4 hour RTO on large file server with eight disks

[wanderson]

Hello!

I have this massive dumb file server with eight disks that total around 20TB. I recently moved off of my old storage that was doing SAN to SAN replication to newer storage, but don't have a SAN to replicate to on the other end anymore. I am trying to work with the Veeam Agent for a Windows File server to keep that four hour RTO in place. It seems like it's taking a few hours to do the backups even with the Agent driver installed. I have them cut up into individual jobs per disk.

I am sending the data straight to Azure's immutable storage, and I don't really think that's the bottleneck for this because the time spent, from what I can tell, is processing the host.

Now I am sitting on a Dell PowerStore that has the ability to talk to storage, but I can't really figure out if there is an ability to move those snapshots somewhere else or if it's simply to manage snapshots.

Any ideas on this?

Thanks!

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

I moved your question to the Veeam Agent for Windows forum, because it looks like you are using that (and not NAS backup which would be the "file shares" subforum).

It seems like it's taking a few hours to do the backups even with the Agent driver installed. I have them cut up into individual jobs per disk.

Veeam Agent for Windows has parallel processing per disk built-in. If you create one job per disk, then the 8 jobs would run sequential and increase overall backup time. I assume, that also RPO is 4h. So let's go for 1% change rate. That would be 200GB in 4h to back up. That is less than 125Mbit/s backup speed on average. That should be doable.

For the agent: if your backup takes longer than 4h, please open a support case and post the case number for reference. That sounds "too long" for me.

For RTO, the main question is how you want / need to restore. If you have an option for instant recovery to vSphere / Hyper-V, then this should be fine (that would take minutes vs. 4h). For a real restore of 20TB in 4h, you need more than 11Gbit/s on average. With the Veeam Agent for Windows, that would be block-based restore.

If you switch from Veeam Agent for Windows to NAS backup, then you could also do Instant SMB share recovery within minutes (vs 4h). The migration to production would be file-based.

Best regards,
Hannes