When migrating data to the cloud, the planning process for those decisions are not always obvious. There are many factors that go into the decision process. Most organizations today operate hybrid cloud environments with ongoing discussions and decisions around the next set of data to move, or not to move, to the cloud. One of the next steps is crucial, and that is deciding “how” to move the data to the cloud.
Most people think virtual tape libraries only streamline backup and recovery by emulating a varied number of tape devices for disk-based backup. While this is certainly what virtual tape libraries can do to optimize data protection, many people often forget the power that virtual tape libraries can bring to help with cloud migrations. Virtual tape libraries are good for cloud migrations as data movers, providing the ability to move data from any source, such as disk or tape, to the cloud with the ability to simply restore the data to the new destination, the cloud.
The truth of the matter is that when a decision has been made to move data to the cloud, that includes all the data. That could mean volumes of data, petabytes and/or terabytes of data. The load is usually simply overwhelming to move and could potentially take up a great deal of resources and time to move. With virtual tape libraries leveraging deduplication technology, you can ensure duplicate data will not be moved minimizing the amount of data to transmit. The process of moving data will be faster by leveraging deduplication technology built in the virtual tape library, like FalconStor StorSafe VTL, so that duplicate copies of data are not moved multiple times to the destination.
The added benefit is that in most cases, when the decision is to move the data, there are oftentimes volumes of legacy data still on tapes that need to be moved as well. That is the added power of VTLs with its ability to read tapes without having to rehydrate the data as part of the migration process back to disk before moving the data to the cloud. Legacy tape migration to the cloud becomes a simple process with StorSafe VTL.
So, the next time you think about migrating data to the cloud, don’t forget about the power of your virtual tape library.
