Veeam has announced another killer feature for their upcoming product – Veeam Backup & Replication 7. The feature is called Backup to Tape. This was one of the major feature which was missing, compared to traditional backup products for physical environments. As devices, all tape devices (Tape Libraries, Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL), or Standalone Drives) which normally appear in the device manager, will be available for backup or archive.
As for now Veeam has announced the following upcoming features for the version 7 of their backup product:
- vCloud Director Support
- vSphere Web Client Plugin
- Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Sharepoint
- Virtual Lab for Hyper-V
- Archive to Tape
Number of my clients was asking for the possibility to have backup to tape, since most of them are coming from full physical environment so they were use to such a feature in the past. Also, number of IT shops do prerequisite tapes as one of the options, before starts consulting offers for backup/DR solutions. Yes, we're in 2013, tapes are slow, not as reliable as disks or NAS devices, but they're easy transportable and can be put into a remote location, or in a bank locker.
How it will work? What's the possibilities?
IT admin will have a possibility, in addition to the traditional disk destination, to to archive directly to tape, and also restore directly from tape. Two backup job types will be available concerning backing up to tape devices (individual tape drives, tape libraries or virtual tape libraries – VTL):
- Backup to tape – archiving Veeam Backups, or archive part (or entire) repository to tape. Multiple jobs can be directed to a single archive on tape.
- Files to tape – backup specific files from Windows or Linux server. Files opened by an application are backed up by using Microsoft VSS mechanism.
Veeam 7 – Restore Operations
- Restore backup from tape – restore back to a repository with automatic import. Possibility of tracking VMs and restore points. Basically you'll choose a VM to restore > pick a restore point > and Veeam does the work…..
- Restore file from tape – restore individual files from tape to the original location, or to another VM. The restore files will be also present in the Veeam Backup Free Edition.
Here is an official video from Veeam showing the feature:
Source: YouTube
