These benefits D2D are significant, but before you're sold on the technology, note one trade-off: Going with D2D means more disks for the storage administrator to manage because mainline storage-management software doesn't handle the cheaper, specialized D2D storage.
Deciding which medium to use when and where depends on your business and operations. One good way to blend tape and disk technologies is for backup and restore functions. A sales database, which is valuable and constantly changing, is a prime candidate for near-line backup storage with a D2D system. It would be backed up from the main-line storage disk to the near-line D2D array quickly, and could be restored fast, too. From there, sales data could flow to a slower tape medium for offline storage.
Another way to mix and match tape and disk is by using archival backups and optimizing your main-line storage. With the archival approach, determining the backup tiers requires that you first carefully examine and classify the data you're backing up. Internal memos, for instance, are first stored in your main-line devices, backed up to a D2D device and, finally, to tape for off-site storage. When this data ages and is less frequently accessed, you can move it off your main-line storage altogether, and then down to your D2D device. From there, you can transfer it onto tape only or to a long-term archival storage system, such as an optical WORM (write-once, read-many).
Moving data from one storage tier to another as it ages ensures that the most frequently accessed data is on the faster, main-line, disk-based storage, and older data kept for archival purposes is moved to your slower tape storage. So your main-line storage accommodates critical data, and lets less expensive storage take care of the rest.
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