Disk to Disk to Tape - D2D2T question - staging/tape virtualization

[gatoradeguy]

Does anyone know of a tape virtualization vendor who's disk device formats the tape with the same name that arcserve formats it with? Right now we're looking at Cybernetics but their virtual tapes are autoformatted as VT1.1,VT1.2 and so on. We are a company that has hundreds of backup tapes and managing the tapes virtually would be an administrative burden. We looked at the staging option in Arcserve but it doesnt seem to be as fast as tape virtualization on a dedicated disk box.

 

[vschumpy]

As far as I am aware, the ADIC Pathlight VX range does this. As far as the backup application is concerned the disks inside it emulate a user conigurable tape drive model, so as far as the backup app goes, it is pretty much transparent.

The advantage to this over using ARCserve for staging is that the data is heading all to the same unit, regardless of whether it is going to a real, or virtual tape, and that any copying out from disk to tape is contained within the same fabric, maximising RAW copy performance.

It's been a couple of years since I saw this demo'd but was pretty impressed with it back then. Essentially if you try to eject a virtual tape, it triggers the dump of the virtual tape to physical tape before exporting it from the library. I'm sure there are a lot of other smart things it does too that may be policy based, but like I say, it's been a while since I last looked at it.

Have also heard a few reports of people I know using the Overland REO who are pretty happy with it.

Both of these are on the ARCserve CDL as far as I know.

Not come across the Cybernetics in my travels yet.