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Overview
FalconStor Virtual Tape Library (VTL) is the industry's market-leading virtual tape solution, unmatched in performance and scalability. With virtual tape, backups complete faster and more reliably, with little or no change needed to the backup environment. Your operations don't change. Your backups just get better. Sophisticated physical tape integration and data security complete the solution.
Designed from the start as an enterprise-class application, FalconStor VTL technology can achieve single node backup speeds of 1.5GB per second, or over 5TB per hour, allowing users to solve the single biggest issue in backup: meeting the backup window. Up to eight nodes can combine into a single logical unit, scaling performance to a remarkable 12GB per second, or 43TB per hour.
Built-in data deduplication dramatically reduces the amount of data needed to be stored on disk. Typical deduplication rates of 20 to 1 mean your storage footprint is reduced by 95% or more, allowing you to keep weeks or even months worth of data on disk for fast, dependable restore, without any of the reliability concerns of tape-based restore. Unique FalconStor technology ensures restores are rapid, without the often severe performance impact imposed by other deduplication solutions.
While deduplication can eliminate or greatly reduce the need for physical tapes, many organizations still require tape for long-term, offsite, or archival storage. The FalconStor VTL solution has the industry's most sophisticated integration with physical tape libraries, allowing you to directly export data to physical tape, leveraging the speed of the VTL without impacting your backup network.
The FalconStor VTL solution also supports small and remote office environments through storage appliances and small footprint virtual appliances.
Key Benefits
High performance to meet backup windows and recovery time objectives (RTO)
FalconStor VTL technology is unmatched in terms of data ingestion rates. Supporting the latest high speed protocols, including 8Gb Fibre Channel (FC) and 10Gb Ethernet, FalconStor VTL technology takes full advantage of the latest advances in server, storage, and networking equipment. Unique technology provides fast restore, even from deduplicated data, to meet critical RTO requirements.
Unmatched scalability and reliability
Supporting up to eight nodes in a single VTL cluster, the FalconStor VTL solution scales to accommodate multi-petabyte environments. Servers are deployed in high availability (HA) pairs to ensure system uptime.
Reduced disk and bandwidth consumption through integrated deduplication with replication
Disk consumption is greatly reduced through integrated, global data deduplication. Deduplicated tapes can also be replicated over IP, enabling electronic tape vaulting with bandwidth reductions of 90% or more. Tape replication eliminates the costs and security risks associated with physical tape shipments.
Physical tape integration meets ongoing corporate need for tape media
Direct integration with physical tape libraries allows the FalconStor VTL solution to expedite media creation, including the creation of multiple copies of the same tape. At the same time, tape media consumption can be reduced through techniques such as tape stacking, which combines multiple smaller virtual tapes onto a single physical tape of the same or larger format.
Simplified deployment and operations
No other VTL solution matches FalconStor VTL in terms of its range of tape library and tape format emulation. Emulating nearly 50 tape library systems, including major enterprise libraries from StorageTek, IBM, and HP, the FalconStor VTL solution can directly replace your current tape system without any change to your backup environment. Over 30 tape formats are supported, including high-capacity formats such as LTO4 and StorageTek T10000B. All major enterprise backup applications work with FalconStor VTL technology, including the Symantec NetBackup OpenStorage option. Multi-node management enables configuration and operation of up to eight nodes as a single logical unit, with integrated real-time and historical performance and capacity reporting.
Features
High Performance Backup and Restore
FalconStor VTL technology supports the latest high-speed storage protocols, including 8Gb FC and 10Gb Ethernet. The FalconStor VTL solution takes full advantage of the latest advances in server, storage, and networking equipment and can achieve single node backup speeds of 1.5GB per second, or over 5TB per hour. Unique read-ahead technology provides fast data restore, even from deduplicated tapes.
Scalable, Reliable Architecture
FalconStor VTL technology supports up to eight separate nodes working as a single logical unit. Nodes are deployed in HA pairs to maintain system integrity in the event of a node failure.
Ease of Management, Integrated Reporting
Up to eight VTL nodes can be configured and managed as a single unit, with one point of control. The easy to use console includes numerous real-time statistical graphs as well as historical reports.
Open Protocol Support
Supports both FC and iSCSI connectivity from the same system.
Extensive Tape Library and Tape Drive Emulation
Emulation of nearly 50 tape library systems, including systems from ADIC, ATL, HP, IBM, Overland, Quantum, Sun StorageTek, and SpectraLogic. Over 30 tape drives emulated, including Ultrium, DLT, Super DLT, AIT, and StorageTek models.
