An Exabyte White Paper Executive summary Exabyte Corporation 1685 38th Street Boulder, CO  80301 1-800-EXABYTE www.exabyte.com July 2001 CS0599.00 Why Choose Native Fibre Channel Backup? Optimal protection for the SAN Lynda Edgington Exabyte Technical Publications For years, SCSI-based tape drives and tape libraries have provided effective backup for traditional business networks.  These networks employ server-attached storage—disks attached to the network through servers that control the data.  Backing up server-attached storage typically involves sending data across the network to tape libraries attached to backup servers.  These massive data transfers degrade network performance and prevent servers from concentrating their resources on other business processes. Traditional server-attached storage is rapidly giving way to storage area networks (SANs).  Businesses are adopting Fibre Channel SANs to alleviate the data storage and delivery problems associated with ever-increasing data loads.  SANs provide data availability, shareability, and manageability that is not possible with server-attached storage. Businesses making the switch to SANs are finding that they have a tremendous opportunity to upgrade their backup operations.  By attaching Fibre Channel tape drives and libraries directly to the SAN, a business can back up its network more quickly, eliminate network slowdowns during backups, make more efficient use of backup resources, and simplify backup and recovery administration. Exabyte provides leading-edge native Fibre Channel tape drives and libraries that attach directly to the SAN without the use of intervening routers.  Exabyte libraries, featuring Mammoth-2 (M2) tape drives, support serverless backup in which data can be moved directly from disk to tape without the involvement of a server.  With Exabyte’s native Fibre Channel backup devices, your backups can finally be completely transparent to users and processes on your network. p1   p2   p3   p4   p5   p6   p7   p8   p9   p10   p11   p12