Month End Tape Backup Configuration

[cmchandler]

First, if this has been answered, I apologize. It's my first post.
If someone has a link to what I'm looking for I would appreciate it.

My request is pretty simple really. I am not sure exactly how I should configure my backup job, so I'm looking for input.

Vmware, run veeam backup to an Exagrid, which is a high speed landing device, which later dedupes the data at about a 7:1 ratio.
Those jobs run daily and we run synthetics every 2 weeks, and a regular full once a month, with I believe 14 restore points.

I need to dump a full backup to tape each month. But for some reason, the jobs are extremely slow and they take about 4 days to complete. It's not a networking issue. I believe the problem is to run a full backup from a previous job, it pulls the job from the Exagrid and then moves it to our tape server for backup.

I think the problem is because it has to rehydrate the data before sending it off to the tape server, and that's the bottleneck.

Regardless, my goal is to find a quicker way to have a month end backup to tapes (it's a library).

One option would be to tell the tape backup job to run whenever there's new data on the Exagrid from the veeam daily backups.
But I'm not sure how that would work or if that's the right approach.

Also, why does it seem that I cannot just have the tape backup job run it from a Nimble snapshot instead of a job already processed?

Any reading, links or general poo flinging are welcomed.

[csydas]

Hey Chris,

Dedupe is absolutely the issue here, doubly so if it's making the Tape Virtual Synthetic Fulls that Veeam does. This is a "semi-synthetic full", in so much that (as I know) it's not really doing full writes, but it can have a performance impact on tape.

Ideally, you want to catch the Full backups before they hit the dedupe zone on your Exagrid, which means schedule your tape jobs to run very close to when your source jobs produce a full backup.