When virtual tape arrived on the scene a few years ago, many storage managers dismissed it as a niche product not sturdy enough for enterprise-class backups. Now this New Data Center technology, which mimics a tape backup library but uses disks as the medium, is proving itself in ever-larger organizations.

Consider CitiStreet. The joint venture between financial giants Citigroup and State Street is one of the nation's largest insurance benefits delivery providers and retirement-plan record keepers; the company reports servicing more than 9 million plan participants. CitiStreet, in Quincy, Mass., has used a 35TB Sepaton S2100-ES2 virtual tape library (VTL) in its Jacksonville, Fla., data center for more than a year, and is installing a 40TB unit in its Quincy data center. By July, that VTL will be operational and the company will retire its two aging Quantum ATL tape library units, which contain four DLT 7000 tape drives each, says Jeff Machols, systems integration manager for CitiStreet. At that time, the VTL will let the two data centers provide speedy disaster recovery for each other. Machols recently discussed CitiStreet's storage plans with Network World Executive Editor Julie Bort.

What was the impetus for moving to a virtual tape library?

The [Quantum] equipment was starting to age, and as compliance moved to the forefront, compliance-audited security started to become a major concern. Plus, we had more batch processing going on at night. We needed to shrink our backup window because our backups were a big [part] of our batch processes. Each [backup batch] stream could take anywhere from one to three hours - and each client had its own batch cycle.

The Quantum ATLs we were using were 5 to 7 years old. More importantly, the media was aging. We knew we had to make a big purchase of hundreds of tapes; it made sense to start looking at other solutions.

Did you know you wanted virtual tape?

Initially, we were going to just refresh our [tape library] hardware. About three years ago, we first saw [VTLs] . . . but they weren't mainstream yet and the ones that were out there were relatively small and not really scalable. They weren't sophisticated in terms of the software, and the road map they were on. But when we started to look seriously [to replace the Quantum library], more enterprise-class systems were available.

We looked at traditional tape backup and also things like network-attached storage and virtual tape. Network-attached storage would have changed all our backup procedures, software, scripts - everything, because it's a whole different storage. Virtual tape emulates the tape library. So we didn't have to change any software or update any of our backup or restore processes - our Veritas backups, and backup and restore scripts.

Did you get a faster backup with the VTL?

Much faster. We went from averaging 2M to 3M byte/sec to well over 30M byte/sec.

Virtual tape is billed as being a low-cost backup method. Was that the case for you?

When you look at having to buy the actual library, the drives and the tape media, the cost per megabyte for virtual tape is about the same. For about the same cost we're getting 10 times the performance plus the added benefits of software functionality down the road.

When will the second system be live?

By the end of Q2.