Integrated, Scalable Deduplication
Disk consumption is greatly reduced through integrated, tape-format aware data deduplication. Typical deduplication rates of 20:1 or more result in a disk space savings of more than 95%. The deduplication repository scales up to four nodes with an additional failover node (4 1) which assumes processing in the event of a node failure.
Flexible Deduplication Architecture
Data deduplication can be run concurrently with backup processes or engineered to run after backups complete, depending on performance needs. This flexible design gives you the option of separating processes to focus all system resources on meeting backup windows.
Integrated Physical Tape Management
Advanced functionality for physical tape management simplifies operations, decreases media consumption and reduces tape handling costs.
Automated Tape Caching
Set up policies that automatically trigger export to physical tape. Files can be restored from either the virtual or physical tape copy. The operation is totally transparent to the backup software so there is no impact to existing backup policies.
Multi-tape Export
Make multiple physical copies of virtual tapes (up to five) for offsite DR and/or to meet regulatory requirements. Multi-tape export may be set as part of automated tape caching or auto archive policy; or it can occur during manual export of a single tape. Multi-tape export increases IT productivity, eliminating the need for manual tape duplication or scripting.
Tape Stacking
Write multiple virtual tapes to a single physical tape of greater capacity. Tape stacking effectively reduces IT management costs and tape media consumption. Enables efficient use of newer, higher capacity tape formats.
Enhanced Security
Protects valuable corporate data from being accessed in the event of tape theft or loss, or misuse of disk resources.
Tape Encryption
The FalconStor VTL solution can export data from virtual to physical tapes in an encrypted format using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Key management is included. Tape encryption is done in the VTL and does not require encryption software on the physical tape drive.
Tape Shredding
Tape shredding enables users to "destroy" a virtual tape so that it cannot be accessed, even when using disk forensics. Shredding performs a three-pass wipe of the selected virtual tapes using an algorithm specified by the U.S. Department of Defense (Standard 5220.22-M).
Hosted Backup
Allows certified backup applications to be installed directly onto the FalconStor VTL server, increasing performance and eliminating the need for a separate backup server.
NetBackup Open Storage Support
Supports Symantec NetBackup OpenStorage to integrate operations with backup software to maintain catalog consistency across operations.
Flexible Deployment Modes
FalconStor VTL technology can be deployed in three different modes: 1) As an integrated self-contained storage appliance containing processing and disk resources, 2) As a virtual appliance running on a VMware ESX server using internal or DAS disk, or 3) As a gateway device connecting to any third-party disk array over a SAN infrastructure.
NDMP Backup Support
Allows certified backup applications and industry-standard NAS appliances to perform backup to and restore from the FalconStor VTL solution using NDMP v4 protocol over an IP network for both command and data flow.
Hardware Compression
Compresses data with add-in hardware card so that more data can be stored on a virtual tape cartridge, saving disk space without adversely impacting VTL performance. Uses high-speed PCI-Express technology.
iSeries Support (AS/400)
Allows IBM iSeries and AS/400 systems to connect to a FalconStor VTL server.
ACSLS Shared Library Support
Allows the system to share ACSLS-managed libraries between the FalconStor VTL appliance and backup servers for physical tape operations.
IBM 3494 Library Support
Enables a FalconStor VTL server to connect to and manage IBM 3494 tape libraries for export and import of virtual tapes to and from physical tapes.
Virtual Appliance
The FalconStor Virtual Tape Library (VTL) Virtual Appliance for VMware Infrastructure is a preinstalled, preconfigured, and ready-to-run software application packaged with an operating system inside a virtual machine—bringing the market-leading enterprise-level VTL technology with data deduplication to virtual environments. Developed for quick and easy deployment, the solution reduces infrastructure costs and complexity while maximizing the value of your storage investments. The FalconStor VTL Virtual Appliance vastly improves the speed, reliability, and manageability of backups while optimizing storage and bandwidth efficiency for disaster recovery (DR) and continuous data availability.
Highlights
- iSCSI SAN support for fast and reliable backup and restore
- Built-in post-process deduplication technology eliminates redundant data to minimize network bandwidth requirements without impacting the backup window
- Tape format awareness accelerates and optimizes the identification of duplicate data
- TOTALLY Open™ architecture offers seamless integration with existing backup software and physical tape libraries
- Optimizes storage and bandwidth efficiency for near-line storage and offsite DR
- Ideal for any organization running a VMware Infrastructure environment
- Enables remote replication for DR
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