Page 12 of 12 Conclusion July 2001 © Copyright 2001 by Exabyte Corporation. All rights reserved. Exabyte, Exabyte Recognition System, Exafacts, Exapak, Exasoft, Exatape, and Strategex are U.S. registered trademarks of Exabyte Corporation. Eliant, M2, MammothTape, NetStorM, SmartClean, and SupportSuite are U.S. trademarks of Exabyte Corporation. All other product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. Look to Fibre Channel for backup If the volume of data on your network is expanding rapidly, as it is on nearly all networks, consider phasing in Fibre Channel backup devices even if you aren’t ready for a SAN.  Many servers that control large disk systems either already have Fibre Channel interfaces or are upgradeable to Fibre Channel through the addition of host bus adapters.  You can connect a standalone Fibre Channel M2 tape drive directly to the server, or you can connect a Fibre Channel library through a hub or switch. Whether or not you are contemplating a SAN, Fibre Channel backup devices will serve you well in your present situation and can be easily integrated into a future SAN if you choose to go that route. Conclusion Fibre Channel SANs are rapidly emerging as the architecture of choice to meet the data delivery requirements of today’s businesses.  SANs greatly improve data availability, shareability, and manageability over traditional networks that use server-attached storage.  Businesses that implement a SAN save a significant amount of money through more efficient use of storage resources, greater productivity, and reduced administrative costs. As on any network, backup on the SAN is essential.  While backups on a traditional network can cause considerable headaches, backups on the SAN are pain-free.  With a SAN, Backups take place more quickly The impact of backups on network performance is eliminated Tape drives and libraries are used more efficiently Data is more accessible for recovery Backup capacity can be added easily Fault tolerance during backups is increased Backups are easier to manage The key to effective SAN backup is attaching tape drives and tape libraries directly to the SAN.  While SCSI tape drives and libraries can be attached to the SAN through routers, backup devices need native Fibre Channel interfaces to avoid creating data bottlenecks and bringing unnecessary complexity and cost to the SAN. Exabyte is the first company to integrate a native Fibre Channel interface into its tape storage devices.  The 430M, X80, and X200 libraries with M2 tape drives attach directly to the SAN without intervening routers.  These libraries are also the first to support serverless backup, which eliminates server bottlenecks, allows server resources to be applied to other processes, and makes the concept of a limited backup window obsolete. Exabyte designs its libraries with the reliability, scalability, and manageability required for storage area networking.  With native Fibre Channel and serverless backup support, the 430M, X80, and X200 libraries provide optimal protection for the valuable data on your SAN. p1   p2   p3   p4   p5   p6   p7   p8   p9   p10   p11   p12