Diligent Brings Virtual Tape Technology To Open Systems

The new application also marks the first move by the company to open a sales channel for solution providers.

Diligent was formed when former EMC employees acquired mainframe tape virtualization technology, called Virtual Tape Facility (VTF), from EMC last September, said Noemi Greyzdorf, product manager.

VTF allows data to be stored on a hard disk instead of tape in such a way that backup and restore applications from several leading vendors think it is being stored to tape, said Greyzdorf. "The backup application doesn't know it is talking to disk drives," she said. "It thinks and acts as if it is working with tape libraries.

As a result, data backup and restore speed is significantly increased, Greyzdorf said. "Tapes hold more data than disk, and throughput has increased over time," she said. "But maintenance costs for tape are high, and recovery of data from tape is time-consuming. The cost of lost productivity and lost revenue is considerable. Tapes also consume more and more data center space, while tape libraries are difficult to scale in size."

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Starting this week, the company will offer VTF Open, which brings the technology to the open systems space, said Greyzdorf. The software resides on an off-the-shelf Linux server running Red Hat 7.2 and connects to up to four front-end hosts and up to four back-end Fibre Channel RAID or non-RAID arrays per server, she said.

Up to four servers can be combined to scale the number of arrays, Greyzdorf said. More powerful servers increase the throughput via the addition of multiple buses. Each server can emulate up to 16 virtual tape libraries, each of which can reside on multiple disk arrays if needed, she said.

Most of Diligent's sales of the existing VTF product went through EMC's sales arm, a company spokesman said. But the go-to-market strategy is to work with partners going forward, said Greyzdorf.

Diligent has already signed up three solution providers in the United States and is recruiting other channel players, Greyzdorf said. "We are looking for VARs able to take our solution and address the needs of their customers," she said. "Some customers need more throughput, some more capacity. VARs can address those specific needs."

VTF Open can be sold two ways. Customers can pay $55,000 to buy the software and $8,250 per year in maintenance costs. Or they can license the software for $35,000 per year, which includes maintenance.