Thunderbolt 3 support for tape drives

[cip2013]

Hello fellow Veeamsters,

Does anyone know if Veeam is planning on supporting Thunderbolt connected LTO tape drives/libraries in the near future? With 40Gb/s transfer rate and up to 30TB on a single LTO8 tape it's a pretty compelling option for air gapping backups and long term archival storage.

[ejenner]

I think the issue is going to be write performance to the tape. There's only so much throughput a mechanical device like that can deal with and it's way way way short of 40Gb/s

[cip2013]

I understand. That makes sense. No sense in investing in the technology if the Thunderbolt throughput is 6 times what LTO-8 is. What about USB 3.0? Just trying to find an easy way to get a tape drive installed at a remote site without having to open the server to install a SAS card.

[Dima P.]

Hi folks,

From the top of my head we should not have any issues with such device (unless it's being incorrectly detected by Windows device manager), but I've asked QA folks to double check the specs, stay tuned!

[ejenner]

I think it's just the case that if it can be detected by Windows and the Windows tape driver works then it'll most likely work in Veeam as well.

[JPMS]

With 40Gb/s transfer rate and up to 30TB on a single LTO8 tape it's a pretty compelling option for air gapping backups and long term archival storage.

Tape is an excellent way of providing air gap backups (and off-site storage too) but I sense you may be new to using tape for backup so as well as speed expectations (a half-height LTO-8 max speed is 300MB/s) I would point out that you will never get close to 30TB on a tape. This is some magical maximum that tape drive manufacturers come up with for highly compressible data. I've been using tape technology for decades and the best compression I have ever seen is about 1.4x (which in this case would equate to under 17TB. Furthermore, you are probably already compressing your B&R backups so you won't see any further compression when you save those files to tape; in other words, you will only be able to save 12TB of backup files to an LTO-8 tape.

[Dima P.]

Windows tape driver works then it'll most likely work in Veeam as well

Absolutely correct!

Furthermore, you are probably already compressing your B&R backups so you won't see any further compression when you save those files to tape; in other words, you will only be able to save 12TB of backup files to an LTO-8 tape.

That is also true, can confirm that native tape compression will give almost zero impact on space consumption in case of backup to tape jobs with compressed backup files being set as a source. However, that could be a great benefit in case of file to tape jobs. Cheers!