Hybrid RAID-tape-library storage system for backup

Traditional tape back-up systems have begun to wear out their welcomes in some businesses, which are turning to the virtual tape technologies. The virtual tape technologies combine the traditional backup methodology with the disk drive technology to create a disk-based library that acts as a tape library. In concert with the traditional backup software from vendors, the virtual tape libraries write data to a disk in current tape formats. Because the disk is used rather than tape, data can be backed up at channel speeds many times faster than with a tape and also recovered more quickly. This paper provided a new hybrid storage appliance: the RAID-tape-library, which makes the customary backup software behave performance and other features of the tape drives. And this hybrid storage device is not like the traditional software-based or hardware-based virtual tape library (VTL), which separates the tape library and the disk, our implementation is as an independent appliance that supports the backup application and the ultra SCSI attachments. It is similar to a disk device, but it does have abundance storage capacity like a tape library. With this hybrid device, the time of mount, position and dismount tapes is overlapped by effectual data transport in a RAID. The result of simulation shows the hybrid storage device has preferable performance.