Benefits of using a virtual tape library

A VTL or a virtual tape library is a technology that gets rid of physical backup tapes and enhances backup process by adding an extra layer of protection. It is virtually available, and stores all data on fast, high capacity, inexpensive storage spinning disks.

WHY VTL?

Tape technology has been the most cost efficient backup solution yet. Tape media has a 30 years lifetime and hence have been the first choice for archival of data. Recently, disk oriented backups are gaining huge demand and popularity due to a sudden drop in the price and lesser requirement of manual intervention. VTL is becoming a favorite choice as tape cartridges often fail during restore or backup process due to incomplete backup or some failures.

BENEFITS of VTL:

VTL provides the simplest replacement for tapes and is a strong medium that bears the problems of the tape. VTL is more flexible, easy to manage, reliable, has lower latency, and enhanced performance that allows the disk integration of newer data encryption techniques. A virtual tape library emulates the tape drive and gives a feel of a physical tape. VTL combines the advantages of both real physical tapes and disks and delivers high speed backup with restore management in case of any loss. It also provides scalability, verification and save-set support. A typical virtual tape library offers an easy setup with data mobility and reduced data management.

VTL will serve just one purpose and that is backup application with the following key benefits:

• Reduced man power to manage backup
• Deduplication helps in reducing cost, space and cooling savings.
• Faster backup and restoring performance.
• Architecture redundancy enables consistent and successful backup.
• Expansion of storage without any disruption.
• Backup window is LAN free.
• Provides multi-thread restoring options.
• Migration from disk to the tape time is reduced.
• Caching not required.
• Multiple libraries within logical partitions.

FEATURES

Some of the features of VTL that make them ever more attractive to the users are:

• Low cost- VTL allows reduction of heavy equipment and bulky disks and makes use of the commodity servers as well as high performance spinning disks in place of autoloaders, disks and drives. The entire infrastructure redundancy has allowed for cost redundancy as well.
• High Performance- VTL uses fast spinning hard disks to emulate tapes and hence accelerates backup. It uses multitier RAM and data deduplication as well as flash cache for high performance that is unachievable by tapes and HDD.
• Simplicity- Virtual tape library is easy to manage as it just seamlessly integrates existing infrastructure instead of a lengthy process of install, then configure and then run.

Virtual Tape Library as efficient and cost effective may be, they sometimes do not perform at similar levels so conducting performance tests are necessary. If high end performance is what you are looking for to achieve, VTL is a perfect solution with the simple infrastructure and deduplication features. For a heterogeneous environment, one can choose VTL for AS/400, mainframe and open systems. Some VTL offer stacking that presents hundreds of virtual tapes and then stack them onto a physical tape, resulting into cost reduction.