The backup industry is less green now than it was even two years ago.  The proliferation of disk-to-disk backup is directly responsible.  Even with all the data deduplication technologies available, the growth in the number of disk drives because of backup applications has been tremendous.  And what did we really gain:  faster access to data IF that data is required.  But if we aren’t accessing that data, why are we keeping an ever increasing amount of it on an energy inefficient resource?

Many IT administrators at small and medium businesses (SMBs) are facing a new budget cycle as the New Year dawns. One of the items which many are considering investing in is data protection technology. Most have experienced an explosion in the amount of data requiring protection while not experiencing an equivalent increase in their IT budget. Additionally, the responsibility of complying with new governmental and industry regulations for data retention, archiving and electronic discovery has fallen squarely in the lap of IT staffs which stretches their budgets further.

No, data replication and data backup are not interchangeable either in word or in application.