What is Virtual Tape Library (VTL)?

Backing up and being able to recover data is a major point of safely and securely running a business dealing with tons of information. The expanding backup and recovery solutions market takes the choice to another level of difficulty. To get a reliable system for recovery and backup, many large enterprises turn to Virtual Tape Library.

What is Virtual Tape Library (VTL)?

A virtual tape library (VTL) is a disk appliance that has special software that makes the device appear as a physical tape drive or tape library to the backup application; the device is accessed through standard tape interfaces. The backup software believes it is writing the backup data to a real tape cartridge when it is, in fact, writing to a specially configured file on the disk appliance. Similarly, the backup software will use the appliance for recovery, accessing the device as if the recovery is coming from tape when it is actually being transferred from disk spindles on the appliance. At its essence, a VTL is both a disk-based appliance and a tape-like interface.

How does it work?

The VTL system emulates a physical tape library and allows the backup software to operate as if writing to or reading from physical tapes. Once the backup process is initiated, the faster speed of the virtual tape drives. Should technicians need to restore data, the VTL system retrieves backed-up data much faster than physical tapes. Users can manage the virtual tapes through the VTL, allowing for easy addition or removal of tapes as needed.

VTL systems also offer features such as deduplication and compression to reduce storage size and ensure efficient use of disk capacity. In addition, data from the VTL can be exported to physical tapes for offsite storage.

Benefits of Virtual Tape Libraries

A VTL drive only emulates the real physical tape, and this makes the integration of new physical storage drives into the network that forms one entity easy. That’s why virtual tape backup is a good choice for every business. However, these are the major benefits:

• Low cost: Virtual tape libraries mainly rely on SAS and SATA disks, meaning the disk arrays in these solutions are not that expensive. Also, using commodity servers reduces the cost.
• Simple: Simplicity is one of the major benefits when you use virtual tape libraries. Because of the ease, VTLs integrate with infrastructure that already exists, there’s no need to install new physical backup drives, etc.
• Performance: This benefit is closely related to the first one, because of the spinning disks used to emulate tapes in VTLs, the backups are faster. The RAM and flash cache combined with deduplication makes the performance much more effective.
• Expansion: To expand the VTL, you simply need to expand the network of physical storage devices. This means there’s a possibility to add more real physical storage tapes or additional hard drives, whatever works best for the system.

There are many more benefits and two purposes of virtual tape libraries. The first one is backup, and the second one is recovery as we said earlier. These are quite fast, quite reliable, and, most of all, cost-effective solutions.

Implementing VTL for businesses

By mimicking traditional tape libraries but using disk-based storage, VTLs provide a cost-effective, fast, and secure solution, making them an essential component of an organization’s data storage strategies. VTLs allow organizations to accommodate demands for protecting sensitive data while also ensuring more cost-effective and reliable data protection and faster recovery times. Incorporating VTL technology into an organization’s data backup infrastructure significantly improves data backup and recovery processes.

Conclusion

VTL is certainly the most common type of solution regarding backup and recovery. It’s necessary to consider the configuration, deduplication features, offsite storage and archiving, and other backup alternatives as well.

Finally, the benefits of virtual tape libraries used as backup and recovery systems are many. They are reliable, excellent in performance, you’ll get a great return on your investment, and they usually don’t cost much.