Advice on best LTO-7 24-48 slot tape library to buy

[rpierce59]

We are about to purchase a tape library in the 24-48 slot size using LTO-7 drives.

Can anybody suggest the pros & cons of Dell, HP, IBM and other tape library systems for use with Veeam 9.5 in a DR scenario? Which one is best?

Has anybody seen an LTO-8 drive on the market?

Does the IBM 1155 15tb drive come in a library as small as 24-48 slots?

I see many libraries that offer multiple tape drives (Dell TL2000 w/2 drives). If I am backing say 12 TB up to a 2 drive (each raw 6TB cap) library does the backup take half as long (using Fibre Channel)? If not, what is the gain for using a multi drive library (other than redundancy)?

Thanks in advance for your advice.
RP

[aceit]

I personally use IBM TS3200 with lto7 fibrechannel drives, it is a compact library supporting up to 4 drives. I don't know other brands, but the principles are the same...

You can definitely use two or more than one drive to push data to them in parallel. A modern fibrechannel fabric wouldn't be the bottleneck...

The important part is to evaluate the whole backup flow and requirements (job design allowing parallel operations, tape usage and space wasted for parallel design, if the source can keep up, disks, backup server etc.)....

Regarding, IBM 1155 I think it is only supported in the "bigger" libraries, like ts4500... but it is proprietary... I would personally stick to LTOs, especially if you don't need that density...

[rpierce59]

Aceit - Thanks for the good information and confirming what I thought about the 1155 platform. I will be sticking with LTOs.

I forgot to mention that we are presently using Veeam 9.5 Backup and Restore. The backup target is a FreeNAS (dedupe & compress) Supermicro box (I built) with 48 x 4TB WD Red drives and 12 x 1TB Samsung 850 Pro SSD as the cache in it as our target over 2 x 10GB Chelsio teamed NIC.

The new tape system will allow us to get data off prem. How often are you moving tapes off Prem?

Do you move your data directly to the tape system via Veeam or do you use Backup Copy to move the backups to tape (or another copy vehicle)?

Thanks again for the suggestions.
RP

[pkelly_sts]

If it helps, I use 24 slot libraries both onsite & offsite. First backup to disk locally, then to tape (using Veeam backup copy to tape job). A backup copy goes off-site to our other location, then it gets copied to tape there as well. The same happens in reverse from the (smaller) remote site, so each site has disk & tape locally & disk & tape remotely. We also do a GFS Tape job at both ends so that's another set of media albeit in the same libraries.

Works well for me but I'll admit we're not talking massive daily change rates, around 60gb in each direction daily.

[rpierce59]

Thanks Pkelley_sts. What Brand of tape backup system do you use?
RP

[pkelly_sts]

We're all HP MSL SAS Libraries & have used a mix of LTO-4 & LTO-6 drives/tapes.

[aceit]

I personally, after the main backup job to disk (to an "old" IBM DS3400 repurposed to store just the backup repo), let veeam kick off the secondary backup copies to tapes. In my particular situation the tape libraries are located distant from the main production loads, inside the same building, but under ground level, mainly for long archiving and as an added layer of redundancy in respect to the disk backup. We don't "off-site" per se, given some company limits and requirements.
I use a daily backup copy to tape rotated weekly plus a GFS style pool at the end of the week.
All traffic is via fibrechannel fabric over fiber, so no impact to production ethernets or similar, basically we can load the physical backup/tape server the whole day and nobody will notice.