Planning a Tape Infrastructure

[ar952]

So basically I am a tape newbie
I am not new to Veeam in general and I am using the products for some time now but I did not yet implement anything with tape.

Now I have to implement a tape infrastructure.
Normally I am working with SOBR and S3 storage.
I already took a look at the documentation and it is kind of overwhelming at first.

I would like to buy the required hardware to test everything in a lab environment first.
Therefor I have to get the sizing right.
I thought about a tape loader which is sufficient for one tape and the tape is switched daily.
So I have to store a full backup on every tape, right?
Is this a recommended approach in general?

How fast do you typically write to a modern tape?
And how do I calculate the amount of storage - based on compressed or uncompressed capacity?

We got an infrastructure consisting of one Hyper-V host (which is also the B&R server) hosting some Windows Server VMs and some Linux/Windows Agents deployed via B&R.
One full backup of all resources is approx. 8 TB right now.

Thank you very much for your thoughts

[Mildur]

Hi ar952

Welcome to the forum.
If you want to try out our Tape features before buying hardware, I can only recommend using a VTL first in your lab. It will allow you to get familiar on how our tape jobs are working.
One of the VTLs is quadstore: https://quadstor.com/
https://jorgedelacruz.uk/2018/10/16/vee ... to-deploy/

I thought about a tape loader which is sufficient for one tape and the tape is switched daily.
So I have to store a full backup on every tape, right? Is this a recommended approach in general?

Daily Fulls to tape doesn't work in all cases. I suggest using a GFS media Pool with weekly and daily incremental.

How fast do you typically write to a modern tape?

It depends on different factors. LTO version, source repository, how the tape is connected to the tape server.

And how do I calculate the amount of storage - based on compressed or uncompressed capacity?

Veeam backup files are already compressed. There won't be any tape compression for this file.
You need to do your calculation on the uncompressed capacity. In your case you would need LTO8 (12TB), if you want to have a single tape to contain a single full backup of all resources.

one Hyper-V host (which is also the B&R server)

The VBR server should be in a VM. Installing on the HyperV host may not be supported in case you face issues:
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110

Thanks
Fabian

[ar952]

Hi Fabian,

thank you for your response

If you want to try out our Tape features before buying hardware, I can only recommend using a VTL first in your lab.

That sounds great, I will look into it.

It depends on different factors. LTO version, source repository, how the tape is connected to the tape server.

We would connect the tape loader (LTO9) via iSCSI to the mentioned host.
The source repository is a NAS device which delivers approx. 500 MB/s read performance to the host.

Daily Fulls to tape doesn't work in all cases. I suggest using a GFS media Pool with weekly and daily incremental.

When it does work (assumed a full can be written through one day), I got the option that the responsible person for switching tapes is always able to take the last backup home on a daily basis to be able to recover it in case of disaster on the production site, right?

The VBR server should be in a VM. Installing on the HyperV host may not be supported in case you face issues:

It worked fine for backup and recovery so far, but I will look into it

[Mildur]

LTO 9 theoretical max speed is 400MB/s. But your speed will be lower than that.
I don't have any values to share. Maybe other users in the community can share their experiences.

When it does work (assumed a full can be written through one day), I got the option that the responsible person for switching tapes is always able to take the last backup home on a daily basis to be able to recover it in case of disaster on the production site, right?

If you use forward incremental backup chain with regular full backups, you won't be able to write daily full backups to tape. You would need to enable daily synthetics full backups, which then can be written to tape.
If you have forever incremental backup chains, you can configure daily virtual fulls in your media pool (only regular media pools) settings.

Best,
Fabian

[bct44]

For LTO9:
Performance test with compression enabled with IBM tool around 400+MB/s
Backup to Tape Jobs with veeam on a single drive around 350/400MB/s