Reel talk: You know what's safely offline? Tape. Data protection outfit Veeam inks deal with Quantum

Magnetic strips barrier to ransomware, burble box-flingers

Data protection firm Veeam has forged an alliance with one of the oldest data protection technologies of all – tape.

Tape storage outfit Quantum and Veeam said the latter's backup software can send data to tape via a dedicated external physical server, which hosts Veeam's tape server. This physical server has to be sized, configured, procured and set up.

What Quantum has done is stick a blade server inside its Scalar i3 tape library and run Veeam's tape server on that. The resulting box is called a converged tape appliance and is available to Quantum distributors and resellers as a single line item (SKU).

The i3 has from 25 to 200 tape cartridge slots, scaled in 25-slot increments, and from from 1 to 12 tape drives. It has Capacity-on-Demand (CoD) software licensing, and compressed LTO-8 tape capacity runs from from 750TB up to 6PB.

Quantum Scalar i3 library in front of other Scalar products

The control module is a 3U enclosure and there can be up to three expansion modules, each taking up 3U. Get a datasheet here.

Quantum played the anti-ransomware card, saying that as tape cartridges are stored offline, they can therefore provide an effective barrier against ransomware and malware.

Veeam users can store backup data on Quantum's DXi deduplicating backup-to-disk arrays, which is quicker than writing to tape, but unlike stored tape cartridges, the arrays are online.

Quantum's converged tape appliances for Veeam environments are available today, beginning at $17,000 MSRP. ®