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Backup continues to challenge IT personnel because the model is fundamentally flawed. Busy application servers are tasked with pushing their data to a backup target while providing 24x7 services to end users. Storage resources are attached to servers using 4Gb or 8Gb Fibre Channel (FC) technology, yet backup data is most often pushed across a narrow 1Gb LAN. Tape library technology has made significant speed advances, but enterprise-class tape drives are very expensive (as much as $30,000 each), and many users simply cannot afford enough drives to meet their backup needs. Others use older systems that are slow and subject to frequent mechanical failures. On top of all this, massive growth in the amount of data that businesses must maintain has stressed the traditional backup network to the breaking point.

VTL technology solves the target-side issues of backup, providing high-performance, reliable backup that efficiently scales to any size environment. (It costs nothing to add more virtual tape drives to the system.) It also provides capabilities such as replication, physical tape integration, and in some cases, data deduplication. However, VTL alone does not resolve the major performance issue of backup, which is the need to quickly feed data to the backup target impacting production systems.

Recognizing that host-side performance is the final barrier to fast, effective backup, FalconStor Software created the FalconStor VTL Backup Accelerator specifically to solve this problem. The FalconStor VTL Backup Accelerator does this by combining a low-impact client agent with a secondary protection pool of data storage. The client agent moves data into the protection pool, which is then used as the source for backup to the FalconStor VTL solution. The end result is backup that has no impact on servers or storage, traveling over a high-speed SAN infrastructure with as much as eight times more data carrying capacity than the LAN.