new Setup with Veeam an Nexsan E18 replication?

[Thomas_KL]

Hi @all,

has anyone already had the chance of testing the new Nexsan E18/48/60 firmware with replication inside?

We usually (in SMB) install a 2 host / 2 Raid infrastructure, in which one Raid is the "production" Raid and the other the "backup" Raid using Veeam. The 2 Raids are usually only half full with disks. The Veeam Backup Server is the only VM stored on the "backup" so when the "production" Raid is "gone" you can simply use Veeam to get running again.
Now, with the new Nexsan E18/48/60 firmware, I am think more like a full mirror Setup, where the first Raid contains double the disk for "production" and "backup" ( with veeam to back it up ) and the second will simple be the replicant of the first via the build in Nexsan E-Series replication feature. This would essentially put it up a noche and be a "cheap" solution without the need to buy software like Data Core.

Sounds like a plan so far. Anyone of you already test that kind of setup? Of course ( or better said as far as I know ) the replicant would be just that without an automatic failover or anything. You would need to manually get the infrastructure running again, because vSphere does not recognize the replicant as a secondary location ( which wouldn't work anyways, because it's only an asynchronous replication with the E18/48/60 )

[dellock6]

Hi Thomas,
I've seen similar setup made with other storage vendors, but I always had some doubts about the IOPS this solution created on the production storage: since you are using the same controller, you end up tripling the IO on the production storage:
- 1 to read from the production luns
- 1 to write back to the backup luns
- 1 to replicate from backup luns to the mirrored storage
And this is calculated using forward incremental backup, with other solution IOPS will further increase...
Since Veeam is already reading data from the production lan, why not simply write these data to the backup storage?
I'm not saying your design is wrong, but take care of this calculations when sizing the storage...

Luca.