| The explosive growth of data
generated by businesses continues to
bring challenges in the area of
backup and recovery operations.
Increasing volumes of data and
narrowing backup windows have made
traditional tape backup increasingly
difficult to maintain. In addition,
tape backup has often led to longer
recovery periods, leaving more room
for media and mechanical failures.
Businesses require faster and more
reliable ways to back up and recover
their data.
Virtual tape appliances, such as
FalconStor Virtual Tape Library (VTL)
Storage Appliances and Enterprise
Edition, address the challenges
associated with tape backup.
FalconStor VTL solutions offer fast
backup, data deduplication,
enterprise-wide replication, and
tape integration in one solution,
without requiring changes to the
existing environment. Built-in data
deduplication features automatically
and transparently eliminate
redundant data, extending data
retention and allowing users to
reduce or even eliminate investments
in physical tape media.
However, FalconStor VTL solutions
require massive amounts of storage
that must scale both in performance
and in capacity. In the market, many
existing disk array products are
designed for traditional enterprise
transactional computing. They cannot
provide the scalability that VTL
applications require, and they are
usually too expensive to deploy in
large volume.
PROMISE VTrak E610f external disk
array subsystem was designed to work
seamlessly with VTL applications,
providing exceptional input/output
(I/O) performance for concurrent VTL
operations like backup, restore, and
deduplication with a host of
features, including:
- Aggregated 1.6Gb/s bandwidth
and low overhead implementation
- Dual 4Gb Fibre Channel host
interface ports
- Support for RAID levels 0,
1, 10, 1E, 5, 6, 50, and 60
- Robust error recovery
- No single point of failure
design
- Active-active dual
controllers
The VTrak E610f has 16 drive bays,
and can support up to 80 SAS or SATA
drives through PROMISE VTrak J610S
expansion units, or up to 80
terabytes (TB) of raw capacity
(based on using a 1TB SATA drive).
It offers a highly scalable,
reliable, and cost-effective storage
solution for FalconStor VTL
Appliances and Enterprise Edition,
appropriate for small and
medium-size businesses (SMBs) to
Enterprise customers.
The recommendations in this best
practices guide were tested on the
following hardware and software
versions:
- PROMISE VTrak E610f external
disk array subsystem, firmware
version 3.33.0000.00 (SR 2.5)
- PROMISE VTrak J610s external
disk subsystem, firmware version
1.07.0000.12
- FalconStor VTL Server v5.1
¡@ |
The FalconStor VTL solution
addresses the business challenge of
making backup and recovery fast and
reliable. Storage plays a
significant role in the reliability
and performance of the VTL solution.
Through efficient use of the PROMISE
VTrak E610f external disk array
subsystem, the VTL backup and
recovery performance becomes
exceptional, the backup and recovery
windows are significantly shortened,
and the total cost of the VTL
solution is dramatically reduced.
PROMISE VTrak E610f external disk
array subsystem is a versatile
storage solution that can support
many different application
requirements. However, for different
applications, best practices may
vary. In order to achieve the best
performance when planning FalconStor
VTL installation with PROMISE VTrak
E610f external disk array subsystem,
please follow the guidelines in this
Best Practices Guide and refer to
the additional resources specified
in this paper.¡@ |
