Yes, we are in the middle of this (trying to replace D2T2T with D2D2D) 
process now.

What I am seeing is that while disk media costs more than tape per TB, 
de-duplication is the difference-maker, the enabler, making extra weeks 
or months retention of D2D data inexpensive. Buy another appliance for 
off-site replication, and only changes, not full backups, are 
essentially moved between sites, causing much lower volume of 
transmission. Kind of like running an "rsync" after previously 
"rsync"ing. Good news that all vendors I've seriously looked at make 
this automatic and great news is that one might expect NetBackup will be 
able to see and use the replicated site directly (soon).

I'm not a fan of VTL, so we are not looking at VTL. Your situation may vary.

Disk-to-disk backup planning is not a simple exercise, however, as 
features, operations and even terminology varies substantially from 
vendor to vendor.

The state of the art does seem much more mature than even a couple of 
years ago. All vendors we're seriously looking at know their competition 
and will make very substantial discounting from "list" prices. Proper 
sizing has been a chore, as each vendor tries to minimize the cost of 
their proposal.

Although we have not made final decisions, I find the "Data Domain" 
backup appliance offerings superb (though we have not yet had an on-site 
trial).

On the other hand, we have a lot of NetApp primary disk, and so the 
NetApp backup offerings are interesting for their support/use of 
snapshots and integration with NetBackup ($$$ features on both NetApp 
and Symantec sides). Technically speaking, though, NetApp NearStore used 
as a simple disk backup appliance does not appear to stack up to the 
Data Domain offerings.

Which solution is best for us has yet to be determined for my 
approximately 10TB site.

All of the D2D2D solutions we've studied and have been proposed to us 
would entail significantly more capital outlay than simply adding some 
staging disk and getting more modern tape drives for our L700, but the 
performance, scalability and automation levels of D2D2D are very exciting.

Hope this helps! (please do post your experiences)

cheers, wayne

Jeff Lightner wrote, in part, on 2007-09-21 9:43 AM:
>
> Yesterday our director said that he doesn’t intend to ever upgrade 
> existing STK L700 because eventually we’ll go tapeless as that is what 
> the industry is doing. The idea being we’d have our disk backup 
> devices here (e.g. Data Domain) and transfer to offsite storage to 
> another disk device so as to eliminate the need for ever transporting 
> tapes.
>
> It made me wonder if anyone was actually doing the above already or 
> was planning to do so?
>


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