Most current VTL solutions use SAS or SATA disk arrays as the primary storage component due to their relatively low cost.
In some cases, the data stored on the VTL's disk array is exported to other media, such as physical tapes, for disaster recovery purposes (scheme called disk-to-disk-to-tape, or D2D2T).
A competitive offering from StorageTek (acquired in 2005 by Sun Microsystems, then subsequently by Oracle Corporation) was known as Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) which leveraged the market dominant STK Powderhorn library as a back store.
Each product line has been enhanced to support larger disk buffer capacities, FICON, and more recently (c. 2010) "tapeless" disk-only environments.
Likewise, VTLs were developed supporting popular SCSI transport protocols such as SPI (legacy systems), Fibre Channel, and iSCSI.
[3] Amazon and StarWind Software in partnership with Veeam, BackBlaze and Wasabi Technologies offer a so-called gateway products that facilitates backing up and archiving "on premises" data as virtual tapes stored in AWS, Microsoft Azure, Wasabi Technologies and BackBlaze public clouds.