Replace legacy hardware tapes

Introduction

Physical tapes have determined the characteristics of archival backup storage as we know it today – immutable, high-capacity, and long-term storage. LTO is a final resort that ensures companies can still restore their data when both primary data and backups are lost and put their business back on track even if the worst disaster happens. Therefore, LTO is very often included as a necessary archival backup storage media in both governmental and private companies backup policies regulations.

Problem

Physical tape infrastructure is complex and expensive to maintain, manage and support. Complexity together with costs grows over time as tape infrastructure scales. Tapes need to be maintained under certain humidity and temperature conditions and periodically offloaded to a safe offsite facility for their storage resulting in high capital and operational expenses. Additionally dedicated, trained staff is required to support the physical tape infrastructure.

Restoring data from tapes takes a significant amount of time, especially, when tapes need to be delivered from an offsite vault. Time is money and modern businesses require faster restore time even from the archival storage.

Finally, physical tapes infrastructure cannot be easily migrated to disk storage since regulatory policies often require tapes to be stored and maintained for decades.

Solution

StarWind VTL provides a cost-effective replacement for physical tapes that significantly simplifies maintenance, management and support since data is stored in a virtual tape format on affordable disk storage. No specifically trained staff is required to maintain and support virtual tapes. To drive the operational costs even lower, StarWind VTL offloads tapes to inexpensive public cloud storage of your choice for archival. This also makes VTL backups immutable and simplifies the archival process along the way.

StarWind VTL ensures faster restore times since virtual tapes are kept already at hand and can benefit from faster speeds of disk storage when needed to restore the data. Even when restoring tapes from cloud storage, it is still faster compared to delivering tapes from an offsite vault.

Finally, StarWind VTL allows meeting the regulatory requirements by keeping backups in the virtual tape format on disk-based storage. And together with Storage Heaven and Tape Ark, StarWind VTL ensures seamless and fast physical-to-virtual LTO migration process.

Conclusion

StarWind VTL minimizes the complexity and costs of data archival associated with physical LTO by storing virtual tapes on inexpensive disk-based storage and offloading data to cloud for even higher cost efficiency. It ensures faster data recovery as it benefits from faster disk-based storage speeds compared to LTO. And finally, StarWind VTL allows meeting the regulatory requirements since it uses virtual tape format and ensures a simple physical-to-virtual LTO migration process together with Storage Heaven and Tape Ark.