Reverse incremental performance on Raid 5 vs Raid 10

[Yuki]

Hi all,
I wanted to see if anyone had done any benchmarks on their storage repositories at different RAID levels. Most of our storage used for backups is RAID5 in order to get the most space, but performance isn't always great. Has anyone done any testing on RAID10 vs RAID10 on reverse incremental runs?

Generally RAID10 should provide better performance, but not sure how this relates to Veeam's I/O requirements.

[Gostev]

I have not tested myself, but heard many times from end users that moving to RAID10 significantly improved reversed incremental performance for them.

[chrisdearden]

RAID 10 all the way - given a reverse incremental has somethign like a 75:25 Write:read i/o profile , you have much less of a write penalty with RAID10 than you would have with RAID 5, so for a given number of spindles you can get more usable IO ( at the expense of capacity )

[Yuki]

Excellent, thanks guys!

[xchose]

Hi guys,

I am pretty new with VEAM backup. So I would like to ask few question about BEST PRACTICIES.
I have Areca RAID driver with 14 - 3T disks. I would like to install Windows 2012 and VEAM BAckup.

What is the best disk configuration. What is recomended RAID level and do you think that is good idea to separete 2 disk in raid 1 for windows OS only?
Thanks for help, links etc.

Martin

[veremin]

H, Martin.

Assuming that you’re going to use this server as a backup repository, it stands to reason so specify RAID 10, since both 5 and 6 has a certain IOP penalty, which might result in decreased backup performance, especially, if reversed incremental is being used.

Thanks.

[foggy]

And there are a couple more of existing topics regarding RAID level recommendations, worth reviewing:
RAID6 or RAID10 for backup storage on local disk array?
NAS RAID level

Thanks.

[davidb1234]

I just finished migrating from RAID 6 SATA disk enclosures to RAID 10 8GB SAN volumes for Veeam repositories in our primary backup site. First Full Active Backup Speeds did not increase but the nightly reverse incrementals are 20-40% faster and we run 3-4 jobs at a time vs 1 job at a time and our storage doesn't flinch. Previously running multiple jobs and using virtual lab features was terrible performance on the RAID 6 locally attached SATA enclosures. We had 12 Spindles in our RAID6. We have 12 spindles in our RAID 10. Obviously we lost lots of space but the tradeoff was worth it for our primary backup storage.

I am looking forward to testing the virtual lab stuff as I am sure that will be much faster as well.

[foggy]

David, thanks for sharing the numbers, much appreciated. They perfectly confirm general recommendations.

[kte]

Any MB/s maesurements , that you won by moving from raid 5 to raid 10 ??
Because I now have a veeam backup server 8 core 32 GB ram aadn local disks 2x 450GB raid10 OS + 10 4TB disk RAiD6 + hotspare
I can do a local copy on the server SATA disk of a 160 GB file in 8m35 seconds so arroun 310 MB/s read and write
Is this bad or ..??
The bottleneck in a direct san connection setup is still source , somethimes the proxy is going above 90 % ( processing rate was the 2 GB/s for an incr backup), but I never saw a target more the 10 %

K

[foggy]

The bottleneck in a direct san connection setup is still source , somethimes the proxy is going above 90 % ( processing rate was the 2 GB/s for an incr backup), but I never saw a target more the 10 %

That means that the source disk reader component is the "weakest" point in the data processing conveyor and the following stages are waiting for it to provide data, while the source disk reader spends all of the time reading the data.

So no need to worry about your target storage performance until you decide to upgrade the source component and the bottleneck moves to target. (However, you are still getting pretty good speeds with the current setup so not sure whether you need to change something, there always will be a bottleneck, in any setup.)

[edfops]

We have 72 1.2TB SAS drives (over three DAS arrays), how might these be best configured for reverse incrementals backup jobs? Due to the space penalty with Raid10, that does not seem viable.

Current debate is between multiple Raid50 (for the better drive rebuild times) or Raid6 sets.

Anyone have similar experiences out there?

edit: not sure why this was merged, this is not a discussion on Raid 5 vs. Raid 10 but Raid 50 vs. Raid 6

[foggy]

You can find some helpful considerations in this thread as well as in the topics mentioned above.

[mcvosi]

I have a JBOD enclosure with sixteen 3 TB drives in it. I'd like to use this for backups; connection will be SAS. Any recommendations on the config for the drives?

[foggy]

Matthew, please review the thread above, as well as another existing topic discussing recommended RAID configurations. Should help.

[albertwt]

Hi All,

which one is the best option to store large VM backup that is using forever Forward Incremental on a very large LUN that is 20TB+ ?

Size 27.2 TiB
RAID Level RAID 6 (ADG)
Legacy Disk Geometry (C/H/S) 65535 / 255 / 32
Strip Size / Full Stripe Size 128 KiB / 2944 KiB

Size 33 TiB
RAID Level RAID 5
Legacy Disk Geometry (C/H/S) 65535 / 255 / 32
Strip Size / Full Stripe Size 256 KiB / 2816 KiB

I'm using VBR 9.0 U1 to store 150+ VMs backup in 25 backup job.

[Gostev]

Hi, "best" option will certainly be RAID10. Thanks!

[albertwt]

Hi Anton,

If somehow the capacity is needed, I can only use RAID5 or 6.
Which one is at least better or closer to RAID10 ?

[dellock6]

With latest disks large at least 4 TB, and thus the rebuild time they require, I'd always go for Raid6. During a rebuild in raid5 you are completely unprotected, and if anything happens you lose data. With raid6 this problem is mitigated by the double parity. Raid6 has a higher write penalty, but I'd buy the extra protection any day over the slight performance decrease.

[albertwt]

Luca,

Thanks for the suggestion as for the LUN size and the stripe size can I select the largest possible for better performance ?

[albertwt]

We have 72 1.2TB SAS drives (over three DAS arrays), how might these be best configured for reverse incrementals backup jobs? Due to the space penalty with Raid10, that does not seem viable.

Current debate is between multiple Raid50 (for the better drive rebuild times) or Raid6 sets.

Anyone have similar experiences out there?

edit: not sure why this was merged, this is not a discussion on Raid 5 vs. Raid 10 but Raid 50 vs. Raid 6

Hi Edfops,

I'm in the similar situation.
So what is the Backup repository configuration that you are end up with now ?