Word of the day...

virtual tape library

A virtual tape library (VTL) is a storage system consisting of hard disk drives (HDDs) that looks and acts like a physical tape library.

VTLs are typically used for backup and data archiving purposes. The array of disks is presented to the backup software as tape. Data is written sequentially, just as it would be as if it were being written to rotating tape, but can be written and read more quickly because disk is the underlying media. In addition to providing faster backup and recovery times, VTLs are scalable, can reduce operating costs and are compatible with other storage features such as deduplication.