Even in these difficult economic times you likely need to move and store data fast and reliably, manage business risk, optimize operations, enhance disaster recovery, and save data for longer periods of time. On top of this you need to manage your explosive data growth, which could be as much as 60% annually, while optimizing your storage resources. The end result needs to be a storage infrastructure that adapts as needed to meet your constantly evolving business needs and data management challenges.

Within your storage hierarchy, an integrated virtual tape library (IVTL, defined in my September 09, 2008 blog) can enable you to store the right data on the right device at the right price, while helping you protect your business-critical information based on its changing value. An IVTL can also enable faster backup and data recall which improves your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO), resulting in more efficient use of hardware resources (i.e., disk, tape libraries and tape drives), increased productivity, an efficient and effective business resumption capability, and lower management costs. Further, an IVTL can help reduce complexity and simplify management by bringing true virtualization into your enterprise tape environment. Instead of writing directly to tape, you can use an IVTL for your appropriate tape applications to write and read at disk speeds to virtual tape drives created and maintained by the IVTL software (this speed is particularly critical for backing up hundreds, more likely thousands, of small data files). It can also economize and optimize tape drives and library resources resulting in fewer tape cartridges, tape drives and tape libraries which reduces space and energy costs in addition to the savings that you could realized by the movement of inactive disk data to more energy efficient tape. As Fred Moore, President of Horison, Inc., would say, “There should be zero energy cost for data that are not being used.” It is estimated that over 60% of your data is inactive and should reside on tape as opposed to disk.

With a properly designed IVTL environment, you could realize the following benefits:

• Manage massive data growth by dramatically increasing the amount of data typically stored on each cartridge utilizing 70 to 80% of your tape media instead of as little as 15% as seen in some environments
• Protect your investment by meeting ever-changing tape workloads without adding more libraries, drives, or media.
• Enhance data protection through physical migration and electronic vaulting.
• Maintain or improve service levels by retrieving data at the speed of disk—while also responding to peak demands.
• Simplify your tape management by moving your data according to your rules, which also helps streamline tape operations.
• Minimize poor cartridge utilization and complex backup/restore activities.
• Streamline tape operations and handle additional new business requirements with improved performance and accuracy.
• Deliver superior consolidation benefits saving space and power by up to 60%.
• Tap into enormous capacity within your existing tape media with fewer tape mounts, tape drives, and cartridges, saving time and improving reliability.

Learn how the Sun StorageTek VSM and VTL Plus systems can help you consolidate and build an IVTL environment. The Sun IVTL systems are designed to be a highly scalable, sharable, performance storage solution for your mission critical data. Further, they are designed, tested and proven to work with the Sun StorageTek SL8500 and SL3000 Modular Library Systems and the StorageTek T9840D, T10000B and LTO4 (open systems only) tape drives.