LaserVault Adds Multi-Path Support To ViTL
September 8, 2025 Alex Woodie
LaserVault is shipping a new release of its virtual tape library software that is likely to find a warm reception among customers who need different retention periods for their IBM i backups. By enabling ViTL 4.0 to support multiple storage paths to backend storage appliances, it’s allowing customers to reduce the amount of data they store and giving them an overall more efficient backup environment.
ViTL is the name of LaserVault’s flagship virtual tape library (VLT) for IBM i, which the company (also known as known as Electronic Storage Corp) launched back in 2018. The product, which emulates an IBM LTO tape library, is available either as software that customers install on their own X86 environment or purchase as a pre-packaged appliance.
Customers can back up their IBM i data directly to a ViTL appliance via Fibre Channel or SAS connections and store it there, or they can use ViTL as a gateway for backups that eventually will live on backup appliances from vendors like Cohesity, Rubrik, Exagrid and others. Those vendors do not have the capability to support the IBM i directly – including the all-important restricted-mode saves and D-mode IPLs that are critical for disaster recoveries – which is why they partner with LaserVault and its ViTL solution.
While LaserVault offers IBM i capabilities that those other storage vendors do not, there were still some limitations in the way that ViTL passed IBM i backups over to those storage appliances, and those limitations impacted how they executed backup policies, said Erik Dabrowsky, who helps developed ViTL at LaserVault.
“We found that people that are using storage appliances like Cohesity, Rubrik, and Exagrid want to take snapshots,” Dabrowsky told IT Jungle. “We save a set of tapes into their share on those devices, and they want to take snapshots of that, but they have different snapshot retention policies. Some backups they want to stick around for seven years, and some backups they might only want for 30 days.”
ViTL is available either as a hardware appliance or as software that customers can install on their own VM.
However, because of the way earlier versions of ViTL worked, every backup that the storage vendors pulled from ViTL’s virtual tape had the same retention policy. So daily IBM i backups that the customer might want to only save for a month before discarding could end up being saved for up to seven years on the backend storage appliance if the customer had a seven-year retention policy for monthly backups. That wasn’t ideal, Dabrowsky said.
“You end up retaining a lot of data that you don’t necessarily need to retain, and that eats up your storage on the storage appliance, which costs more money and makes more data to replicate,” he said. “So we were looking at ways that we could better match the tape retention policy… in BRMS with your snapshot retention policy on your storage appliance.”
Some customers devised workarounds to that limitation, such as creating separate VTLs within ViTL for monthly and weekly backups. While that technically worked, it added a lot of extra configuration challenges, and it also required the use of an additional physical Fibre Channel ports or virtual ports on the VTL appliance, Dabrowsky said.
“Our solution approach to that was, well, what if we could create different pools of tapes?” he said. “And what if we can keep those tapes on different paths? That way, you can create a share on your appliance for your monthly saves and set its retention policy of seven years, and then you have another share for your dailies and maybe it’s got 15- or 30-day retention.”
That is what LaserVault released with ViTL 4.0. By enabling customers to define multiple storage paths in a single tape library, LaserVault give customers the flexibility to define different retention policies for different backups.
The change required quite a bit of work on LaserVault’s part, Dabrowsky said, and it impacted how other components of the ViTL product work. With previous versions, where each virtual tape library had a single path, there was no need to toggle compression or encryption on or off at the path level. However, now that each virtual tape library can support multiple paths, customers need to be able to specify whether or not to use encryption and compression for a particular path.
Some customers may want to use LaserVault’s encryption and compression capabilities if they’re keeping an IBM i backup on the internal SSD, Dabrowsky said. But if backups will eventually be sent out to Cohesity or Rubrik for long-term storage, then the customer will most likely want to use those vendors’ compression and encryption algorithms, because they’re likely to get higher compression rates. Those vendors also support data de-duplication routines that can also shrink the size of backups even more, he said.
“So that gets you into a situation where some of our tapes are compressed and encrypted from the point of LaserVault and some of them aren’t. And how do you manage that?” Dabrowsky asked. “Well, the way you manage that is by defining those settings at the path level.”
ViTL 4.0 is available now. Check out www.laservault.com for more info.
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