FalconStor Software hopes to take the success it has enjoyed in the enterprise-level virtual tape library (VTL) market downstream with today’s announcement of two lower-capacity VTLs targeting remote offices, departments, and mid-sized companies: the VTL Storage Appliance and VTL Virtual Appliance, which is a pre-configured virtual machine image that brings VTL capabilities to VMware environments.
Both products include FalconStor’s VTL integrated with Single Instance Repository (SIR) technology for data de-duplication. The VTL Storage Appliance and Virtual Appliance provide high-speed backup interfaces—1Gbps iSCSI or 4Gbps Fibre Channel—and tape-format-aware de-duplication
According to company officials, the VTL Storage Appliance can be deployed in less than 30 minutes with no changes to the existing environment, and its compatibility with legacy physical tape drives and libraries allows the VTL to automatically export tapes directly, by policy, or on-demand, at the speed of the SAN.
The VTL Storage Appliance integrates with FalconStor VTL Enterprise to allow remote offices to replicate virtual tapes over a WAN to the corporate data center for centralized management or compliance.
The FalconStor VTL Virtual Appliance is a software application packaged with the operating system inside a virtual machine running under VMware Infrastructure. The virtual version includes all of the features of its physical counterpart.
The new VTLs have the same features and functionality as the company’s enterprise-level VTLs, but are limited in capacity. The new appliances are designed for the 2TB to 10TB range.
The VTL Storage Appliance and VTL Virtual Appliance are priced from $19,000 and $8,000, respectively.