The number of times that someone has declared tape "dead" probably numbers in the thousands. Users that deploy disk consistently report that their success ratios for backups and restores climb to 95% or higher. Yet companies should still view disk's place in the backup process as a temporary resting place for data and not a permanent one.

Disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) is seen as the logical way for companies to ease disk into their backup environment but that is still easier said than done. Storage systems configured as disk, file servers and virtual tape libraries are all options from which companies can choose and more than one might be the right choice. Then once selected, implementing and managing it brings its own problems.

Disk can ease today's backup pain but disk creates its own set of issues. Throwing disk at backup problems may provide short term relief but odds are that companies will spend a load of money and time trying to fix the new problems that disk just created.

Having all backups on disk creates power and heat problems thereby creating financial burden on the backup solution. SMB users tend not to have multiple sites to replicate disk images and therefore are faced with using tape medium to take data offsite.

Many organisations are faced with regulatory compliance and need to guarantee data is kept unchanged for long periods of time - to do this on disk would be cost prohibitive.