With its ease of use, dense footprint, and low price point, VTL Value specifically addresses the needs of small to medium businesses or remote office/back office operations for the enterprise. The all-in-one, pre-configured Sun StorageTek VTL Value appliance is easy to install, integrating seamlessly with leading backup products. It simplifies storage management with a single, simple user interface and works with ZFS to eliminate volume management. Coupled with a value-oriented list price of $84,995, Sun's VTL Value lowers the barriers for smaller customer environments to budget and implement a VTL solution.

"Our customers are swimming in a sea of data - a company's most important asset - and need tape storage integration solutions that don't break the bank", stated Nigel Dessau, senior vice-president, Storage with Sun Microsystems Inc. "The new Virtual Tape Library Value system is an economical answer, as it runs on the Solaris OS, delivers 24 terabytes (TB) of disk capacity and is available at a very affordable price-point."

Industry leaders like Biogen Idec Inc. currently use Sun StorageTek VTL+ system and have used this innovative tape solution to solve challenging data management needs. As the growth of data threatens to overwhelm smaller-scale IT operations, VTL employs virtualization to simplify companies' back-up operations. VTL is a cost-effective solution to reduce back-up windows and drive down management costs. It provides businesses with a multitude of virtual tape drives and library resources that can be deployed, managed, and monitored from a single point, optimizing physical resource usage.

VTL Value gives customers a low-cost way to realize the benefits of the Sun approach to Virtual Tape: interoperability, rigorously tested Virtual Tape code base and industry-leading server innovation. The VTL Value appliance adds to a growing family of virtual tape solutions and is interoperable with Sun StorageTek VTL Plus, providing customers greater investment protection and flexibility. Sun's enterprise-class Solaris OS yields high performance and security benefits for the customer, while, the new 128-bit ZFS file system delivers storage pooling, RAID parity, check summing, data integrity, and additional performance - all of which are VTL optimizations only available through this new offering.