According to the World Meteorological Organization, global temperatures are set to reach new records in the next five years. The Copernicus Programme also reports that multiple global heat records were broken in July 2023. Today, climate change is a real threat with disastrous consequences to businesses.

Rising cybercrimes are another significant threat to businesses, causing major financial damages in various forms. The global average cost of a data breach in 2023 was USD 4.45 million, a 15% increase over three years.

Other real-world changes—global health crises, geopolitical upheavals and new technological discoveries—are also impacting businesses, highlighting the need for an IT strategy in which disaster recovery (DR) and DR security aren’t an afterthought.

Go hybrid for disaster recovery (DR)

With a hybrid cloud strategy, you can deploy your workloads across multiple locations—on-premises or in public or private clouds—and not risk losing them all in the event of a disaster or an attack. You can put your hybrid cloud strategy into action with IBM® Power® Virtual Server, which are virtual IBM Power servers that you can access in the cloud. These servers enable you to replicate your on-prem IBM Power infrastructure environment in the cloud, allowing you to seamlessly move and manage your workloads across both environments.

But how exactly do IBM Power Virtual Server help put DR and DR security front and center? To answer that question, we must consider one of the key use cases of IBM Power Virtual Server—business continuity planning—which helps you keep your business running with reliable failover solutions including backup, high availability and DR. In this post, we’ll focus on how you can kick your business continuity plan into high gear with virtual tape library systems on your IBM Power Virtual Server.

What are virtual tape libraries and how can you use them on IBM Power Virtual Server?

Virtual tape libraries (VTLs) are disk-based appliances that are designed to emulate traditional tape libraries. For users (like many IBM Power clients) who continue to rely on physical tape or virtual tape for storage and backup but are looking to leverage IBM Power Virtual Server for DR and security, VTLs can be a game changer.

VTLs offer numerous benefits for IBM Power Virtual Server environments:

• They help automate backup and recovery processes to eliminate user disruption.
• They provide easy-to-scale solutions that start at a terabyte and can scale to petabytes.
• They deliver optimum performance for backups on-premises and in IBM Power Virtual Server environments.

To get started with VTLs on IBM Power Virtual Server, you don’t have to look any further than FalconStor StorSafe VTL, an integrated VTL solution from IBM partner FalconStor—one of the leading providers of VTL solutions in the market.

StorSafe VTL is the only IBM-certified VTL solution that offers data protection, cloud migration, DR, high availability and ransomware protection. For your workloads already on IBM Power Virtual Server, it can optimize backup through deduplication—significantly improving performance and helping reduce backup storage costs by 60%–90% (based on IBM client data, actual results may vary).

For workloads that you wish to migrate to the cloud from your on-prem Power environment, StorSafe VTL provides reliable and secure data movement from on-premises to cloud and back.

FalconStor StorSafe VTL use cases

Let’s consider the four use cases FalconStor StorSafe VTL has for backing up and protecting your mission-critical workloads:

• Migrate from on-premises to IBM Power Virtual Server: Simplify the migration of your on-premises workloads and legacy tapes to IBM Power Virtual Server with a non-disruptive and secure process that can scale according to the size of your workloads.

• Set up hybrid cloud backup: Leverage the cloud for long-term archival or disaster recovery with a secondary backup to IBM Power Virtual Server.

• Enable IBM Power Virtual Server resident backup: Ensure cost-effective and reliable backups and restores for all your IBM Power Virtual Server workloads.

• Enhance IBM Power Virtual Server disaster recovery: Replicate your workloads in IBM Power Virtual Server to another cloud location and enjoy the added protection of a secondary cloud location using your existing StorSafe VTL solution.

Get started

FalconStor VTL can be purchased through the IBM Cloud Catalog. With IBM Power Virtual Server and StorSafe VTL, begin—or extend—your hybrid cloud journey and experience comprehensive backup and recovery for your mission-critical systems.