This IDC study uses the IDC MarketScape model to provide an assessment of a number of vendors participating in the VTL market. The IDC MarketScape is an evaluation based on a comprehensive framework and a set of parameters that assess vendors relative to one another and to those factors expected to be most conducive to success in a given market during the short and long term.

"The VTL market is quickly shifting into a broader disk-based data protection market that includes not only tape emulation and the ability to export to physical tape but also support for deduplication, remote replication, standard network interfaces, and the ability to become a data protection platform for different backup, archive, and recovery workloads," said Laura DuBois, program director for Storage Software at IDC.