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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Dollars and sense – VTL business benefits

Reduced TCO
Perhaps, the single-most compelling argument for VTL solutions lies in the sphere of reducing costs, especially relevant in the current uncertain economic scenario. It does so by several different ways:

a) Enabling organsations to optimise their current investment by facilitating seamless and easy integration into existing back-up environments.

b) By eliminating redundant data, physical storage needs can be reduced by up to 25 times or more, the need to buy new tapes is eliminated—all without compromising the integrity of the data stored.

c) Large amounts of data to be stored on disk, which dramatically lowers the cost per GB for back up data—this enables more long-term data retention for recovery purposes

Enhance business productivity
Advanced VTL de-duplication storage services for backup and recovery operations is the best method for improving reliability, reducing backup windows, achieving greater data throughput performance and ensuring rapid recovery. Most importantly, the solutions empower organisations with the right tools to respond rapidly to the changing IT environments without compromising business productivity.

Robust data protection
Armed with VTL solutions as part of their back-up strategy, organisations can optimise the data restore process, while reducing downtime. They help in eliminating the common errors and failure rates which strengthen the integrity of data backups being performed. It also ensures optimal business continuity, availability and disaster recovery support of business-critical company data.

VTL in action
Compliance – In the current business landscape, a key area where VTL can benefit immensely is compliance. With new regulations in the offing, enterprises are legally required to use formal data protection. Hence, the growing concern about archiving and protecting data. VTL solutions can help firms respond to the need for increased storage power as they combine the speed and convenience of disk storage with the backwards compatibility of tape emulation.

Industry example – In a conservative and sensitive industry like that of healthcare, the importance storage backup cannot be undermined. The loss of data could impact somebody's health or worse still life and keeping complete records can double the patient' s lifetime and prevent mis-diagnosis. Hence, the value of data is completely different than that for example financial data. From an IT perspective, managing these challenging compliance regulations can dramatically increase the data management burden.

A VTL and de-duplication solution can go a long way in solving the data management problem by minimizing storage and automate retention. Furthermore, they can slash restore times from hours or days to seconds, improving the overall performance and cost of data storage and preparing the data for intelligent applications.

Shift to Web 2.0 – The Internet rules the roost in today's knowledge-based economy. Data-intensive Web sites deal with burgeoning data storage requirements, hence the traditional model of correlating the number of employees to the amount of data is not applicable anymore. As a Web 2.0 company's Web site or service becomes more successful, it will attract more and more users, which in turn demands even greater storage space. Before they know it, Web 2.0 companies quickly outgrow their entire storage infrastructure.

VTL solutions come to the rescue in managing and protecting the data through integration and consolidation of heterogeneous tape environments. They also offer capabilities such as scalability, reliable performance, and an "always on" design.

Looking ahead
The increase in the volume of information has made data management complex, and IT managers are looking to simplify information and data management. As a result, more and more CIOs are looking to an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) path that is leading them towards cleaning up their primary disk storage systems, prioritizing information, and putting more efficient data protection solutions in place.

It is important to note that industry analyst firm IDC states that VTLs will be increasingly integrated as a tiered solution and open system customers are considering VTLs to increase recovery time objectives, improve tape utilization, and decrease backup windows.

The mindset will change gradually as organisations prove the potential benefits and value proposition of VTL systems and not merely tout them solely as an alternative to tape-based data protection.

The author of the article is Director of Storage Solutions, Asia Pacific, Hitachi Data Systems.

©CIOL Bureau

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