StarWind VTL helps businesses to eliminate their costly tape backup processes while meeting regulatory data archival and retention requirements using on-premises Virtual Tape Libraries with cloud and object storage tier. Protect your backup data from ransomware by keeping it on ransomware-resilient virtual tapes. Replicate and tier your backups to AWS, Azure, or any other public cloud to maximize storage cost-efficiency and security. Finally, use any industry-standard object storage array for flexibly scaling the local storage.
For system administrators who can maintain the backup infrastructure on their own, we offer a Free version of StarWind Virtual Tape Library. StarWind VTL Free delivers the unrestricted set of features and a GUI that works only in monitoring mode. Also, the free version is supported only in the open public community forum.
If you care about the data you store and want to receive useful regular updates and fixes, we recommend choosing the commercial version.
| StarWind VTL Free | StarWind VTL | StarWind Cloud VTL for AWS and Veeam | StarWind VTL Appliance | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monitoring through Web UI/Thick Client | + | + | + | + |
| Management through Web UI/Thick Client | - | + | + | + |
| RDP/Phone/Email Support with 1 hour or 4 hour SLA | - | + | - (purchased separately) | + |
| Single point of support for backup and storage stack | - | - | + | +* |
| Cloud Storage Support | + | + | +** | + |
| Object Storage Support | + | + | - | + |
* Single point of support is provided for hardware and software components included in the Appliance
** AWS only
The commonly asked question is how our Cloud Storage Support differs from those integrated into AWS and Veeam? The difference here is that StarWind uses a different approach for storing data and tiering it between the local and cloud storage. The table below compares the functionality of StarWind VTL, Veeam Availability Suite, and AWS Storage Gateway.
| StarWind VTL | Veeam Availability Suite | AWS Storage Gateway | |
| Cloud Storage Support | + | + | + |
| Object Storage Support | + | - | - |
| Ability to store backups locally | + | + | - |
| Flexible retention policies between on-premises, fast cloud, and archival cloud | + | - | - |
StarWind VTL transparently extends existing on-premises backup storage pools to Azure, AWS or other public cloud storage services. This serves two purposes. First, organizations can transparently scale up storage capacity without purchasing any extra hardware. Second, public cloud storage offers the most appealing $/GB rate for long-term data archival.
StarWind VTL dramatically simplifies storage management for organizations by interconnecting isolated storage silos. It allows using any industry-standard object storage arrays to expand the local storage pools. This way VTL unifies storage management and automates organization’s data flow between primary backup storage, on-premises object storage, and public cloud storage.
StarWind Web-based Management provides system administrators with the ability to access and manage their StarWind storage infrastructure via HTML5 web console from any location. This functionality delivers full control over storage-related operations from PC, Android, iOS or Windows mobile devices.
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StarWind VTL implements both deduplication and compression space reduction technologies. This results in increased usable storage capacity and improved performance as more data fits on primary storage. Also, it speeds up offsite replication and recovery by reducing the amount of data transferred.
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StarWind VTL allows both scale-up and scale-out architectures. Capacity is transparently increased by local object storage and public cloud storage. Adding more VTL instances scales the performance and shrinks the backup window by running multiple parallel backup operations.
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