Using Isilon as a Veeam Target

[CraigV]

Hi all,

I'd like to know whether or not using an EMC Isilon is a worthwhile target for Veeam.
Ideally this is going to be a shared target for another vendor's physical server-based backups as well, but Veeam does backup to a network share. The concept behind the Isilon is compelling due to its scale-out nature.

I found a document relating to Isilon integrating into TSM, and wondered if Veeam had something similar? Are there any best practices?

If so then it opens up a few doors to clients where we can utilise existing 10GbE networks, while still allowing Veeam to replicate backups to a standby Isilon which can be used to tape-out data to a tape library for longer term storage.

Thanks!

[PTide]

Hi,

Currently we don't have a direct integration with Isilon. Here are some quotes from our engineers regarding usage of Isilon as a target:

<...>Target: EMC Isilon with NL nodes, shared via CIFS

Configured 3 different repositories, one for each proxy and spread the jobs out to each repository. This is done to get multiple I/O streams to the Isilon since it performs best with multiple streams.<...>

<...>Isilon is a NAS, and instead of presenting it to VMware via NFS and creating 2 TB VMDK files, you might as well write to it directly via SMB. It is critical that you enable "per-VM backup files", as this will at least support backing up ~4 TB VMs with average data reduction before you hit the OneFS limitation of 2 TB files (which should be increased on newer firmwares btw).

You could also point them to dsmISI for VEEAM by General Storage, which takes care of all the limitations. Of course it requires some licensing too, but it really makes Isilon shine.<...>

The biggest drawback of Isilon is<...>Another drawback today is that you have to manually create repositories to try to artificially create I/O streams to really make full use of the box, especially when there are many nodes in the scale-out, and most customers I've worked with seem to have found it less than ideal via SMB. They two largest customers that I know of using Isilon are font-ending them with Linux repositories and accessing the Isilon via NFS. Works reasonably well, including the replication.

Hope this helps.

Thank you.

[hiraoglu]

I don't recommend a Isilon. The maximum size of a file is 4 TB in Onefs.

[dsmISI]

Yes, the maximum size of a file is 4 TB in OneFS, but with dsmISI for Veeam the file size is no matter (unlimited backup file size, there is no limitation).

Regards

[Songykhw]

I don't recommend a Isilon. The maximum size of a file is 4 TB in Onefs.

As file size limitation, are there some setting on Veeam to split backup files?

[foggy]

No, there's no such functionality in Veeam B&R.