You know very well how critical your data is to your organization and how much your business would be impacted were that data to become unavailable because of a major IT outage.  Organizations typically rely on traditional tape backup to guard against this eventuality. More comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) solutions that automatically maintain up-to-date copies of data at a remote location are desirable, but are often unaffordable for two reasons: either the solutions require very expensive equipment on both ends, or they require modifications to every host. The former is beyond the scope of the small to medium size enterprise, the latter is host-invasive, complex and difficult to manage.

Over the last couple of years the expansion of broadband Internet services, the declining cost of disk storage hardware, and the more effective use of software capabilities have breathed new life into this on-again-off-again segment of the storage market. There is no reason to think that these trends won’t continue.