The word is out on VTL

I was on a call with Hewlett-Packard this week getting a rundown on some upcoming activities, when half-way through the call, in the midst of various and sundry product updates, the HP executive casually mentioned that they had surpassed the 1.5PB mark for VTL capacity shipped. 1.5PB! And that's in only six months.

Sepaton, upon whose technology HP's VTL solution is based (the two companies inked the deal in May 2005), recently announced it grew its VTL business more than 300% year-over-year, signing up more than 300 customers and shipping about 1.0PB of its own VTL capacity; 2.5PB when you factor in HP shipments.

NetApp, who has been conspicuously absent from the VTL picture, today announced its first VTL product, based on technology it gained from its acquisition of Alacritus nearly a year ago. It's already shipped tens of petabytes of near-line disk for backup purposes. Why not to try to expand this with VTL?

And FalconStor, one of the pioneers of virtual tape, is still on the move, continuing to post significant revenue gains quarter over quarter, as well as working with EMC and other not-to-be-named storage vendors as OEM partners. While EMC won't divulge the exact VTL capacity it has shipped under the CLARiiON Disk Library label, ESG has done an informal analysis of the market and estimates EMC's share to be just under 30%. You do the math!

And the above is just a partial list of VTL players. Other vendors such as Copan, Data Domain, and Diligent have also seen early success with VTL products, as have some of the traditional tape library folks like ADIC, Overland, and Quantum. Overland, for example, has shipped 500 virtual tape appliances (Overland REO), not tape libraries, for several quarters now.

See a trend? ESG does. We expect VTL technology to take off in 2006, largely because it addresses one of end-users&' biggest pain points -- backup and recovery performance -- in a simple, non-disruptive way.

So, if you're one of those people who likes to sit back and watch a market or technology mature (i.e., you are not an "early adopter") before you think about investing in it, now may be the time to give VTL a second look. Thousands of organizations already have.