LOUISVILLE, Colo. and STORAGE WORLD CONFERENCE - StorageTek®, the storage services and solutions expert, has launched EchoView, a data protection iSCSI appliance that revolutionizes data protection and availability. EchoView continuously protects data while it is being created - allowing customers to totally eliminate the backup window and for quick and easy recovery of business critical data. EchoView reduces the amount of time and resources involved in backing up business-critical data by using "set and forget" policies. Its ability to continuously and automatically protect data enables customers to allocate those resources to other areas of the data center where they may be better utilized. "While tape continues to be the cornerstone of the data protection process, our customers are increasingly looking for ways to enhance system availability," said Pat Martin, StorageTek chairman, president and CEO. "There is no question that application downtime has huge financial consequences for businesses. EchoView enhances the backup process by eliminating the need for scheduled downtime while protecting our customers' most valuable asset in a manner that assures them of rapid and intuitive recovery." "Disk-to-disk backup and mirroring are becoming critical components in companies' data protection and business continuity efforts," said Richard Villars, vice president, Storage Systems at IDC. "The addition of EchoView to StorageTek's existing portfolio of data protection solutions is a confirmation of disk-based backup systems improving cost effectiveness and interoperability with existing tape-based backup hardware and software solutions." Aims Community College, in Greeley Colo., has been testing an early copy of EchoView since January. In February, the college experienced a real data corruption event and lost its help desk database. According to David Urano, Aims Data Center operations manager, "Our team was able to restore the database to minutes before the corruption took place. In this real-world experience, EchoView met and exceeded our expectations. We are very pleased with the product." EchoView protects data at the block level by saving it to cost-effective secondary disk. It backs up views of the data rather than live data, allowing users to completely eliminate the backup window. Using patent-pending technology, EchoView timestamps and journals each update, giving it the ability to present virtual views of each protected volume as that data appeared at any point in time. This gives users the ability to recover at disk-to-disk speeds to a point in time just before a data loss occurred. EchoView is open and flexible. It protects data stored on any vendors' disk and has been successfully tested with several leading vendors' backup and restore software. EchoView differs from failover technology like mirroring in that it protects data against hardware and software failure, environmental disasters, malicious viruses and end-user faults such as deletions and overwrites.