Wiley Data Protection for Virtual Data Centers 978-0-470-57214-6 Manuale Utente

The term data protection means different things to different people. Rather than asking what kind of 
protection you need, you should ask what data protection problem you are trying to solve. Security 
people discuss data protection in terms of access, where authentication, physical access, and fire-
walls are the main areas of focus. Other folks talk about protecting the integrity of the data with 
antivirus or antimalware functions. This chapter discusses protecting your data as an assurance of 
its availability in its current or previous forms.

Said another way, this book splits data protection into two concepts. We’ll define data protec-

 as preserving your data and data availability as ensuring the data is always accessible.

So, what are you solving for — protection or availability? The short answer is that while 

you’d like to say both, there is a primary and a secondary priority. More importantly, as we 
go through this book, you’ll learn that it is almost never one technology that delivers both 
capabilities.

Disk was where data lived — always, we hoped.

Tape was where data rested — forever, we presumed.
Both beliefs were incorrect.
Because this book is focused on Windows data protection, we won’t go back to the earliest 

days of IT and computers. But to appreciate where data protection and availability are today, 
we will briefly explore the methods that came before. It’s a good way for us to frame most of the 
technology approaches that are available today. Understanding where they came from will help 
us appreciate what each is best designed to address.

We don’t have to go back to the beginning of time for this explanation or even back to when 

computers became popular as mainframes. Instead, we’ll go back to when Windows was first 
becoming a viable server platform.

During the late 1980s, local area networks (LANs) and servers were usually Novell NetWare. 

More notably for the readers of this book, data protection typically equated to connecting a tape 
drive to the network administrator’s workstation. When the administrator went home at night, 
the software would log on as the administrator, presumably with full access rights, and protect 
all the data on the server.

In 1994, Windows NT started to become a server operating system of choice, or at least a serious 

contender in networking, with the grandiose dream of displacing NetWare in most environments.

Even with the “revolutionary” ability to connect a tape drive directly to your server, your two 

choices for data protection were still either highly available disk or nightly tape. With those as 
your only two choices, you didn’t need to identify the difference between data protection and 
data availability. Data protection in those days was (as it is now) about preventing data loss from 

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