VTL: Reworking the economics of tape

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VTL: Reworking the economics of tape

Firms gravitating toward virtual tape libraries as an effective way to enterprise data protection

Adrian De Luca

Friday, May 16, 2008

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BANGALORE, INDIA: As storage administrators struggle to manage and protect what seems like ever-increasing amounts of data, organizations are gravitating toward virtual tape libraries (VTL) as a new and more effective way approach to enterprise data protection.

Adrian De Luca, Hitachi Data Systems

The global VTL market has experienced rapid growth in terms of both revenue and terabytes. Industry analyst, IDC predict that sales of virtual tape libraries will double in the next five years, hitting $1.4 billion in sales by 2011.

A key reason behind the figures cited by IDC is the exponential growth of data. Organisations are faced with challenges like burgeoning unstructured data, regional disruptions, compliance mandates, contractual commitments, and service agreements, which frankly make the task of data protection quite overwhelming.

Backup and recovery remains the number one problem in the minds of IT managers, as it no longer takes a catastrophe to cause severe economic loss to an organization, and the longer an interruption persists the more potential it has to be devastating. What was once a minor interruption in service can now have the same economic impact as a flood or a fire.

Traditional approach has limited functionality
Information is the lifeblood of today's knowledge-based economy and organizations routinely backup enterprise data so that copies of mission critical information can be stored securely at a safe location in case of an emergency. In the event of data corruption or a disaster, a recovery operation is activated and data is restored from the backup so that the organization can resume its business operations.

Traditional business continuity approaches, such as "Business Impact Assessment" are designed to respond to an event and, therefore, support planning decisions for a worst-case, catastrophic event. They do not necessarily prevent the occurrence which makes the data recovery situation vulnerable.

Again, many organizations rely on traditional magnetic tape as their backup storage media as it is widely seen as a cost-effective solution. However, as the amount of data requiring protection escalates, cracks start to surface in the tape-based infrastructure and the amount of management required by IT staff quickly gets out of hand. Tape-based backups also are rarely encrypted, which means that precious enterprise data is exposed to recovery and tampering from unauthorized personnel.

VTL to the rescue
Not surprisingly, IT managers are turning to disk-based backup solution to address the numerous issues related to data management and retrieval. Hence, virtual tape libraries are gaining popularity as effective back-up solutions. A VTL is an archival backup solution that combines traditional tape backup methodology with low-cost disk technology to create an optimized backup and recovery solution. As a VTL solution emulates the existing physical tape library, there is no disruption in the organisation's current backup-and-restore infrastructure or policies.

Using a VTL appliance as the backup mechanism provides faster and more reliable backups. Data restore times are greatly improved over tape because the data is accessed from disk, making it an ideal solution for near line retrieval in the event of a data corruption, not just for off-line. A VTL is also less prone to failures such as tape loss, theft, or damage during transportation to off-site vaulting, and tape handling making it a more reliable backup solution compared to other procedures.

Role of de-duplication in VTL solutions
Some newer VTL solutions come bundled with de-duplication software which is a fairly recent technology that has emerged to combat the problem of exponentially growing data. Due to the repetitious nature of backup data, this feature offers a number of lucrative benefits, such as reduced costs, smaller backup windows and faster recovery time objectives (RTOs).

Data de-duplication ensures that only "unique" data is written during the backup process, which means that significantly less disk capacity is needed on the back-end to store changes. Infact, a recent report by IT Centrix states that data de-duplication has evolved from an esoteric to a "must-have" technology, since it is directed at solving the right business problem.

Solutions, incorporating de-duplication technology simplify its go-to-market approach, particularly in midrange markets. The appliances are integrated solutions consisting of a server, operating system, storage and data de-duplication software that can be ordered as a single part number.

Implementation of these systems is also dramatically simpler since all components have been tested and certified by the vendor and backup software vendors. By incorporating de-duplication technology, solutions in the VTL space are more cost-effective than any first-generation VTL in almost any customer scenario.

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