The scope of the digital data protection challenge faced by most organizations will continue to grow as an increasing percentage of the data these organizations depend upon is digitally originated. In all these applications, tape-based approaches are used for data archiving and, in many cases, for disaster recovery as well.

We have introduced the concept of an enhanced backup solution that can extend the performance and applicability of backup data protection by combining both disk and tape technology. The cost-effective implementation of enhanced backup requires a disk architecture with performance and economic characteristics that are significantly different from those of traditional applications storage architectures.