Recommendations for backup storage, backup target

[veremin]

It's possible and supported to leverage Windows Server 2012 R2 dedupe volume as a primary backup target. The performance of jobs involving transformation activity (forward forever, reversed incremental modes, etc.) will be affected. The restoration might be slower as well due to data rehydration.

Windows Server 2012 R2 deduplication has been discussed already; might be worth reviewing the best practices.

Thanks.

[albertwt]

Cool I never knew that it is possible to reduce the disk space usage from those VBK and VBR files using Win2012 R2 dedupe feature.

I'll study that link,

Thanks for the explanation.

[lornaschmidt]

Hi,

We would like to create a backup copy job across our WAN offsite and wonder if there is a recommendation for a reasonably priced NAS that works comfortably with Veeam.

We have a Buffalo TS-XL which is proving problematic so wouldn't want to deploy it offsite and, before spending any more money, just wondered if anyone has specific NAS recommendations.

Thank you

Lorna

[jazzoberoi]

HPE StoreOnce (either HW appliance or VSA) with 'Catalyst' ?

[Pat490]

we use Qnap NAS systems exactly for that backup copy job purpose offsite. No problems so far!
Sure this is not first production backup storage repository.

[igarcia1]

We're going to be refreshing our storage solutions, starting with backups. We are currently using a single tier, single controller Compellent array to store backups and the plan is to merge that into our production Compellent array once we have a replacement backup system in place. Wish I could say there was a budget, but that's a long story. Short version: we have 288TB (raw), no compression or dedup beyond what Veeam provides, and spend about 0.64 per usable GB and would like to find something better.

The IT Director and I like Exagrid on paper, and I have no clue what Dell will push (I get the impression the DR4100 is going away.) I'm sure most of you have been through this already, so I hope I can save some time by getting a few recommendations on what works the best with Veeam, or some advice on what vendors or setups to avoid. I'd rather initiate contact with as few sales folks as possible. I've already heard from one vendor (who happens to be Veeam certified) and of course their advice leans heavily toward their own product. Appreciate anything you can offer.

[igarcia1]

Knew there had to be something already here, just didn't search right. Awesome collection of information. Thanks mods.

[NightBird]

HPE Apollo 4510 or Cisco UCS C3160 should be a good choice for 288TB raw

[bg.ranken]

I second both of these. Though if you don't want to go as big as the 4510 you could get two Apollo 4200 units instead. It might be alittle cheaper but not by much since 80% of the cost is going to be disks but you'll end up with almost the same storage (each 4200 can hold 28 LFF disks, so 56 disks total compared to the 68 LFF disks of the 4510). You'd also have less processing power I believe, since you'd only have two proxies and the 4510 has 3 nodes I believe which gives you three.

Also remember you'd be able to replace your backup servers as well with any of these devices which should be a plus.

[cjack03]

We are in the process of moving our veeam backups off a 3par 7200 with 10K and 7.2K spinning disks in our DR site to one Supermicro SC847 4U chassis with 36 x 6TB 7.2K disks in a JBOD with SAS3 connections. The server acts as repository with 24 disks in RAID6 and 12 in RAID10. These two spaces are used in a SOBR with fulls on the RAID6 and incrementals on the RAID10. It is connected to the SAN fabric with a FC card for access to storage snapshots and has 10G ethernet for copies from other servers if needed. The server also acts as a proxy.

I have to say I couldnt be happier, we are seeing very good performance, better than I anticipated.

Although this isnt big enough for your needs there is no reason why you could add another JBOD for extra capacity. The other upside is that it is cheap! We will run Windows 2012R2 without dedup and once 2016 has been in the wild a little bit we will consider moving to this and enabling dedup to see how it helps. This kind of machine will definitely be our strategy going forward.

chris

[cjack03]

p.s we had a quote for an apollo 4510 with just 36 disk but this was still twice the price of the supermicro. We are pretty much an HP shop too.

[nmdange]

Although this isnt big enough for your needs there is no reason why you could add another JBOD for extra capacity. The other upside is that it is cheap! We will run Windows 2012R2 without dedup and once 2016 has been in the wild a little bit we will consider moving to this and enabling dedup to see how it helps. This kind of machine will definitely be our strategy going forward.

Make sure to read this thread, you probably won't even need dedup with Veeam 9.5 + REFS on 2016.
veeam-backup-replication-f2/veeam-next- ... 37231.html

[albertwt]

That's cool if it is true .

