Out of Space on My Backup-Up Server & Looking for Recommendations

[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).

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 only have one spare bay to add another hard drive. I am looking for some suggestions on how to move forward.

Would you recommend, simply replacing all of the 6 TB drives with 10 TB drives? That should get me to 80 TB of usable space in a RAID 6 config. Using Windows deduplication I should have quite a bit of free space to "grow" into. Or, should I look at a NAS, such as one from Synology. Or, is there a different path I should take?

I am not an expert in this stuff by any means. I am currently leaning toward picking up a 4U Supermico 24-Bay server, loading it up with drives and moving my backups to that new server. I can pickup a 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.

[HannesK]

Hello,
it seems you store all backups on one system. So depending on the budget, I would at least buy a second box (I prefer a server over a NAS) to meet the 3-2-1 rule. Depending on the budget, you can keep using the current server

Best regards,
Hannes