tape drive suggestion

[ytpcs]

we're exploring to move away from BE (on w2008) to Veeam however the hardware that we use is not working on new physical W2016 with VBR installed.
Tape drive is IBM Ultrium 3 HH attached to ISCSI LSI U320. I've tried different drivers for drive and controller card and OS shows them installed but Veeam sees the tape but no media inserted.
or when it does (with other drivers) it comes back with I/O error during backup job.

This device is fairly old and would like the community to suggest a out of the box working standalone single drive. We'll be using either w10 or w2016 with Veeam.
Unless anyone has this particular setup working with Veeam. I opened the case but didn't hear anything yet from support. We're in the trail period of VBR.

is there anything usb 3.0 out there ? ofc we're open to sas/scsi setups as well.

Thanks in advance

[nitramd]

Hello ytpcs.

I'd suggest looking at the IBM 3200 Tape Library series. Veeam works well with this TL.

Since the product is IBM it'll be expensive. I've found, however, that it's a reliable product with few hiccups.

Good luck.

[ytpcs]

thanks for the suggestion nitramd. we do daily full (fits on 1 tape) stored offsite changed manually. we'll look into your suggestion although a standalone drive is preferred.

[JPMS]

I suspect you should be good with any SAS based tape drive but we have used Quantum single tape drives (LTO-4 to LTO-8) without any issues.

Their warranty process is comparatively painless and (unlike HP) you don't need a maintenance contract to download firmware updates! I don't know where HP got that idea from but we haven't bought a single piece of HP kit since they came up with this ridiculous policy. <rant off>

I suspect your issues are probably driver based as SCSI has been dead for some time now and I can't imagine any drivers for 2016 have had any active work done on them for a long time. I'm actually a little surprised you can get SCSI drivers for 2016! All tape drives have been SAS based for quite a while. I'm not sure about USB3 but I think I read somewhere here that Veeam don't support it. Not sure about that but maybe someone more knowledgable will jump in.

[RobTurk]

@ytpcs Do you know if you still need access to the data on your LTO-3 tapes? If so, then LTO-5 is the highest you can use. Newer drives do not support reading dfata from LTO-3 tapes.

[ytpcs]

@JPMS Yeah with SCSI card and IBM Ultrium 3 HH we couldn't get it to work. Veeam was doing some strange things. Once we switched to SAS card with same model drive everything works. We'll look into Quantum drives as we look to move to LTO-6.

@RobTurk We'll move up to LTO-6 and start with fresh batch of tapes. We'll keep the old drive if we ever need to access the old data. Thanks for pointing out the backward compatibility.