[cjack03]

I think we will probably look to stick with dedup rather than ReFS. We have experience with dedup in windows 2012 and the improvements in 2016 look really exciting. Although RefS does look fantastic i'm not sure I'd be willing to use this technology in our production environment so quickly after launch.

We will however keep a close eye on real world experiences and get a lab up and running to test when its GA.

[andyg]

We're going to be refreshing our storage solutions, starting with backups. We are currently using a single tier, single controller Compellent array to store backups and the plan is to merge that into our production Compellent array once we have a replacement backup system in place. Wish I could say there was a budget, but that's a long story. Short version: we have 288TB (raw), no compression or dedup beyond what Veeam provides, and spend about 0.64 per usable GB and would like to find something better.

The IT Director and I like Exagrid on paper, and I have no clue what Dell will push (I get the impression the DR4100 is going away.) I'm sure most of you have been through this already, so I hope I can save some time by getting a few recommendations on what works the best with Veeam, or some advice on what vendors or setups to avoid. I'd rather initiate contact with as few sales folks as possible. I've already heard from one vendor (who happens to be Veeam certified) and of course their advice leans heavily toward their own product. Appreciate anything you can offer.

What did you settle on as your new backup solution? Do you have a short-list of devices that look good for that sort of size?

[coreya123]

hello,
I am in the process of migrating our backup process from tapes to disk and implement Veeam at the same time. A full backup for us is 15tb and takes forever using our current system/software. I am looking for recommendations for a new disk based backup target. Veeam suspects we will need 100tb of storage for 5 years worth of data...this seems a like a lot to me.

Will 25+ NLSAS drives offer good performance or should I be looking at 10 SAS drives?

SAN, NAS, or Internal Storage?

Currently I am looking at Dell but have thought about Datto and Synology. Any other brands to look at?

I am looking to acquire 2 appliances so that I can have off-site storage.

Lastly, as a possible option...at our remote site I plan on using this appliance to also be the disk target for our DR recovery. So backup to disk at SiteA, replicate to SiteB, and if DR is needed, recover to the SiteB Appliance virtually.

Any suggestions/comments to help us would greatly be appreciated.
Thank you

[veremin]

Before we start discussing particular manufactures and models, may I ask you one questions? Have you considered deploying physical Windows Server 2016 server with bunch of locally attached disks? I'm asking because this should give you the best combination of price (locally attached drives), performance (Windows Server 2016 fast clone) and space reduction (spaceless full backup).

Thanks.

[coreya123]

I have not looked at Windows 2016 but I did look at using a physical server with internal disks. After speaking with several vendors I was nudged toward an inexpensive SAN...though it is not so inexpensive.

One concern I have with any solution is how well will 25+ NL-SAS 7200 rpm drives perform for a backup or restore? I have 15 TB of data to backup and currently it takes forever.

I did have a vendor a year ago offer Windows 2012 with Storage spaces and a SSD drive to do performance caching. What they said sounded great but I am uncertain how well this works with Veeam as Veeam doesn't support caching in its program.

For this project I am looking for everything required to backup my virtual servers, replicate to a remote site, and then recover at the remote site. I need everything for backup and recovery at both sites.

Thank you for your input and I will review the physical server w/internal storage again and see what that comes out to be.

[Mike Resseler]

Corey,

I personally would follow Vladimir's advice and before you make a decision, do a few tests. S2D (the follow-up from storage spaces) has caching and works perfectly with Veeam. We did some testing (OK, I admit... we did some playing ) with Luca and some other friends and got some nice results: See here for example: http://www.virtualtothecore.com/en/an-e ... dows-2016/

There are tons of possibilities today and it is difficult to say what the best solution is for backup storage, but what I do say is that it doesn't have to be the most expensive anymore all the time.

Mike

[nmdange]

I am definitely a fan of that particular server you used, which based on the picture I can tell is actually this SuperMicro server: https://www.supermicro.com/products/sys ... 1CR36L.cfm

Even without ReFS I get really good performance with RAID 50 and a hardware RAID controller, with a lot more than 15 tb of backups (though I have both a 36-bay server and a 45-bay jbod for a total of 81 drives). Here's another good vendor that resells Supermicro hardware: https://www.aberdeeninc.com/stirling-x47/

I will definitely be reporting back soon on how my setup works once I switch to ReFS

[coreya123]

Thank you all for your feedback.
I am looking into the server configurations that you mentioned. My only issue is that I have not been given a lot of time to look into this.

