White Paper: Accelerating Backup/Restore With The Virtual Tape Library Configuration That Fits Your Environment

FalconStor VirtualTape Library (VTL), the industry leading virtual tape solution, increases the speed and reliability of backups that use standard third party backup applications by leveraging disk to emulate industry standard tape libraries. Since VTL uses disk to back up data, it eliminates the media and mechanical errors that can occur with physical tapes and drives. And, because VTL can emulate more tape drives than your physical tape library really has, more backup streams can run simultaneously, enabling organizations to easily complete their backups within the allotted backup window.

Recognizing the benefits of disk-based backup, some backup administrators implement VTL to back up data solely to a disk-based virtual tape library (D2D), replacing the need for physical tape libraries. Many other backup administrators, who want or need to have backup data on physical tapes, choose to complement their existing tape backup strategy with VTL. Used in this way, VTL dramatically accelerates backups and then moves data to physical tapes as a background process without impacting production servers.

When planning your VTL deployment, you need to determine what type of configuration best suits your organization. In addition to D2D, the flexibility of FalconStor VTL supports three possible disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) configurations (many VTL vendors are limited to a single mode of deployment). To serve the diverse requirements of today's organizations—retention needs, tiered data, backup windows, RTO—this flexibility is essential.

In a D2D2T scenario with FalconStor VTL, you choose your preferred configuration of the various components— your third party backup software, the VTL appliance, the disk storage managed by VTL for use as the virtual tape library, and one or more physical tape libraries. Regardless of which configuration you choose, FalconStor VTL makes it easy for backup administrators to manage both virtual tapes and physical tapes.