Dell PowerEdge XE7100 as a backup repo

[JonJR]

Hey,

I was wondering if anybody is using or has opinions on the Dell EMC PowerEdge XE7100 as a backup repository? (It's 100 disks in 5U with 1 or two blades servers: https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-au/ ... ervers.htm).

We were thinking of getting one with 50 disks to start and using it as a Linux repository, so I would guess we'd RAID 6 the drives on the PERC RAID controller and then LVM the volumes together in RHEL to give us one ~600TB volume.

Cheers Jon

[HannesK]

Hello,
I have a positive opinion on that server (same as on similar servers of other vendors). I was in a session with Dell some weeks ago and it sounded as very good Veeam backup target.

I would probably avoid LVM, but that's more a personal opinion (I prefer "hardware"-RAID).

Best regards,
Hannes

[JonJR]

Thanks for the feedback.

One question:

I would probably avoid LVM, but that's more a personal opinion (I prefer "hardware"-RAID).

I totally agree with this sentiment and I'd love to leave it all to the RAID card (or have the budget to get a backup SAN)... but with 50+ drives, the drives will have to go into separate RAID groups (probably groups of 12) which my understanding is the RAID card will present the groups as separate volumes. So they have to be joined somehow and whilst I don't like the double handling of the "spanning", I didn't see an alternative - is there an alternative?

[pirx]

Is it just one RAID controller? I've a similar setup but not with Dell server with 2x14 drives in RAID60 per RAID controller.

[HannesK]

yep, RAID-60 would be "default" with more than one raidgroup.

if you have multiple RAID controllers, then the question is, whether you want to use a logical volume manager

[tgietz]

A possible RAID-60 Config would be 4x(10+2) = 48 HDDs + 2HS.

The advantage of a raid 60 is that you get a single large volume.

Has anyone already practical experience with the server?

[JonJR]

Quick update. We did indeed get the XE7100 for our backups with 50x16TB drives which we have in RAID50 and it is great. The blade server is running RHEL as an immutable hardened repo and we are maxing out the 10G NICs a 25GB switch upgrade next year will be welcome.

Yeah I know RAID 5 is evil, but RAID6/60 just didn't fit with the drive count and the performance hit was quite large, also we are doing tape backups from the repo.