Using a D-Link DSN1100-10 Device for backups.

[STORM121]

I'm looking at using a D-Link DSN-1100-10 xStack Storage SAN to backup my VM's instead of to USB drives.

http://www.dlink.com/us/en/support/prod ... 1gbe-ports

Does anybody have any recommendations on how I should integrate this device into my environment?

I currently have a EMC VNX5300 that is using both Block and File storage. My block storage is dedicated to my three HP hosts running 5.1. My file is dedicated to my cifs server.

I have two HP switches dedicated to the HOST/VNX5300 connectivity via iSCSI.

I currently use Veeam 6.5 on a physical machine that is connected to my main network switch via cat 5 and I have three external USB drives connected to that physical machine...one for each host.

I swap out those three USB drives weekly...<<<< what a pain that is...

Anyway, I have this D-Link device that I can connect to my network via iSCSI only...I want to fill the device with 5 drives and raid 5 to create my initial backups onto and then I'll offload those to the USB drives for off site.

Since this device is iSCSI only...what would be the recommend way to introduce it into my environment...should I dedicate 4 ports on my LAN switch and give it IP address from my main network or should I connect it directly to the switch/s that are currently connecting the Hosts and VNX5300 together via iSCSI?

Also...with that, should I create the Veeam Server as a Virtual machine or leave it as a physical?

Thanks for any suggestions or comments.

David

[dellock6]

hi,
this device sounds not so good to me, it's only capable of exporting disk space via iSCSI and it has only 256 MB of ram for both operating system (some sort of linux maybe?) and storage controller (so sounds like is a software raid...). I'm not expecting it to have so much performances, even if it can aggregate 5 disks. The 425 MBits of bandwidth is pure marketing, it's only calculated by aggregating the 4 Gbit network cards, but in reality a IP-to-IP connection in etherchannel only uses 1 channel at a time, so maximum bandwidth is only 125 MBtis. Not that I'm expecting the network to be the bottleneck in this device...

Anyway, since you already have it, it will for sure be better than external connected disks, at least thanks to raid protection. I would probably configure it with 4 large disks aggregated in Raid10, so you don't have any write penalty. Then, you can connect it via iscsi to the physical Veeam server and format it as an additional drive, and configure a new Repository with it.

In my opinion, the Dlink would probably be a bottleneck since data is coming out of a VNX5300, so there is no real need to fine tune performances in the backup design, I suspect both hotadd mode with a virtual Veeam server (and in-guest iscsi connection) or directSAN connection with a physical Veeam server would give you same performances. I would probably go first with physical Veeam, since you already have it, so you do not need to destroy and recreate the Veeam server.

Just a quick trick: create a small share disk on a VM, and map it as an additional repository in Veeam. It's useful to send there only the configuration backup. If the physical Veeam server stops, you can quickly install Veeam into that VM and import configuration, and start again.

Luca.

[ejamerson]

I am with EMC. I agree, if you already have a device you should attempt it for sure. If you have issues we can talk about EMC's backup but I don't know if you have or what your budget is for anything new. If you at least want to discuss the environment more then let me know.

[STORM121]

Sorry for the delay...been busy.

Thanks for the comments and suggestions, I'm still waiting on some enterprise drives to come down in price to try this out.

The Firmware version in this device only supports certain enterprise drives up to 2TB...and it will only do RAID1 or RAID5 I believe...

I'll post back when I have it up and running.

David

[veremin]

Hi, David.

According to the product specification, raid 10 is also supported. So, if I were you, I would follow with it, since the latter doesn’t have I/O penalties in comparison with raid 5.

Thanks.

[STORM121]

I see that...

RAID Levels 0, 1, 1+0 and 5

Thanks

[veremin]

The recommended raid level for backup repository is 10, indeed. So, you should be ok with it. Thanks.