Virtual tape libraries (VTLs) are making strong inroads into the storage marketplace to securely manage company data.
This is according to Rajen Naicker, Overland Storage product specialist at Drive Control Corporation. He says that, contrary to predictions that disc will eventually take over tape, it seems tape has come back with genuine feasibility, particularly in an increasingly virtualised world.
“Companies are investing in virtualised tape solutions as it offers a cost-effective and easy-to-use solution, regardless of your storage infrastructure. Storage vendors continue to invest heavily in R&D of their tape and virtualised tape offerings, which means the functionality and value continue to grow,” Naicker adds.
“Virtual tape's capacity, flexibility and utilisation benefits allow you to purchase and expand additional storage on real, long-term needs as opposed to short-term emergencies, pertinent in more challenging economic times,” he says.
The VTL, explains Naicker, mimics its hardware counterpart, but uses disc (SATAs) as the storage medium, so here disc continues to play an important role.
“To the storage subsystem, VTL appears as tape libraries but with the performance of disc. To make things easy, data is written directly to disc drives in the same format as it would be written onto a tape cartridge. Consequently there is no need to change the backup software when implementing VTL - everything is recognised as before,” Naicker continues.
One of the key benefits of a VTL is its read performance, according to Naicker. He adds that unlike physical tape, VTL can run multiple host data streams which are being written to different disc buffer locations at the same time, and also allows for fast access to the data since it is stored on a disc buffer.
“It is the cost per megabyte that makes VTLs so feasible. It is estimated to be the same as physical tape libraries but offers 10 times the performance plus the ability to expand at a whim when and where needed,” Naicker concludes.
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