Is This JBOD Server Overkill or Not Enough?

[vaicsimmons]

A few years back, I put together a backup server to backup up our production VMs. It's a SuperMicro server with two Intel Xeon E5520 Processors running at 2.27 GHz, 16 GB RAM, and running Windows Server 2012 with Veeam Backup and Recovery. The OS is installed on SSDs in a RAID 1 configuration. The storage for the backups are spindled drives within the same server. Those drives are configured in a RAID 6 array with roughly 38 TB of available storage (using 6 TB drives). This server is kept in another building on our property which does not house our production servers.

I am backing up 13 VMs totaling 2.1 TB. I am keeping 14 restore points. The backups are incremental with full backup on the last Friday of the month. I keep 4 weekly backups, 12 monthly backups, and 7 yearly backups. I am using Windows deduplication to minimize the size of the archived backups.

Unfortunately, I recently ran out of storage space for the backups. I was able to get to 4 yearly backups. In all, the backups are 53.1 TB in size and consume 36 TB of disc space.

I am not an expert in this stuff by any means so I am looking for a bit of advise.

I am currently leaning toward picking up a 4U Supermico 24-Bay server and loading it up with drives to create another JBOD server. I would use the existing server, noted above, to store my daily and weekly backups. Once again, this server would be kept in another building on our property. My new / second JBOD server would then be stored in yet another building and would hold our archived backups (weekly, monthly and yearly). I may also keep a copy of the daily backups on this server as well.

If I keep copy of my daily backups on this second server, this would allow me to have daily backups in three separate locations. I would have my weekly backups in two separate locations. And, I would have my monthly and yearly backups in one location. I may also look to put a copy of my daily incrementals and a weekly in the cloud as well.

I understand that we would only have a monthly and yearly backups in one location. However, these backups are not critical for us to retain and are kept simply because we can. If something was to happen to that building and we lost our monthly / yearly backups it would not be the end of the world.

I am looking at a SuperMicro server with 24-Bays, 4x Xeon E5-4650 Procs, 256GB of RAM and a LSI 9260-8i RAID card for around $1,500 plus the cost of the hard drives. Do you think that this server is over or under-sized for what I will be using it for? Or, do you have another suggestion entirely?

I appreciate any and all feedback!

[HannesK]

Hello,
well yes, everything is oversized if you have an 8h backup window - but hey, you get faster restores

Copy to second server sounds good. Maybe you want to think about REFS instead of Windows deduplication.

Best regards,
Hannes