Recovering from a system outage or some other type of data-loss event was uncertain and could take days, weeks or more to complete. Downtime wasn't just a potential risk of tape-based backup recovery. It was an everyday concern - one with potentially devastating business consequences. And for the many users who still back up solely to tape today, these risks still exist.

But that was before ATA/SATA disk and, importantly, well before data de-duplication. With the advent of ATA/SATA disk as a backup target, data protection got much better seemingly overnight. Backup speeds improved drastically and, importantly, so did recovery performance. For the first time, we started thinking about data protection in recovery, and not just backup, terms. And our recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives started getting a lot more aggressive.