Dell EMC Isilon A2000 NAS Storage

[Michael.H]

Looking for up-to-date design recommendations and best practices for Veeam B&R v11 using Dell EMC Isilon A2000 NAS Storage.

We have a large Isilon cluster with 28+ A2000 nodes and plenty of free space, and I have questions.
- In general, is a large Isilon cluster a viable backup backup target for Veeam B&R v11?
- What are the current Veeam B&R v11 design recommendations and best practices for Isilon clusters?
- Should I consider General Storage's dsmISI (or something similar) so B&R stripes all backup streams across all the Isilon nodes?
- What are the drawbacks and pitfalls when using Isilon storage for B&R v11?
- What have I overlooked?

Thanks,

Michael

[Andreas Neufert]

Vendor Settings:

• Vendor recommendation - Disable the write coalescer on the share directory and all sub-directories used by Veeam.

Additional Considerations:

• Dell EMC Isilon has a default maximum file size limitation of 4TiB. OneFS 8.2.2 or later has the option to increase the maximum file size limitation to 16TiB.

• Active Full + Incremental processing is advised.

• Veeam Scale Out Backup Repository can distribute the load across the Isilon cluster via multiple Backup Repository Extents each defined to use a different cluster node DNS A record and path.

• When backups exceed the maximum file size limitation even with Veeam deduplication and compression, other considerations should be made.

A software load balancer can mitigate these limitations and adds block cloning for fast synthetic processing and to save space (ex. https://www.veeam.com/kb2221).