New Backup Repository

[mcvosi]

I just racked up a new JBOD enclosure with (24) 8 TB drives. What's going to give me the best performance? RAID 10? Not concerned too much about capacity as it's only a 2 week retention on this array.

TIA.

[Mike Resseler]

That is always a difficult question with no clear answer. Each RAID level has its advantages and disadvantage.
What is the plan with this enclosure? Is this primary storage and do you have a copy backup job to another location? If so, and it is allowed and possible with your SLA from the company, you can even consider RAID 0. This is not fault-tolerant, but with multiple controllers it can be very good in I/O performance. (although that means you should EXPECT a drive failure at any moment and be ready for it... So I would never do this myself)
Another example is RAID 1. Mostly good performance but you loose half of the capacity.
RAID 5 (which is barely used in newer systems) loses some of the writing performance (because of the parity calculations) but less capacity. On the other hand, a drive rebuild can be painful with 8TB drives (depending on the controllers).
RAID 6 will write parity to 2 drives which has an impact on the write performance. RAID 10 combines the advantages and disadvantages of RAID 0 and 10. You will also loose capacity there.

And what about the controller? Is it software or hardware because that will make a difference also.

But, generally speaking, you will see that mostly RAID 10 will be advised as a good mix for disk speed and safety.
PS: Rick from the Product Strategy team has written a blog post on it: https://www.veeam.com/blog/vmware-backu ... tices.html

Hope it helps a bit
Mike

[mcvosi]

Thx for the response, Mike. The intended use for this is primary backup storage, but Backup Copy jobs run in parallel onto a Data Domain for archival purposes. So, with that said, I guess speed would be the most important factor. The controller is an LSI 12 Gb SAS3.

[nmdange]

With 24 drives or more, I would typically do RAID 60, but if you can meet your capacity needs with RAID 10, then that will be the best performance. Just keep in mind future growth!

Also with your RAID controller, you really want to ensure you have a battery-backed write cache. Some lower end LSI cards don't have any cache, and write performance isn't going to be great without it.