ATTO + Veeam: Modern Tape Backup for Hyperconverged Infrastructures
Organizations running hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) often struggle to integrate tape into tightly integrated, disk‑centric environments without adding silos, complexity, or cost. ATTO XstreamCORE 8100T and Veeam Backup & Replication together deliver a simple way to extend SAS tape libraries over Ethernet, enabling secure, air‑gapped backups directly from your virtual environment.
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Consolidate tape backups across HCI clusters without adding dedicated physical backup servers.
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Leverage Veeam’s native tape support with no changes to existing backup jobs or policies.
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Strengthen cyber‑resilience with offline, long‑term retention on LTO tape libraries.
Challenges in Modern HCI Environments
Organizations adopting HCI face a consistent set of backup and data protection challenges that this solution is designed to address:
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Disk‑only backup exposure
Many HCI platforms are optimized for disk, leaving organizations heavily reliant on online storage and more vulnerable to ransomware and other cyber threats. -
No straightforward tape connectivity
Pre‑configured HCI appliances rarely offer native, supported ways to attach tape libraries, forcing IT to consider separate backup islands or custom hardware integrations. -
Silos outside the hyperconverged stack
Traditional tape deployments often sit outside the consolidated environment, creating isolated compute and storage silos that add management overhead and complicate operations. -
Limited in‑house integration expertise
Designing and maintaining custom tape connectivity over the network can be complex, time‑consuming, and budget‑prohibitive for many IT teams. -
Regulatory and long‑term retention pressure
Organizations must retain data longer and prove its integrity, yet keeping everything on primary disk is too expensive and operationally inefficient.
How the ATTO + Veeam Solution Addresses These Challenges
1. Enable tape in HCI without adding silos
ATTO XstreamCORE 8100T virtualizes SAS tape drives over 10GbE iSCSI, allowing HCI nodes to access LTO libraries directly over the existing Ethernet fabric. Veeam Backup & Replication simply “sees” these drives as standard SAS‑attached tape devices, so tape can be fully integrated into the hyperconverged environment instead of stranded on separate hardware.
2. Reduce ransomware risk with air‑gapped copies
By introducing tape as an offline tier, you can align with 3‑2‑1 best practices and maintain at least one physically separated copy of critical data. This protects against ransomware, accidental deletion, and logical corruption in a way that disk‑only architectures cannot.
3. Eliminate dedicated physical tape servers
A VM within the HCI cluster can assume the Veeam tape server role, orchestrating backup, copy, and restore workflows end‑to‑end. This removes the need for separate physical backup servers, reduces hardware sprawl, and simplifies lifecycle management.
4. Simplify operations with centralized management
Because Veeam manages both disk and tape from the same interface, IT teams can apply consistent backup policies, schedules, and reporting across all tiers. Tape becomes just another target within Veeam, rather than a separate environment with its own tools and processes.
5. Control costs for long‑term retention
LTO tape offers very high capacity and low power consumption, making it an ideal medium for archives, compliance copies, and infrequently accessed datasets. Offloading this data from primary storage to tape helps control capacity growth, licensing, and energy costs across the HCI environment.