Using a NFS Share as a backup target?

[sfaits]

We are exploring using NFS shares as a veeam backup target and were wondering what others have experienced with this?
Storage is a Dell EMC Isilon.
I know we lose the fast cloning of our current linux (xfs) repos but other than that I am not clear on the downsides.

Thank you.

[soncscy]

Heya sfaits,

I'm not sure if Isilon can present as iscsi, but iscsi is always preferable to network shares. Most vendors do some very "interesting" things with their implementations of NFS/SMB, and of course iscsi as well. The idea though is that if you're going to be getting a weird implementation anyways, might as well go with the fast/weird one.

The biggest thing about Isilons is performance and file size; if I remember right, the default OneFS has a 4 TiB file size limit; you can adjust the backing storage on the Isilon to raise the limit to 16 TiB via the OneFS CLI. Even then though, for most of my clients that use Isilons, the performance was always quite poor.

However you present it (iscsi/smb/nfs), make sure the Repository Server/Gateway are "close" to the Isilon itself (no network jumps and preferably no hops between), ensure you've got a fast NIC for both the repository server/gateway server => Isilon, and remember to consider the Isilon file size limits.

Frankly speaking, I already steer clients away from trying to use their Isilon units unless there is truly no other option. Isilons are trying to do something else besides being high performance backup storage, and they handle being a general purpose file storage pretty fine. But I wouldn't go deep into Isilon as a production environment backup target. I know we have some clients handling their backups on Isilon(s) exclusively, but they have pretty specific workloads and DR scenarios they've optimized for via SLA, not from a technical perspective.

[PetrM]

Hello,

One more huge argument for Linux repository is the Immutability feature that enables protection against malware activity or unplanned manual actions.

Thanks!