Advice on HD's

[mythumbsclick]

Hi Guys

Bit of a general hardware question. I currently have a Synology DS1513+ RAID5 NAS as my backup repos via ISCSI target attached directly to a Veeam VM. This works fine but is slow and RAID 5 is far from ideal. I have a spare R720xd that I am going to use as a physical Veeam backup server instead and have seen a few other people here using 720's or the newer 730's so I think I am on the right track. My question is in order to save costs I was going to use existing Toshiba Nearline SAS 2TB disks. The chassis is x12 3.5 so in a RAID 10 I would get a max of 12TB usable. Considering I have probably just over 1TB of data over all VMs I was going to do 30 day incrementals on all VMs and then 11 months of GFS Backup copy jobs to the same location aiming to get a years worth of monthly backups. I think I am going to need more breathing space than 12TB usable space so I am thinking of purchasing 12x 4TB WD reds. As the physical server will only be running Veeam backups. Will consumer grade disks be ok? In a RAID 10 I will have 24TB and allot more room for manoeuvre. Will 12 x 4TB WD Red (5400 rpm) in a RAID 10 give enough IOPS for decent Veeam speeds as well as drive longevity/life span? Also, Will Windows (Server 2012R2) recognise 24TB volume ok?

Any input would be massively appreciated.
Thanks

[dellock6]

Hi,
here are some answers:
- in general, i would not keep backup copy jobs into the same storage used for primary backup jobs, for two reasons. First, if you loose that storage, you have lost both the copies. Second, IOPS during the backup copy jobs will be a lot, since you are reading data from backup files and writing them to the backup copy jobs. It can be completed, but depending on the load it could be a problem for IO activity. And this relates to the second Q
- sometimes differences between consumer grade and enterprise grade disks are less that one would think. I would look to real statistics. Backblaze is a huge cloud storage providers and they regularly publish reliability stats. Last ones are here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-dri ... r-q2-2015/. Look for both brands and different models, as seems even in the same brands there are pretty big differences. In general, NAS-grade are a better choice
- the technical limit of NTFS over GPT partitions is 256TB, but has been tested by Microsoft up to 16TB over 4k cluster size. you should be fine, also because in order to have both backups and backup copy jobs you will probably end up with 2 different partitions I suppose

Luca

[PTide]

Hi,

I think I am going to need more breathing space than 12TB usable space so I am thinking of purchasing 12x 4TB WD reds

Yes, you are. All in all you'll need 11TB for .VBKs + some space for your meta (if local target then 175MB per each TB of your backup chain) + some space for 30 incrementals. That looks like slightly bigger than 12 TB.

Will consumer grade disks be ok? In a RAID 10 I will have 24TB and allot more room for manoeuvre. Will 12 x 4TB WD Red (5400 rpm) in a RAID 10 give enough IOPS for decent Veeam speeds as well as drive longevity/life span?

Please check where does the bottleneck occur when using your current configuration. If it's a storage then you definitely should not place slower disk in your repo box. The topic of performance for various tasks is complex and it's hard to see everything from here. I believe these three articles can help you to find the most balanced configuration:

Understanding the Impact of IOPS on Backup Performance
Veeam backup methods and the impact on destination storage I/O
How to use DiskSpd to simulate Veeam Backup & Replication disk actions

Also, Will Windows (Server 2012R2) recognise 24TB volume ok?

Yes, it will.

Thank you.