With this solution, you can choose the LTO format. That means you can pick from LTO1 through LTO9 currently. All that really does is set up how big a tape folder will be. 

Inside that folder, you can set how large you want the file chunks to be.  This allows you to take the capacity of an LTO9 tape and break it down into smaller increments. This does a better job of taking advantage of the underlying storage that you are using. You can also create more than one virtual backup appliance.  Each appliance can have up to four virtual drives assigned to it.

I like the fact that we can simultaneously upload the virtual tapes to different cloud providers, and the settings can be adjusted to speed up the upload times even further. This helps with our RPO objective, which is within 24 hours.

The cost is also much lower, as uploading to cloud storage providers such as Wasabi is very cheap. This is unlike physical tape libraries that can cost thousands of dollars in addition to tape costs.

The virtual tapes themselves are also in linear tape-open (LTO) format, which means they are air-gapped.

The ability to continue to use Veeam was of the highest importance — but we needed something to replicate data easily to a cloud storage provider like Backblaze. StarWind's VTL to B2 fit the bill nicely on paper. In practice, it is somewhat technical to deploy and manage, but overall it gets the job done.

The solution is compatible with cloud storage platforms, such as Amazon S3. Also, it efficiently reduces the storage cost for archiving.

StarWind VTL allowed us to back up to virtual tape that was created within Veeam and upload the tape to the cloud.

This solution is easy to set up without having to have a lot of storage on-premises or change the backup solution that we already had in place, which saved us time and money.

The most valuable feature of the StarWind Virtual Tape Library is the archiving to the AWS cloud.