Do you know what kind of performance simple NL-SAS 7200 rpm disks may offer when run in a Raid 5 or 6 and a hardware raid controller? Is anyone backing up a large amount of data to disks of this type? I am trying to estimate how fast I can backup 15 tb on say 30 disks. I know this will vary a lot depending on the type of data and such.

Thank you
Corey

[coreya123]

The other concern I have is the amount of disk space needed. I am looking to backup 15tb of data and I am wondering how much disk space I will need to keep my backups on for 5+ years. I tried using a tool that Veeam sent me but each time I run it I find I need 50-100tb of space just for the first few months...so I must be doing something wrong.

[nmdange]

I backup roughly 80tb of VMs with this hardware. With RAID 50, I have yet to be able to back up data fast enough to where my backup repository server is the bottleneck. Looking through my recent jobs, the fastest processing rate I've gotten is around 700MB/sec. Keep in mind after your initial backup of 15tb, all subsequent backups will only be changed data not full copies. So your backup storage doesn't really need to be super fast since only a small amount of changed data would be backed up each day.

In terms of space needed for 5+ years of backups, that really depends on the amount of changed data you have. The important part is using Windows Server 2016 with ReFS to reduce the disk space used, see these references:
veeam-backup-replication-f2/vbr-9-5-refs-t38521.html
veeam-backup-replication-f2/question-re ... 38331.html
https://www.veeam.com/blog/advanced-ref ... suite.html

[Delo123]

Hi Corey,

we also use DAS (Supermicro 36bay Servers) and JBOD NL-SAS (60bay HGST) disks and even SATA with windows Dedupe enabled. Full Backups regularly go over 1GB/s so i wouldn't be worried about backup performance. windows Dedupe can also run quite fast if you split up your disks in mutiple vdisks (using storage spaces to create a pool and thin disks). Restoring is another things and tends to run a lot slower (but is still way over 300MB/s even from dedupes). In our case we switches all repos from Raid 5 to Raid 10 some time ago because it doesn't really make sense to use parity raids on these big volumes, the risk is just too high... But as said it's much better to get 25 NL-SAS than 10 SAS, you will never reach the same level with "just" 10 hdd's.
Regarding disk space needed windows dedupe can help you here a lot: (here are some examples from one of our repos, fulls and incrementals)
PS C:\Windows\system32> get-dedupstatus

FreeSpace SavedSpace OptimizedFiles InPolicyFiles Volume
--------- ---------- -------------- ------------- ------
37.37 TB 116.91 TB 8982 8988 R:
51.51 TB 56.59 TB 4970 4970 V:
52.17 TB 85.46 TB 499 501 Q:
43.14 TB 102.02 TB 443 443 O:
46.27 TB 38.68 TB 13 13 S:
40.62 TB 61.01 TB 5706 5706 P:
28.11 TB 93.91 TB 272 276 T:

but maybe even better with Veeam ReFS you can create "thin" fulls which don't use much space after the initial full which is a big game changer!

[pdkilian]

Mike or Vladimir,

Does all of the reFS goodness that Veeam 9.5 uses only work with Storage Spaces Direct or will the standard Windows 2016 license be able to be used as a backup repository with all of benefits that you described?

Thanks.

[pdkilian]

Before we start discussing particular manufactures and models, may I ask you one questions? Have you considered deploying physical Windows Server 2016 server with bunch of locally attached disks? I'm asking because this should give you the best combination of price (locally attached drives), performance (Windows Server 2016 fast clone) and space reduction (spaceless full backup).

Thanks.

Vladimir,

Do these benefits only apply to reFS using Storage Spaces Direct which requires a Data Center license, or will they work with the Standard license of Windows 2016?

[Delo123]

Storage spaces is included in standard. Storage spaces direct isn't needed!

[nmdange]

Do these benefits only apply to reFS using Storage Spaces Direct which requires a Data Center license, or will they work with the Standard license of Windows 2016?

Storage Spaces is not required (neither Storage Spaces Direct nor "classic" Storage Spaces"). Any drive formatted with ReFS on Windows Server 2016 will see the same benefits.

[pdkilian]

Thank you for your quick replies.

[ITP-Stan]

Classic Windows Deduplication is only available on NTFS.
On ReFS you don't have dedup but there is block clone what also gives considerable space benefits.
Didn't some do a head-to-head comparison of the 2 yet?