LTO 6 tape drive recommendation

[flesz]

I am planing on upgrading current Veeam 7 to v8 and also changing old LTO 3 tape drive to LTO 6

At the moment I am using backup exec to backup to tape, but I want to get LTO 6 tape drive and use it with Veeam 8.

Could someone recommend a compatible LTO 6 tape drive (rack mountable, >6 slots) which definitely works with Veeam 8 under Win 2008 R2 ?
I know there is unofficial compatibility list, but maybe someone is using LTO 6 at the moment in a similar setup

Thanks

[Dima P.]

Hello,

Just a quick note. Any library should work if it has windows singed drivers available, as currently VBR does not support Unknown Medium Changer default driver. As for models you can stick to unofficial compatibility list for sure as most of these libraries were tested by our engineers.

[nunciate]

I use a Quantum i80 tape library with 4 LTO6 drives in it. You can have up to 5 drives only with this library.
The drives are fiber attached and I get pretty fast tape out from my Veeam physical backup server.

[Dima P.]

Alan,
I wonder what is your current tape writing speed with improved performance in v8?

[mfo]

We use a Quantum SuperLoader 3 with a LTO5 Drive. This has 8 or 16 Slots depending on how much magazines you put in (1 or 2). It's also available with a LTO6 Drive.
As the Library Driver is the same for the LTO5 and LTO6 version, you should have no problem running this library with veeam.
Performance with the SAS connection is arround 100Mbytes/s in out setup.

[Dima P.]

Christoph,
Thank you for posting your results, we will continue to improve our existing tape service in the next versions!

[nunciate]

I have seen speeds as fast as 160MB/s. Most of my speed issues are related to my storage not my drives.
I backup to Raid-5 and Raid-6 arrays (currently converting disks to Raid-6. A typical array is made up of 12x 2Tb 7200 RPM drives using 1 as a hot spare.
I use Windows 2012 R2 deduplication which can also slow your reverse incremental and tape out performance.
I am also converting all of my backups to a weekly active full with forward incremental. You have to be careful with your space on these jobs. 2012 Dedupe takes care of most of the duplicate data from the multiple full backup files that are created but it needs time to clean them up. So I do my active full, tape out before deduplication can do its thing and then let deduplication free up space before the next weeks full. Works pretty well.

Here is an example of one of my arrays.
Raid-6 Array on 12x 1Tb 7200RPM disks. 1 hot spare so the array comes out to about 8Tb of usable space.
So the drive shows around 8Tb of space but properties on the folders in the drive say they are 23Tb. That is a considerable reduction in space because of deduplicaiton.
All backups on the drive are using weekly active fulls with forward daily incremental. I am keeping 28 restore points on each job.
Tape out is pretty fast at 160MB/s. I am using a 4Gb FC Switch but the drives are actually locked at 2Gb because I have seen backup failures at faster speeds.