LTO9 Performance

[richard.hubbard]

We are planning to implement Veeam secondary backups to tape using an LTO9 drive attached by SAS to the Veeam Tape Server

The Veeam Tape Server has a 10Gbe link to the NAS where the .vbk files are stored. The NAS storage is a RAID 10 array of HDD

The gross storage to be backup is about 7TB at the moment

Veeam version is currently v11 with a plan to move to v12 soon.

I want to do the backup daily and ideally within a window of 10-12 hours.

Datasheet performance suggest this is possible.
Any one with experience of LTO9 drives and their real world performance when doing Veeam backups?

My other thought is to use two LTO8 drives

[david.domask]

Hi Richard, welcome to the forums.

LTO 8 and 9 should get ~360/400 MB/s respectively as their max potential speed, which should easily meet a window of 10-12 hours. Keep in mind however, that there is the read speed from the source storage and the transfer to take into account, but if you are getting fast random reads on the NAS storage (basically if restores work pretty well), I would not anticipate challenges for your backup window with either LTO 8 or 9 drives. Multiple drives may be beneficial just to have the option for multiple tape operations simultaneously and parallel processing, but LTO9 should also be quite fine.

Keep in mind that Veeam will be gated largely by environmental factors here if at all, but it's pretty common to see backups streaming to tape as fast as the tape drive can handle it. If you're seeing significant deviation from the LTO drive theoretical maximums, it's best to open a Support case at that time, Veeam Support can help you with isolating and identifying the bottleneck.