Tape Servers - Limits & Expansion - Service Providers when do you expand?

Don’t have much input and am mostly here to see the responses.  I only have 2 clients under rental licensing but we’re backing them up to local NAS storage on their premise and not back to us, with one of them copying to Iland/11:11 VCC. 

I can tell you that in my old environment (not Veeam), using a Quest NetVault cluster that was backing up to a Nexsan (guessing SATABeast with expansion units) as a temporary landing location, and then would offload to a fiber channel tape library that had had something like 12 LTO drives, I think LTO 5 and LTO 6….maybe 4 and 5 - hard to remember for sure.  I had probably…60ish clients on it.  That was probably…8 or 9 years ago that we transitioned from tape over to EMC Avamar and DataDomain’s.  I’m not sure if that’s helpful at all or not…it’s an apples to bok choy comparison, but it might lend some help?  

Any input helps.  Thanks Derek.

We are using often tape-drives and loaders for customers but not for our VCC-environment.

I think it really depends on how many running concurrent jobs and how frequently you want them to copy to tape? Is there a daily change?

Not yet considered using veeam ready immutable object storage appliances @Chris.Childerhose ?

For a situation as a VCC environment, it’s lot less administration and manual operation...

For this service there isn't a need for immutability as it lands on disk and goes straight to tape.