Feature Request: Mechanism to trigger long erase on VTL

[SyNtAxx]

All,

I came across an idea (if it doesn't already exist) that may be helpful to those that have Deduplicating devices and present them to be used as VTL in certain cases like I do. What I found was I had hundreds of VTL tapes each 1tb in size backed buy an HPE StoreOnce 6500 which is deduplicating. When the tapes are full....and protected for the requisite time period and then expire, Veeam sees them as ready to use, however the data on the backend on the StoreOnce in my case is not purged from the array in my observation. I ended up with hundreds of TBs of data that needs to undergo housekeeping and catalyst store compaction operations to reclaim the actual disk space. I was able to trigger this manually by selecting the VTL media and initiating a long erase. The backend operation will take a very long time to complete as the SO array is very active. I think having an option to automatically trigger a 'long erase' on the VTL media up expiry of the VTL tape would go a long way in allowing the backend cleanup to be automated and occur in a way that wont overwhelm the array with clean up duty. Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Nick

[HannesK]

Hello,
sounds like you combined the worst from both worlds. Complicated to use and slow restore.

Any thoughts?

switch to catalyst. That's why the integration exists

Did you think about the Erase-VBRTapeMedium https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=100 command?

Best regards,
Hannes

[soncscy]

Out of curiosity, why "erase" a vcart? The whole benefit of VTLs is you're not bound by the same restrictions of physical mediums, so just set up a cron-job to delete expired tapes after the same protection period in Veeam. As I get it, the backend storage once the data is marked as free for overwrite should either clean it in garbage collection or at least flag the space as available to use.

But the Long Erase option seems like it's just an unnecessary overhead for VTLs

[Dima P.]

Harvey is right. You need to delete the emulated media as a file and then start garbage collection procedure, once done the used blocks should be marked as free and reused to store new data.