal with, the Prostor RDX (removable disk -xfactor?) system uses the highest volume/lowest cost disk interface and connectors in the universe. That alone should make the RDX the most desired backup technology ever created.
Of course, the big thing that most people will like about RDX is the lack of tape. The RDX does not have tape that flakes apart over time, tape that can't stand temperature and humidity changes, tape that can't stand magnetic coercion, tape that sometimes gets kinked up in the transport and needs to be removed with a tweezers, tape that needs to be retensioned every year when sitting on the shelf storing archives, tape that breaks off the end of the spool when you least expect it and tape that needs to be discarded because its header has been updated a couple thousand times already (this happens much faster than its sounds). Yes, tape has lots of problems and most of us can't stand any of one of them, much less the whole lot of them together waiting to ruin our days, jobs, careers, etc.
In the last few years, disk to disk (D2D) backup has become popular because tape is such a nuisance. The problem is, D2D backup with larger subsystems tends to be a bit pricey and the whole backup operations needs to be altered to incorporate an intermediate disk layer. Do you write to disk and then to tape? If so, can you recover directly from tape or do you need to recover to disk first? How is media managed when you write to tape from disk? Do these tapes use the same naming conventions and does the backup database know about these tapes? As you go further down the path with D2D and D2D2T and all variations, there are best practices and disciplines to develop that are thornier to deal with than it looks at first glance. Its worth doing, but its more work. Backup and recovery is always work.
So along comes Prostor with RDX and the next thing you know, there is no intermediate disk stage. You write to their disk cartridges directly during backup (yes - you need an RDX "drive" or robotic controller mechanism too) and naming conventions are taken care of without figuring out complicated schemes. There is no second backup-to-tape operation and there is no lag time required before you can take data off site to comply with disaster recovery edicts.
For people who have struggled with backups for years, this is the sort of thing you have been dreaming about. Run don't walk to Prostor's web site: http://www.prostorsystems.com/ Then start trying to figure out how you are going to get your hands on the stuff so you can start making your lives a whole lot easier.
There will be bumps along the way I'm sure like there are with any new technology, but the bumps this time likely to be a lot smaller and fewer than we've seen with tape over many decades of refining and suffering.
-Marc Farley
