June 2012 – VMware,Microsoft Knowledge Sharing Portal

Firestreamer is a virtual tape library (VTL) that enables the existing tape backup software to access a wide range of non-tape storage media, making possible long-term and off-site retention of data without the need for tape drives.

Firestreamer allows you to:

Avoid or minimize investments in expensive physical tape hardware.
Reduce operational costs through increased automation of backups and restores.
Optimize utilization of your existing storage resources, such as disk arrays or NAS.
Save time with fast simultaneous backups and restores to and from multiple virtual tape drives.
Make your business more disaster resilient by saving your data to different types of media for off-site storage.
Improve the performance, compatibility and storage utilization of your current online and physical tape backups with intermediate backups to virtual tape.