Hardware Kit list:
P2000-1:
1 x SFF FC head unit & 1 x expansion enclosure
33 x 300Gb 15k SAS
13 x 600gb 10k SAS
P2000-2:
Identical to P2000-1
We actually currently have these fronted by a pair of FalconStor appliances (until it's decommed as we've migrated those to new as well) so I /could/ pool the whole lot in some way & present it but we'd be limited by 16Tb of FalconStor capacity licensing.
So, bearing in mind the P2000 is limited to VDisks comprising a max 16 physical disks, that gives either 2.4(ish) TB in RAID-10 or 4.2Tb in RAID-6 for each set of 16 of the 300's and 3.6Tb (R10) or 6Tb (R6) for the 600's.
Either way it results in 3 chunks of disk that I can present to the new test repository server which, for now, will likely be a VM to start with as I can do all this remotely before I spin up a spare physical server to host the repo's.
Current full backup size for this site is around 4tb
So, first question then is, once the initial full backup (or backup copy) is completed, does the benefits or ReFS for subsequent synthetic fulls outweigh the overhead of using Raid-6?
Assuming I'm testing with a Vm repo server initially, If I present the 3 LUNs (from one of the P2000's) to the VM would I be best just creating a SoBR with the 3 LUNs or is there a benefit to using storage spaces?
How about if I then present a further identical 3 luns from the other P2000?
I think my ultimate aim is to
A) see what the performance of ReFS is like given OUR source VMs & change rate (knowing everyone is different)
B) See what we can achieve keeping on-disk long-term to save us having to revert to tape for older backups (we'll still be using tape for the foreseeable as a final stage)
C) Establish whether, when I deploy the final solution on the final hardware, I should just create all repo storage as ReFS & let Veeam just get on with it...
D) If it's deemed relevant, I'll learn a bit about storage spaces as I haven't had a need to touch them up to now so haven't really absorbed what they might offer (or what their limitations might be)
What would you do?
