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Executive summary
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 is still the foundation of a comprehensive data protection strategy because of its low cost/GB and the ability to physically offsite the data on tape. 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" the existing range of HP tape drives and libraries while protecting a customer's existing 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 (HP VLS6000) offer up to 10 TB of backup storage (up to 20 TB with software data compression and 2:1 compressible data) at combined data rates of up to 450 MB/sec.
The HP VLS6000 technology is primarily targeted at:
- Long backup windows due to "slow" servers being unable to stream higher performance tape drives in a storage area network (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.
- Environments with many single file restores on a regular basis.
- Data that only has a short life span, for example, transaction logs in Oracle?, SQL, and Microsoft? Exchange.
- People who are using clone or snapshot technology (and hence expensive high-performance disk array space) for non-critical data backup.
An additional benefit of implementing an HP VLS6000 solution is that it can also better utilize your existing investment in physical tape?doing more with less. Backup to tape from the HP VLS6000 can now take place at the customer's convenience during the day, with the same physical library being used during the night for backing up the faster parts of the customer's infrastructure (databases, etc.).
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, as 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 to accelerate backup and recovery jobs for slower servers in the SAN, normal backup application software licensing applies, normally 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 virtual tape. Exchange server backup is often also "slow" because of the Exchange database access API and so it may also be advantageous (performance wise) to back up small distributed email servers to separate "virtual" tape drives?hence reducing the overall backup window for the total number of email servers in a SAN environment. The diagram shows database files being backed up directly to physical tape because these files are generally large in size and held on higher performance disk arrays (to ensure good response times).
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