Feature requests for V7 Tape support

[Doug.Butler]

I recently attended a couple of the Webinars related to the upcoming V7 release. The new feature that I am most interested in is the Native Tape Support.

At the end of one of the sessions I had submitted a couple of questions to the presenter and he suggested that I submit the same items to the Community Forum, as this venue is tracked by the folks involved in steering development.

For reference, I am in the "SMB" category. We have approx. 150 workstations, approx. 200-250 'users' (depending on the criteria you use) and approx. 40 virtualized workloads. This is a mix of mostly SQL-based business support applications, with application servers, file servers, general purpose SQL servers, and so forth. For the foreseeable future, we will continue to have some legacy applications that will remain physical until an upgrade opportunity, which is when we typically also migrate applications to virtual.

Thus, I continue to need a backup solution for those legacy physical servers. We are currently running a legacy instance of Symantec Backup Exec (v12.5). We currently use BEX to back up my physical Veeam server (2TB+ of direct attached storage in it) to tapes for off-site/vault storage. I would love to switch it around and use Veeam to do at least some rudimentary level of tape backup of the physical servers. I am prepared to use Windows-native backup-to-disk on each server, and have that server back itself up to a local disk file on itself; then use Veeam to back up those backup files to tape.

Here are some features that I think would be definite needs for such a unified approach. First, I need to support my existing catalog of Backup Exec media to meet retention policy. (I need a way to recover the BEX backups after I shut down BEX.) I understand if the tapes are written in native format of the media I should be OK with this.

Second, the Veeam solution should have some type of inbuilt wizard-driven way to automate a Grandfather/Father/Son tape rotation and escalation scheme. (Automatically elevate the Friday daily backup to a Weekly backup, automatically elevate the first Monday backup of every month to a Monthly backup, etc.) The wizard should handle assigning media from one pool to another automatically.

Third, the Veeam solution should include support for the concepts of "vaults" and "offsite" storage, together with policy and automation for moving tapes out of online libraries and into the "Vault" and then instructing the user to move tapes from the "Vault" to the "offsite" and then back again (depending on the policy).

[Gostev]

Thanks Doug. We will consider these enhancements for future releases depending on the amount of requests.

[mongie]

Obviously support for the Backup Exec catalog format (read from the tape) will be a much-wanted feature...

I know I'll want it.