What is a Virtual Tape Library (VTL) ?

As corporate data grows exponentially, it has become more costly and time-consuming for IT managers today to manage tape-based data backup systems due to the fact that it demands continuous monitoring, complex configuration, repeated tuning and constant supervision. Not to mention, tape drives are notorious for frequent failures, slow load and transfer rates, and sluggish seek times.

VTL is a virtual tape library device that brings the emulation functionalities of tape libraries to the high-performance and highly reliability of disk arrays.

The product consists of the VTL software installed on a 2U based appliance controller and SATA based disk subsystems. BASIS is integrating, testing and selling the VTL product.

Features and Benefits

• High speed backup and restore that are multiple times faster than tape (transfer data rates in excess of 400MB/sec (1.37TB/h) per VTL appliance)
• Able to create and define different tape standards, number of drives, slots, and libraries
• Scalability up to 32.8TB per VTL appliance
• RAID for reliability (hotspare drive included)
• Multi-platform compatibility (Windows NT/2000, UNIX, Linux)
  Compatible with the major backup software solutions (Legato (certified), Veritas (certified), CA (certified) and others)
• Maintenance free (no need for head cleaning/tape rewind/tuning)
• Ability to export or clone data within VTL for long term storage to physical tape or library. In order to preserve the integrity of the system, the phys. tapes have the same barcode labels as the corresponding virtual tapes. The export process is a bit for bit copy and takes place async. to the backup (and does not impact on performance or reliability). The resultant tapes are in the exact format that the backup app. used. This means that a phys. tape created by our VTL can even restored by the backup app. without our VTL!

Virtual tape libraries (VTL) remove legacy libraries and the associated mechanical components from the critical backup data path. Backup data is streamed directly to cost-effective disks, and converting virtual tapes to physical media can be performed outside of the backup window and without interfering with databases, application servers, or other production systems. As a consequence, the frequency and urgency of manual intervention is substantially reduced and administrators are given the tools to make well-informed decisions.

As illustrated below, hard disk drives have become price competitive with tape media over the last few years. In one decade, disk costs declined by a factor of 10000, the cost of tape by a factor of 10. Meanwhile, the performance and manageability deltas of disk over tape continue to grow. Our VTL takes advantage of this trend to offer an economical solution for large-scale backups.