I'm not a big fan of tape (given the high recovery failure rates that exist), and with disk pricing coming down I'd use a D2D system – but then again, I work for a D2D company so you have to factor that in.

But what I'd note is that when you say “all that most SMBs need for BUP” you really mean “if SMBs do 100% virtualization at not only the server level but at the edge (PCs, notebooks, etc.) then that's all that most SMBs need for BUP.” And even then, I'd substitute a media with a higher recovery rate and something where I get retention without having to physically load/unload tapes. And I'd substitute some type of enterprise backup backplane so that I could handle heterogeneous systems in case I wanted to spend $89 on a terabyte of DAS storage versus a ton of money on some SAN storage.

I'm not a big fan of tape (given the high recovery failure rates that exist), and with disk pricing coming down I'd use a D2D system – but then again, I work for a D2D company so you have to factor that in.

But what I'd note is that when you say “all that most SMBs need for BUP” you really mean “if SMBs do 100% virtualization at not only the server level but at the edge (PCs, notebooks, etc.) then that's all that most SMBs need for BUP.” And even then, I'd substitute a media with a higher recovery rate and something where I get retention without having to physically load/unload tapes. And I'd substitute some type of enterprise backup backplane so that I could handle heterogeneous systems in case I wanted to spend $89 on a terabyte of DAS storage versus a ton of money on some SAN storage.

What it doesn't do, which is required for DR is allow to the data repository to be backed up to tape. This is a showstopper for most businesses.

VMware appears to want to “offer” a backup solution, but not irk the 3rd party BUP ecosystem.

Once more mature, vDR with a to-tape option, could be all that most SMBs need for BUP.

We will see