Kevin Whittaker said:

>P.S..... Actually I would say NOT to purchase a VTL. 

>I believe with all the new great features in NB 6.5, make the Disk Staging

>Units to be the best options for most people.

FWIW, I’m not even close to dumping VTLs.  I hear this statement about twice a week, so I respond to it a lot. ;)  Here are some of my reasons.

1. The biggest thing that VTLs gave me was multi-host access of the same storage.  You can allegedly do that with 6.5 and whatever they’re calling SSO for disk now.  BUT I haven’t talked to anyone who is using it yet, so it is unproven, AFAIC.
2. The other thing is dedupe with high-speed block access.  If you want dedupe and are OK with NAS performance, there are a few players out there for you, the main one being Data Domain. But if you need several hundred MB/s behind large SAN media servers, you need block access.  And if you want block access + dedupe, today that means VTLs.
3. MAYBE in a year or so when the Open Storage API becomes common place (right now, only one vendor supports it) and has many more features (right now it’s pretty bare bones), things will change.  MAYBE in a year or so, I’ll be able to have a high-speed (100s of MB/s) block access filesystem with dedupe.

Dedupe is the bomb.  If you’re buying disk without it at this point, I think you’re wasting your money.