Does SSD write cache improving performance on a QNAP (Merging)

[surfingoncloud]

Hey Veeam Geeks,

We are a cloud service provider - we have 3x QNAP TS-1263U-RP NASs, each QNAP holds roughly 22 Clients (7 Restore points per client). They are fully populated with 5x12TB Seagate (55TB usable) (ST16000NE000-2RW103) enterprise drives in a RAID6.
As you can imagine IOPS on a RAID6 are rather poor, so Veeam backup merge processes are quite slow (1x Active Full backup once a month and weekly Synthetic backups for most of the clients).

The QNAP Support recommended us to get an SSD Cache into the QNAP which should help with the merge processes, do you think that could help? How much SSD Storage should we consider for each QNAP? Like 1TB or 5TB? And do you think it will help with the merge processes? Are there any other tuning which we could do to speed up that process?

Thanks,

Case #04251627

[HannesK]

Hello,
chances are good that a write cache helps a little bit. But it will not make it "good".

To make 12TB disks "fast", the only way is using a proper filesystem (REFS / XFS) with block cloning (well, or only active-full). https://www.veeam.com/blog/advanced-ref ... suite.html

The way is to replace NFS / SMB with iSCSI + REFS / XFS

It's not a task for support to help with hardware design decisions. I asked them to close the case.

Best regards,
Hannes

[AuGL]

It won't help with the merge process, in fact it will likely make it worse. I have two QNAP appliances, similar to your model. I'm replacing them shortly with HPE Apollo's. I had SSD cache in the QNAP, and replaced it with more SATA drives for capacity.

As Hannes said above, the best performance on a QNAP would be to use create an iSCSI volume and present that out to your Repository server. The last time I asked QNAP Support, they did not support ReFS. So you would need to use NTFS, or check with QNAP whether they support ReFS / XFS these days.