Tape Technology Remains a Viable Veeam Backup Target

I had the pleasure of attending my first VeeamOn event this week. Veeam’s annual conference provides both end users and partners with insightful information on new initiatives. Set in Chicago, this year’s event facilitates conversation on a broader level by bringing these audiences together in one location. From the moment I landed, I had a feeling that the event was going to blow me away. With 2,200 in attendance, it didn’t fail to impress.

Sessions outlined the importance of the hyper-availability of data. As Veeam describes it, the hyper-availability of data is the new standard for data in today’s enterprise – data that enables today’s “always-on” technologies to meet the business needs of our on-demand economy by bringing about new insights, increasing productivity, and optimizing delivery of new digital services. Ultimately, it is the inevitable future of business – a new intelligent data management paradigm.

Throughout the week, Veeam echoed a sentiment that has been at the core of Spectra’s nearly 40-years of data storage innovation. Specifically, that sound data storage solutions are crucial to business continuity, accelerating innovation in the enterprise and reducing risk to data, and consequently, to the organization.  In that light, Veeam Backup targets are extremely important.

Adam Congdon, Vinh Pham, and Marty Williams of Veeam
present on ‘Tips and tricks for tape support with Veeam’ to a full house.

The meetings that I attended were lively. Topics ranged from ‘Automate yourself out of a (backup) job’ to my personal favorite (and I’m slightly biased), ‘Tips and tricks for Tape support with Veeam,’ which focused on the benefits of tape as a Veeam backup target, presented by Veeam representatives. Affirming that tape technology is of critical importance, the tape session was jam-packed with every seat taken and standing room only. The team showcased the history of tape, its evolution, its rich future roadmap, and the shift to new tape drive heads and BaFE technology.

Presenters also discussed tape performance, shelf stability, resiliency, and the cost differential between tape and public cloud offerings.  In keeping with the hyper-availability theme, speakers exemplified how restoring from tape is both faster and more economical than recovering large sets of data from the public cloud, making tape an attractive Veeam backup target. Veeam’s 3-2-1-1 rule was also recommended as a data protection strategy to safeguard data against accidental deletion, purposeful deletion (ouch!), disaster, and ransomware. Tape fits perfectly into this data protection recipe as a second type of media, which can be kept offsite easily and is offline.

At the end of the session, Veeam’s speaker reflected that ‘tape isn’t going anywhere.’  I couldn’t agree more. There is a reason why this tried-and-true technology has maintained its staying power over the years.

Spectra looks forward to strengthening our valued partnership with Veeam as they step into the realm of hyper-availability and enterprise data management to better serve our mutual current and future customers as they seek reliable, economical storage for their invaluable data.

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