New backup design - object storage pros/cons

[rasmusan]

Hi,

I am currently architecting a refresh for a Veeam backup design, due to hardware age and maintenance. Current involves backing up the following:


- ~600 Hyper-V VMs (~300TB and growing) - on-host proxy only

- SQL backup of some massive DBs (50TB+ and growing) - native SQL backup (due to demand from DB admins) - retention via Veeam Agent backups og SQL native backups.

- multiple virtual MSCS file clusters (VAWS)

- multiple physical servers (VAWS)


Current design is as follows:

- 2 sites

- storage server on each site (local disks RAID-60 - ReFS filesystem) (VMs)

- primary backup to first site - copy to other site (VMs)

- long term VM backup retention on Dedupe appliance on each site

- SQL backup (native) to a dedicated storage server on each site - (VAWS for longer term retention on same desicated server)



For new design following requirements, beside existing, have been introduced:


- Openshift/Docker platform instances (onprem)

- Immutable backups

- support for backup of Azure VMs

- backing up M365 data (~65TB and growing)



Now we want to get rid of dedupe appliances due to speed, cost etc. If possible.
Storage servers for SQL remain as is as of now, as these are fairly new.

For everything else we would like to simplify and consolidate for backup Storage as much as possible - of course backup of cloud workloads Will land on some cloud Storage.
But for all onprem, we are evaluering whether object storage could be a good fit, to accomodate for easier growth (scalability), consolidate storage platform etc.

I know this is not complete info, but hope enough to give idea of requirements

Any thougths on the above?

[HannesK]

Hello,
if speed and costs are the main driver, then a (few) high density servers with with XFS are unbeatable from a price / value perspective. That would work for everything except Veeam Backup for M365 which runs best on object storage.

With object storage, you can use the database plugins with capacity tier (not in backup copy jobs). That needs to be considered during design.

For object storage itself: you need to find a vendor that goes through the details and then size it accordingly, that would be an option. I just don't see whether the amount of data you have is big enough that object storage "pays off".

As I have Linux background, I would probably install Minio on a Linux server instead of going for pre-configured object storage appliances. As second alternative I would try to get a "single-box object storage" only for VB365 and have Linux repositories for the rest in parallel. Please keep in mind, that this is my personal preference and not a general advice, because giving advice on object storage is pretty complex because of the various design options.

Best regards,
Hannes