Most organizations have a significant investment in a Virtual Tape Library (VTL). For many, the VTL is the cornerstone of their data protection and disaster recovery strategy. Though VTLs offer reliability, performance and scalability, and have been state of the art for many years, emerging technologies and tightening regulatory requirements are shifting the landscape.

VTFM-NewGen complements VTL capabilities by:

• Providing backup to S3 or S3-compatible storage for older VTL implementations that do not offer this capability. Backup to S3 can satisfy requirements for immutable, air gap copies of critical data.
• Providing inexpensive, long-term archival of infrequently accessed data without the degradation associated with physical tape.
• Providing concurrent read access to multiple objects on the same tape to de-serializes recovery jobs. This capability is particularly useful for accelerating the recovery of Db2 object backups.

Organizations nearing the end of the lease term for an aging VTL installation may wish to consider a full transition to a software-only plus S3 backup and recovery approach. Cost savings, along with improvements in operational flexibility , performance and regulatory compliance posture, can be substantial.

VTFM-NewGen is a robust and flexible software-based solution that provides a plug-and-play bridge for migrating from a hardware to a software-based backup and recovery approach. VTFM fully leverages your existing data and tape management software components (e.g. IBM HSM and IBM TSM) while requiring no changes to your JCL. Migration is near-transparent to your ongoing operations.

VTFM-NewGen’s e-Vaulting capabilities enable back up of both tape and data sets to private and public S3 and S3-compatible storage. In combination, VTFM-NewGen and S3 storage offer a powerful solution for creating and managing both air gap and immutable backups.

Air gap backups involve physically or logically isolating backup data from the production environment, effectively creating an “air gap” that prevents cyber threats such as ransomware from compromising the backup. S3 storage facilitates air gap backups by providing the option to store data in a separate AWS account or region, ensuring that backup copies remain isolated and unaffected by security incidents targeting the primary environment. By leveraging S3’s robust access controls and encryption capabilities, organizations can establish a reliable air gap strategy to safeguard critical data against cyberattacks and unauthorized access.

Immutable backups are backup copies that are tamper-proof. They cannot be altered, deleted, or overwritten by unauthorized users or processes. S3 storage supports immutability through features like Object Lock, which allows users to enforce retention periods and legal holds on stored objects, preventing any modifications until the specified duration or condition is met. This capability is particularly valuable for industries with stringent compliance requirements including healthcare, finance, and government, where maintaining data integrity and audit trails is paramount.

By leveraging VTFM-NewGen in combination with S3 storage for air gap and immutable backup, organizations can significantly enhance their data resilience and regulatory compliance posture. By decoupling backup data from the production environment and enforcing strict immutability controls, VTFM plus helps organizations mitigate the risk of data loss, corruption, and tampering, ensuring business continuity and regulatory adherence.

VTFM-NewGen offers unique capabilities designed to dramatically accelerate the recover-from-tape process. VTFM-NewGen’s Parallel Access Tape (PAT) feature lets multiple current jobs read objects from the same virtual tape at the same time. Recovery velocity, otherwise constrained by the single-threaded nature of reading from virtual tape, is unleashed by VTFM-NewGen PAT and enjoys a tremendous speed boost. A common use case that benefits from PAT is the recovery of Db2 database objects from virtual tape. In a 24×7 online environment database downtime truly impacts the business. Through VTFM PAT, an ‘unlimited’ number of jobs can concurrently recover different tablespaces from the same virtual tape or set of tapes. Benchmarks demonstrate an order of magnitude reduction in the time required to recover databases comprised of thousands of tablespaces.

VTFM-NewGen brings added flexibility to your backup and recovery operations. Do you want to back up your data sets to virtual tape and then vault your tapes in the cloud. Do you want to move individual data sets, bypassing backup to virtual tape? VTFM-NewGen offers the best of both worlds. Virtual Tape: Seamlessly back up tapes to the cloud just as you would to any other target. Define storage locations in the cloud using VTFM and use your existing tape management solution to define the desired vault patterns and policies. Data Sets: Individual data sets may be vaulted to S3 and then deleted from local storage, or may be replicated to cloud storage with the local copy retained. If replicated, any changes to the local copy can trigger a repeat replication to the Cloud. VTFM-NewGen offers flexible implementation options for both virtual tape and data set use cases.