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Data protection has never been more important?data is the lifeblood of any modern company. With the advent of lower cost Serial ATA (SATA)?based disk arrays, disk-assisted backup has been making inroads into areas where physical tape drives were once the primary means of data protection. Tape will always be the lowest cost storage technology, but the role of tape is changing. Tape remains the foundation of a comprehensive data protection strategy because of its low cost/GB and the ability to physically remove the tape media and store the data offsite. Tape is being used more and more for high-volume data backup (from fast data sources), long-term archiving, and the migration of data that has already been backed up to disk.
Virtual tape libraries from HP offer a seamless migration to a disk-assisted backup strategy because they emulate existing HP tape drives and libraries, while protecting a customer's investment in backup software. They appear as "real" physical libraries to the backup software, enabling all existing processes and procedures to be used.
The HP StorageWorks 6000 Virtual Library Systems (also called the VLS6000) offer up to 70 TB of backup storage (up to 140 TB with software data compression and 2:1 compressible data) at combined data rates of up to 600 MB/sec.
The HP VLS6000 is primarily targeted at:
- Reducing long backup windows due to slow servers being unable to stream higher performance tape drives in a SAN-based environment. "Slow" in this sense is related to the data type being slow to access, for example, file and print or web servers. This reduction in backup time is achieved by running multiple backups in parallel to several virtual tape drives on the VLS6000.
- Environments that have to perform single file restores on a regular basis. Because the VLS6000 is disk-based, restoring a specific file is much quicker than restoring from tape.
- Data that only has a short life span, for example, transaction logs in Oracle?, SQL, and Microsoft? Exchange.
- Those who are using clone or snapshot technology (and hence expensive high-performance disk arrays) for backing up non-critical data. The VLS6000 provides a more cost-effective way to protect non-critical data.
An additional benefit of implementing an HP VLS6000 solution is better utilization of your existing physical tape hardware?doing more with less. Backup to physical tape from the HP VLS6000 can now take place at your convenience during the day, with the same physical library being used during the night for backing up the faster parts of your infrastructure (databases, and so on).
The HP VLS6000 integrates seamlessly into heterogeneous backup environments because the backup application thinks it is backing up to physical tape. Because of its optimized design, the capacity and performance of the HP VLS6000 grow together. The HP VLS6000 can offer the best cost per MB/sec value in its class.
The HP VLS6000 manages the virtualization node and disk array as a single device, using HP StorageWorks Command View VLS to minimize the management overhead of your IT operation.
Because the HP VLS6000 integrates seamlessly into existing backup and recovery processes and appears as a physical library to the backup software, normal backup application software licensing applies. This is typically based on drive count or slot count. Some major backup application ISVs, such as HP OpenView Storage Data Protector and VERITAS NetBackup, have modified their licensing rules for virtual tape to license it on a raw per TB basis.
What is becoming apparent in the data protection market is the way that different technologies? virtual tape, disk-to-disk, standard tape?are being deployed according to the different data types and topologies they protect. Consider the example in Figure 2, which shows the typical data types that can benefit from the use of HP virtual tape technology.
As can be seen in Figure 2, "slow" data sources, such as file/print data or small web server files are best backed up to virtual tape before being transferred (if necessary) to physical tape. Exchange server backup is often also slow because of the Exchange database access API, so it may also be advantageous (performance wise) to back up small distributed email servers to separate virtual tape drives?thus reducing the overall backup window for the total number of email servers in a SAN environment.
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