Network Appliance is set to unveil additions to its storage portfolio that
allow customers to corral their data without having to mess with their
current infrastructure.
The storage systems vendor Monday will introduce two new disk-to-disk backup
storage appliances from its NearStore Virtual Tape Library (VTL) family.
NetApp’s VTL machines act like tape libraries but provide more reliability,
speed and resilience than their tape brethren at a time when customers are
growing weary of broken tape or slow spool times.
Disk-based backup is also
a bonus because customers claim backup windows are shrinking, giving them
less time to protect their data.
These new systems, NearStore VTL600 and the dual-head NearStore VTL1200,
store large capacities of data on disk, automatically copying data to
physical tape within any storage environment, including EMC, Hitachi and IBM
storage arrays.
Both plug right into disparate storage environments and sync with servers.
NearStore VTL systems scale from 4.5 terabytes to 168 terabytes
industry leaders BakBone, CA, CommVault, HP, Legato, Symantec and Tivoli.
At first blush, the systems might seem like another couple of VTLs, albeit
more powerful than machines from competitors like Falconstor, IBM and EMC.
But two distinct features put that notion to rest, NetApp officials claim.
Krish Padmanabhan, general manager of NetApp’s heterogeneous data-protection
business unit, said the VTL600 and VTL1200 come with self-tuning to balance
workloads and tape smart sizing features for a 50 percent savings in
physical tape versus other VTLs.
Other virtual tape libraries sit at fixed locations, waiting to store data.
But regular load balancing does not adjust for data hot spots, which means a
storage administrator had to manually tune the machine to adjust for the hot
spots.
The new NetApp VTLs can adjust to these hot spots on-the-fly and are
assigned to whichever device that gives the highest service level,
Padmanabhan said, without having to pay an administrator $100,000 a year to
balance loads and tune backup tapes.
Moreover, the tape smart sizing tool in the new VTLs allows customers to
predict how data will compress when it reaches the physical tape drive.
NearStore VTL samples backup data and adjusts each virtual tape to fit
without impacting performance.
“When the data comes into our NearStore VTL, we sample it and figure out how
much that data will compress when it eventually goes to the physical tape
drive,” Padmanabhan said.
The new VTL systems will be pitted against the glut of data in corporations
that refuse to stop growing and are an answer to the frequent tape-loss
issues.
In related data-protection news, Decru, which NetApp purchased last year, today announced that its latest DataFort E-Series Version 3.0
software supports iSCSI-based storage in addition to networked-attached
storage (NAS)
This means that CIFS, NFS and iSCSI
single appliance, bridging the gap between traditional NAS and more modern
IP-based storage. This should give customers greater flexibility in adapting
to their current infrastructure.
DataFort 3.0, which pipes data at wire speed without impacting data
performance, includes greater antivirus support, role-based access controls
for administrators and more key management functionality to help customers
encrypt and decrypt data.
Also, NetApp Global Services (NGS) will launch three new service offerings
geared to protect and serve data: a VTL design and implementation for
NearStore VTL machines; disaster recovery design and implementation; and
backup and recovery design and implementation.
