Tape management when backing up to AWS VTL using Veeam

[aevans@ricoh.com.au]

Hi All,

We are looking at transitioning our tape backups from physical tapes to AWS VTL however running into some design problems.
As an MSP we have customer's who pay for different tiers of tape backups, therefore I've created Silver, Gold & Platinum GFS media pools with different retention.

I've set the jobs to immediately archive the tapes when the jobs complete so as to keep our costs to a minimum.
What I'm struggling with is how to manage tape expiry, in a traditional tape backup rotation the tapes are automatically expired and made available in the pool again to be reused.
I assume when using VTL Veeam will expire the tape but the tape stays in archive in AWS, I'm sure this is by design because there is a cost associated with retrieving a VTL archived tape.

So to keep costs low I'm guessing we would need to then login to AWS locate the expired tapes and delete them. Then create new tapes and add them back into Veeam.
In order to keep our costs to a minimum this would be a manual weekly task? There is also added risk of user error in deleting the wrong tapes in AWS.

Appreciate any advice or assistance with this, interested to see how others who are using VTL are managing this particular situation.
Or is there likely to be further integration coming in new Veeam releases to help automate and simplify this?

Thanks.

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Andrew,

Have you looked into this whitepaper? https://www.veeam.com/using-aws-vtl-gat ... de_wpp.pdf

Dustin describes the process and I believe that all the information you need is in there.

[aevans@ricoh.com.au]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the quick response, yes I actually followed that white paper when setting up the POC environment.
The one thing missing from it is how to handle the expired tapes and either bring them back into the available media pool (without doing a retrieval which costs money) or delete them.

[Mike Resseler]

Hmmm. I guess that won't be that simple. I will move this thread to the tape subforum where the specialists might know a solution

[Dima P.]

Andrew,

Veeam B&R cannot handle expired media in automated fashion as likely such tape is stored in offline Amazon Virtual Shelf. What I can propose is to use VeeamOne tape expiration report to track the tape expiration (basically, you can get a list of tape media with expiration dates) and when the day comes - manually delete these media from Amazon (unless you don't need to load these tapes back to your site). Makes sense?

[aevans@ricoh.com.au]

Hi Dima,

Thanks for the response, makes sense just not ideal as I was hoping we could avoid manual steps.

Thanks.

[Dima P.]

Andrew,

Take a look at STARWIND CLOUD VTL FOR AWS AND VEEAM as possible alternative for native AWS VTL. As far as I remember this VTL can load/unload tape media from AWS automatically.