Sepaton this week unveiled a virtual tape appliance for small and mid-size businesses that saves data to disk but emulates tape libraries.

The S2100-DS Virtual Tape Library scales from 1.5T bytes to 6T bytes. It is contained in a 4U (7-inch-high) enclosure. Users can upgrade the box in 1.5T-byte increments. It can save 150M bytes per second.

The S2100-DS combines Fibre Channel technology and high-speed ATA RAID disk storage with tape library emulation technology that allows the disk to look like tape to the backup software. It emulates a variety of tape libraries from StorageTek, ADIC and Quantum and works with backup software from Veritas, Legato, Commvault, IBM Tivoli and BakBone.

The company claims its products are content-aware, allowing it to provide additional data protection. Sepaton competes in the virtual tape library market with EMC, Quantum and software vendor Diligent.

The S2100DS starts at $21,000 for a 1.5T-byte configuration. It is available now.