Backup vendor Yosemite Technologies announced Tuesday at LinuxWorld in Boston that it has created a service pack for its TapeWare 7 software that enables disk-based backup.
The software, which will ship later this month, is designed for small and mid-sized enterprise customers. TapeWare 7 operates on Windows, Linux and NetWare, among other operating systems.
Customers are seeing an increase in backup-to-disk products. Nearly all the backup vendors -- IBM/Tivoli, Legato Software, Veritas Software and Commvault Systems -- have added this capability to their products. Backup-to-disk is faster than backing up data to tape, and it is almost as inexpensive. Add to that the problem of retrieving data from tapes that may be kept offsite, and backup-to-disk is an attractive strategy for a company.
Backup-to-disk products will not replace tape, however. They will be used as the primary backup for companies or as a staging area until data can be backed up to tape at the user's convenience.
TapeWare 7 is downloadable from Yosemite's Web site. It is priced at US$649 for the master backup server and US$199 for each server the master server backs up. An additional media server is available for larger businesses that want to archive their backups before transferring them to tape. The media server is US$400.