Moving to a new B&R Server, looking for some tips

[kpax]

Hey guys,

I am looking to decommission my current B&R server, which is;

SuperMicro x9drd-7ln4f
CPU: E5-2620 v2 x2
Memory: 36gb
Raid Controller: LSI MegaRAID SAS 9271-8- with CacheVault
HDD: x12 WDCWD20002FAEX0 7200k 1.8tb
Array 1: 11x 1.8tb Drives, 16tb Raid 6 Array
vSphere 5.5
Server 2012 R2 VM for B&R

I am looking to replace it with;

Dell PowerEdge R730xd
CPU: E5-2609 v4 x2 (still investigating model, lower clock speed than the E-52620, but a new process and architecture, could that cover the difference?)
RAM: 96gb
Raid Controller: PERC H730P RAID Controller, 2GB NV Cache, Mini-card
SSD: 2x 400GB Solid State Drive SAS Mix Use 12Gbps 512e 2.5in Hot-plug Drive,3.5in HYB CARR, PM1635a
HDD: 10x 4TB 7.2K RPM NL-SAS 512n 3.5in Hot-plug Hard Drive

This would be on vSphere 6.5 with a Server 2016 VM (Unless there are some horror stories I'm unaware of).

My thought is to R10 the 4tb's for 20tb usable and then mirror the SSDs for the B&R VM and some other DEV/TEST VMs.

Is ReFS a road worth going down now? I have been reading some things about corrupt volumes as well as using HW raid being unsupported?

Is Server 2016 Data Dedup worth using? Would I be hardware limited based on the above specs?

And finally, Dell would like me to jump into a Data Domain DD3300 with 17tb of usable space. Dell has some good claims about dedupe and compression (10x min) which if true would be great. Does anyone have any first-hand experience with this platform?

Sorry for all the questions, I appreciate any response

[DaveWatkins]

You can't use Server 2016 dedup on ReFS with Veeam. To a certain extent ReFS does that anyway with BlockClone.

A DataDomain will get 10x compression (ours currently shows 20x), but it shouldn't be your primary repo. Restoring from it will be _very_ slow. Use it for long term storage and populate it with copy jobs from your primary repository. You may also want to look at getting the R730xd with 2.5 inch drives as smaller drives with more spindles will have a higher performance. That might not be required with a RAID10 though.