Virtualization

The growth of data in today's enterprise datacenters remains unabated. Driven by email, messaging, fixed content, database and compliance considerations, data growth continues to put immense pressure on backup windows and disaster recovery plans. Most enterprises are looking for ways to shorten their backup windows, improve their restore operations, and ensure their company's long-term viability with effective disaster recovery solutions. In the early part of this decade, the development of low-cost, high-capacity disk products was an economic enabler to incorporating disk into data protection strategies. Early disk-to-disk and disk-to-disk-to-tape solutions brought with them a new set of problems, which at times were worse than the problems they were designed to solve.

Storage virtualization has emerged as a powerful and practical way to get more from existing storage systems, consolidate resources, and simplify environments. The concept of storage virtualization is the pooling of multiple physical storage resources into a single "virtual" storage resource that can be centrally managed. While this may sound like storage Utopia, finding the right solution isn't always as easy as it seems. Every environment is different, with a unique set of needs that varies from enterprise to enterprise. To identify the right type of solution for an enterprise, it helps to understand the history of storage virtualization solutions as well as what new capabilities and products now make the concept of virtualization much simpler.

Since 2003, many providers have offered an approach that provides an easily implemented alternative--the Virtual Tape Library (VTL). First-generation VTLs were primarily standalone devices that required dual writes or media server involvement to create physical tapes. Second-generation devices, called integrated virtual tape libraries, began to provide the ability to write from the VTL to a physical tape library. Many of the early "integrated" implementations caused some exposure to unmanageable physical tape and single points of failure in backup, restore, and disaster recovery processes.

The Sun StorageTek Virtual Tape Library (VTL) is an integrated solution that addresses the problems of early second-generation integrated VTL systems. Backup, restore, and disaster recovery operations are provided in a totally integrated management solution. Not only are backup windows shortened and handled more efficiently, some organizations now perform backups more frequently due to the system?s ease of use. Disaster recovery operations are automated via a policy-based management system that enables management with less human intervention.

The StorageTek VTL solution, unlike first- and second-generation VTL systems, leverages the value of both virtual and physical tape. This powerful combination helps organizations reduce operating costs through virtualization and consolidation activities as well as labor costs via automation and policy management, increase the reliability and efficiency of backups, and enhance the security of their data.