File share NAS Backup sizing

[vmtech123]

What are the largest servers you guys are seeing / using for NAS backup?

I have very large file servers. 20-40TB. They are going to be an issue for a file restore when I have to pull from a tape to get a small word file from a few months prior.

Is NAS backup a solution that works with 10's of millions or 100's of millions of files and 100's of TB's of data?

As someone who has enterprise sockets on everything we pay a fair amount and it's disappointing this isn't included.
even if we go to VUL it's probably not feasible for us to go this route do to the cost.

My main problem is we have minimal storage on our Veaam SANs to be storing these monster VM's.
We back up to Tape at the locations, but restores are slow. Restoring a full VM to a temporary location to do a file level recovery is not ideal.

I have split our servers in to MANY file servers, but now this effects the cost. Going to take up more VULS, and other applications license per host in many cases.

I have tried to get people to classify and remove data, but it is next to impossible.

[rennerstefan]

Hi,
if I get it right your question is what sizes of NAS source we see in the field and if it scales?
I had customers with 300+TB NAS data backing it up with our NAS backup engine and of course it scales to such large file servers.
At the end it’s, like with every solution, about creating the right design and concept before implementing.
That consists out our the file structure, the change rates as well as the expectations in terms of RTO and RPO. With all of those infos you can build a concept and then also a sizing of the veeam components as well as the target(s).

Thanks

[vmtech123]

Thanks.

I was told a few years ago that NAS backup was not really ideal if I wanted to back up 10's or 100's of millions of files and that using VM based backups would be better.

However, the price of backup on 6 50TB VM's does cost me nothing extra with my enterprise socket licensing. 300TB of NAS backup would not be in our budget.

Is NAS backup to TAPE an option? or NAS backup to disk to tape?

[rennerstefan]

Well I would say NAS backup only exists for some time now. Maybe back that time they were talking about "File to Tape" Backup, which indeed is not optimal for your case.
The regular NAS Backup is good for that size.

To the licensing question, I think it is more about if you need the benefits in terms of backup and recovery we have with NAS backup over the VM level approach. Both are possible options.

NAS Backup to Tape is not available today (as said "File to Tape" is not an option in my eyes).

[vmtech123]

I just added a 1TB share using NAS backup and it works fantastic. Quick to browse, easy to restore a file, version control without having to do a full VM backup.

I do have a few questions.

1- There is no way to export these jobs to tape at this time correct? Will that be a future option? perhaps being allowed to backup previous versions of a file to tape? That would keep the backups from getting huge and old versions could be kept. Or the whole thing would even work for me.

2- In addition to file to tape backup jobs, I am talking about lets say 250 TB and tens or hundreds of millions of files. Not a little NAS. These are all monster windows file servers.

3- Thinking a restore in a critical situation, for a restore it is probably best to have a full VM backup on hand. Would you recommend a regular backup AND the NAS backup on a fileserver? I could back up just the system disk in a regular job, but it would still be a difficult task to restore all of the shares on multiple file servers this way rather than just restoring the full VM"s.

With our large file servers, we export to tape with regular Veaam jobs to prevent our backup SANS from getting full. (also for ransomware etc.) It's the only way we can have extremely long term retention. The issue is users not realizing something is deleted for months, or was modified months ago and asking for a restore. Restoring a 25 TB VM to a repo, to get a word document is not ideal. NAS backup solves this, but a full restore is also important in a crit sit.