Understanding the concept of VTL

This recipe will cover the concept of a virtual tape library, also known as VTL, and how DPM can leverage it.

For many companies, there is no interest in writing the production data to an actual tape. The reason is that they only need the grandfather-father-son relation or granularity and that is only possible by defining long-term recovery goals. This can be accomplished using a VTL, which could be a hardware box or software that you install on the DPM server.

A VTL solution is installed and configured the same way as a physical tape library and from a DPM perspective, should be managed the same way regarding its long-term recovery goals.

A virtual tape library simulates a media changer and a number of tape drives. Instead of using tapes, the VTL software or solution writes the backed-up data to individual files that represent a tape. Different vendors use different file setups and extensions.

The advantage of using VTL is to gain the granularity of tape to...