PRO+ Premium Content/Storage

If someone had told me a couple of years ago that secondary data storage would become fashionable -- almost sexy, even -- I would've said, "Sure, and EMC would be bought by one of its storage-selling rivals." In the strange way the storage world turns, both things happened. Dell now holds the keys to the EMC empire, and secondary data storage is getting nearly as much attention as all-flash arrays. Go figure. After all, secondary data storage is the place where you park the data you don't really need right now and may never need again. From the time tapes got tucked away in mountains to sending backups to NAS targets masquerading as tape libraries to cyberstorage in cloud services, the key consideration for backup data has typically been about where to stick secondary data so it wouldn't be too far away or too hard to find or too expensive to stash. All that's changing, however, and if secondary data storage is edging closer to center stage, vendors can thank the software side of data protection for pushing it into the spotlight...