Integrated Virtual Tape Libraries are virtual tape solutions that have integrated both tier 2 disk and tier 3 physical tape storage infrastructures together. VSM from Sun is the leading example of Integrated Virtual Tape Libraries in the mainframe space. This blog is more about Integrated Virtual Tape Libraries from an open systems perspective for enterprise customers. Sun is also leading the industry on this front but you may not be aware of its solution. Below is a short overview of how Sun is changing the open systems industry today with its open virtual tape solutions. You will be able to obtain more information about it from my Industry Insights perspective: “Open Tape: Virtualization and Beyond.”

Jonathan Schwartz,CEO and President – Sun Microsystems, mentioned back in March, 2008, “... fundamentally, Sun is about ... choice.” This is also true about our enterprise storage solutions that are available for open systems environments. The Sun open systems virtual tape solutions provide you a choice that will best support your business: Extreme backup performance (up to 2400 MB/sec) and significant data deduplication (realistic data reduction ratios of 20:1).

When you have petabytes of data to backup, you need the extreme performance to backup your data within your available time window. This is accomplished with the tier 2 storage structure of the Virtual Tape Library (VTL) solution. And further, you have the choice of backing up the tier 2 disk infrastructure to physical tape. As you know, you can not afford to have your backup data only on the disk infrastructure as it also needs to be on physical tape. The physical tape choices you have depends on the backup application you are using. For example if your backup application is NDMP 4.0-compliant (i.e., direct to tape and an application such as Symantec's Veritas NetBackup), it will keep track of your data in the virtual tape library infrastructure as it migrates from tier 2 disk to tier 3 physical tape.

Further, you have the choice of tape caching which allows the Sun VTL solution to manage the tier 2 disk to tier 3 physical tape migration independent of the backup application. Tape Caching provides policy-based triggers that can automatically export data to physical tapes immediately upon backup completion or based on criteria such as time of day, the number of days that data has been on virtual tape, or the amount of tier 2 disk space utilized. Tape Caching also provides flexible reclamation policies that delete data within the tier 2 disk that have been migrated to the tier 3 physical tape thus creating additional space on the tier 2 disk for additional backups.

Sun solutions give you a choice as Jonathan mentioned in March – a fundamental part of Sun for your advantage.