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Storage analyst Deni Connor focuses on storage, application and infrastructure management in this twice-weekly newsletter.
Are midsize businesses ready for virtual tape libraries? Diligent thinks so.
This week the company is introducing two software-based appliances for midsize businesses. Diligent will add two pre-defined hardware/software combinations to its ProtecTier family.
The target customer for Diligent’s midrange products is a business that is backing up less than 4TB a day and has a small staff of one or two people dedicated to backup operations.
The appliances will start at $75,000 for 8TB capacities. The ProtecTier software resides on a standard Linux server, where it emulates a tape library including all the drives, cartridges and robotics. It backs up data to any Fibre-Channel- attached disk subsystem. While data is being backed up it is also being deduplicated with a technology called HyperFactor, which operates inline.
The Mid-Range Entry Package has up to 8TB useable capacity and supports as many as 12 virtual tape drives and two virtual tape libraries. The Mid-Range Standard Package has as much as 20TB of useable capacity and supports up to 16 virtual tape drives and four virtual tape libraries. This contrasts to the Enterprise edition, which supports as much as 30TB, 256 virtual tape drives and 15 virtual tape libraries.
IDC says the virtual tape library market is growing from $589 Million in 2007 to $675 million in 2008.
Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.

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