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To stay competitive in today’s information economy, businesses need instantaneous, worldwide access to data generated by a wide variety of computer systems. As a result, there is no end in sight for the exponential growth of data that IT managers have to manage, store and protect. This problem is compounded by corporate business continuity programs, green initiatives, and increasingly stringent government regulations (SEC, HIPAA, SOX, etc.) that require companies to have long-term data retention, data encryption, and advanced disaster protection. As the volume of data and the complexity of data management continue to grow, companies face a variety of challenges, including:
- Backing up increasing volumes of data within ever-shortening backup windows - Meeting business continuity objectives and regulatory requirements by ensuring data availability through failures and site-wide disasters
- Reducing floor space and power consumption to meet green initiatives
- Cutting administration cost and streamlining data center complexity through virtualization and consolidation
- Adding capacity and performance of backup/restore technology to meet current and future needs while staying within budget
- Eliminating labor-intensive, repetitive media management tasks
- Getting the maximum return on investments in data protection technology
- Managing data in mixed environments (i.e., mainframe and open systems)
- Protecting remote data in decentralized organizations
The options available to meet these challenges were limited. Physical tape libraries are labor-intensive and prone to backup failures. Restoring data from tape is also slow. While disk-to-disk technologies solve some of the challenges posed by tape, they have performance issues, increased capacity requirements, and ongoing management complexity.
As a result, virtual tape library (VTL) technologies are becoming the industry standard. According to an Enterprise Strategy Group report1, “Not only are users replacing tape libraries with new disk-based solutions, they are doing so on a significant scale: Sixty percent of users surveyed by ESG believe that more than 40% of their current tape-based capacity will reside on disk in just three years.” The report also states, “Virtual tape library (VTL) is the most widely deployed tape replacement technology today.”
SEPATON has designed a best-in-class VTL technology that combines the benefits of both physical tape and disk-to-disk technology with the SEPATON ContentAware architecture to deliver the industry’s fastest, most scalable, and most automated backup solution. The result is an appliance that reduces the cost and risk associated with storing, protecting and recovering data. This system was designed from the ground up to be highly efficient for backing up and restoring both large volumes of data and individual files. The SEPATON technology delivers:***
- Industry-leading performance that cuts both backup and restore times dramatically
- Simple, modular scalability of both performance and capacity that saves time and money by allowing you to purchase only what you need, when you need it
- High availability, high reliability design that nearly eliminates downtime and meets business continuity objectives
- Automated management functions that eliminate the complexity of implementation, configuration and ongoing management tasks
- Complete emulation of leading physical tape libraries and tape formats as well as integration with leading backup software applications
- Support for mainframe, open systems computing, and mixed environments
- Software applications enable simple addition of new features and functionality including advanced data deduplication and remote replication
This white paper will describe the SEPATON technology in detail and highlight the powerful features that make it unique in the industry and enable it to deliver the highest level of business value.
To users and backup applications, a SEPATON VTL looks and functions like a physical tape library—complete with virtual tape cartridges and virtual tape drives. As a result, it installs in minutes and integrates seamlessly with all leading backup software. The unique SEPATON architecture delivers industry-leading backup and restore times while reducing the complexity of storage management through advanced automation. (See Figure 1.) Unlike a physical tape library, SEPATON delivers Fibre Channel wire speed data transfer rates, linear scalability, advanced data compression, and rock solid reliability.
Mainframe Compatibility
The S2100-ES2 is fully compatible with mainframes, open systems and mixed computing environments to enable you to protect your entire enterprise and to consolidate backups from a variety of server environments onto a single VTL for improved efficiency and reduced administrative complexity.
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