Backup Storage Appliance (Exagrid, Cloudian, Fujitsu, InfiniGuard, Quantum) Experience

[tiger1444]

Hello All!

We're looking for an enterprise backup storage appliance that will dedupe, encrypt, support immutable storage, and replicate data to off-site (DR) location. At the same time we're looking at enterprise backup solution: Veeam, CommVault, Veritas Netbackup latest version 10.2, and Rubrik

For backup storage we looked at:

ExaGrid https://www.exagrid.com/

and Exagrid Competitors:

Cloudian
https://cloudian.com/products/hyperstore/

Fujitsu Storage ETERNUS CS800 M1
https://www.fujitsu.com/global/products ... ndex3.html

InfiniGuard Infinidat

https://www.infinidat.com/en/products-t ... nfiniguard

Quantum DXi

https://www.quantum.com/en/products/backup-appliances/

NetBackup Access 3350

https://www.veritas.com/content/dam/www ... _V1554.pdf

Does anyone have experience with the above storage appliances?

If yes which backup software do you have the storage appliance working with?

Wanted to know which storage appliance you are happy with.

Thanks in advance.

[HannesK]

Hello,
without telling anyone how much data you want to store (amount of source data + retention you plan (days, weeks, months...)), I guess the feedback you will get is more or less unusable. It does not really help to get feedback for example from a 100TB customer if you try to store 10PB.

The feedback below is something I hear from customers of different sizes
- Exagrid: the feedback from customers is good.
- Cloudian works if it was sized for Veeam workload. Correct sizing is important. Make sure, that Cloudian knows that the system should be used for Veeam
- Fujitsu and Infiniguard are OEMs of Quantum. They should all behave the same.
- Using the NetBackup appliance with Veeam sounds like wasted money. Technically it might even work with NFS / SMB if you do active full backups. But I would avoid that. I have zero feedback on Veeam + NetaBackup appliance.

Wanted to know which storage appliance you are happy with.

the highest happiness factor are HPE Apollo / Cisco 3260 / any other high density servers with Hardened Repository on XFS (XFS doing the deduplication). Some partners sell them as pre-configured appliances depending where you are located. These systems are unbeatable at price / performance ratio and scale endless because you get more compute, storage and network with every node you add (in 400-800 TB steps native usable capacity).

The main question is, why you want to use an appliance. Setting up a DISA STIG hardened system is documented in the user guide and there is also a series of blog posst that guides you step by step. I would save the money on appliances and go for dumb & fast servers with internal disks and Hardened Repository.

Best regards,
Hannes

[tiger1444]

Hello,
without telling anyone how much data you want to store (amount of source data + retention you plan (days, weeks, months...)), I guess the feedback you will get is more or less unusable. It does not really help to get feedback for example from a 100TB customer if you try to store 10PB.

To start I asked a simple question wanting to know if anyone has experience with the backup storage appliance name brands I mentioned. If someone had that experience and responded I would've continued the conversation and get into more details of how much data we're planning to store.

- Using the NetBackup appliance with Veeam sounds like wasted money. Technically it might even work with NFS / SMB if you do active full backups. But I would avoid that. I have zero feedback on Veeam + NetaBackup appliance.

I know Netbackup appliance works well with Veritas NetBackup and likely not with Veeam/Rubrik/CommVault. NetBackup Appliance storage feedback question can be disregarded, it’s best I ask that in a Veritas forum.

XFS (XFS doing the deduplication)

I never knew a file system "XFS" does deduplication itself

The main question is, why you want to use an appliance.

Reasons why I want a backup appliance is already mentioned in the beginning of question I asked.

I would save the money on appliances and go for dumb & fast servers with internal disks and Hardened Repository.

I don't agree with you on using dumb & fast servers. Period. Like I mentioned earlier if someone has experience with backup storage appliances name brands I mentioned earlier I'll continue to have a conversation with that person.

[HannesK]

Hello,

I never knew a file system "XFS" does deduplication itself

Veeam uses block cloning on XFS and REFS. That allows spaceless full backups (the blog post is for REFS on Windows and it works the same for XFS on Linux). Here a customer posted some of the results

Reasons why I want a backup appliance is already mentioned in the beginning of question I asked.

what I try to say is: an appliance is optional from Veeam side to achieve what you ask for in the first sentence. If your company has no Linux knowledge, and does not want a partner to manage that part, then an appliance can still make sense (that's why Veeam integrates with so many hardware vendors).

I don't agree with you on using dumb & fast servers. Period

we can agree to disagree. I just told you the way how to scale Veeam cost efficient with highest performance.

Like I mentioned earlier if someone has experience with backup storage appliances name brands I mentioned earlier I'll continue to have a conversation with that person.

sure, my experience is only second hand (customers tell me how they like the products). If sized right, they work. Inline dedupe appliances have a drawback at restores (all the Quantum OEMs or any other inline dedupe appliance) which Exagrid does not have because of their landing zone. I even remember one using their old NetBackup appliances with Veeam

Best regards,
Hannes