The Best Virtual Tape Library (VTL)
for Enterprise ROBO, SMB & Edge

For decades, physical tapes have been the gold standard for archival backup storage: immutable, high-capacity, and long-lasting. However, they are complex to manage, costly to maintain, and slow to restore.

StarWind Virtual Tape Library offers all the benefits of archival storage without the drawbacks of physical tapes. It ensures immutability and ransomware protection with secure virtual tapes and offloading to public cloud storage, provides large storage capacities with disk-based storage, and supports long-term retention using affordable cloud archival options. StarWind VTL is the ideal, cost-effective replacement for physical tapes — easy to manage and faster to restore.

Backups are critical for protecting business data during outages, failures, or cyberattacks. But long-term data archiving is just as important — especially for organizations that need to retain historical records for compliance, audits, or future reference, sometimes spanning decades. Both backup and archiving require large storage capacity, reliable ransomware protection, and, above all, cost-efficiency.

StarWind solves these challenges by offering a seamless storage gateway to AWS S3 and Glacier. It enables any backup application to offload data to the cloud, providing unlimited storage, strong data resilience, and a highly affordable way to meet both short-term recovery and long-term retention needs.

Reliable backups are essential for any business because they protect production data even if disaster strikes your primary infrastructure. A key rule is to keep multiple backup copies, with at least one stored offsite (The “3-2-1” rule).

However, offsite backup storage can be expensive, especially when using physical tapes stored in external vaults - and restoring from them is very slow. StarWind VTL makes offsite backups affordable, secure, and fast to restore by acting as a storage gateway to the Backblaze B2 cloud for any backup software. It automates data tiering from local disks to the cloud and eliminates the need for manual tape handling. With instant access to cloud-based copies, you can restore data in minutes instead of hours.