Backup solution suggestions wanted
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After talking to @hubtechagain I realize that I'm probably over thinking, or limiting myself when I probably shouldn't be.
Currently I have 3 bare metal servers, all of them 8+ years old. I also have two VM hosts (ESXi 5.5). My backup software is Appassure running one two separate VMs each backing up about half the Windows machines (yeah don't ask).
The backup target is an old gen 1 Drobo Pro that is either USB 2.0 or iSCSI (iSCSI is hampered by the fact that for data safety, the Drobo can only talk to one host at a time, it's designed to be a DAS, not NAS or SAN). The Drobo is connected to one of the NIC ports on a VM host, and feed directly to one of the Appassure VMs. That VM also shares that storage via the network to the second Appassure VM.
When I need to reboot the VM hosting the Drobo, I have to shut everything down on the second VM.I need to simplify this whole setup.
The original plan was a follows:
BM1 - move data to another server, retire server
BM2 - P2V to VM host
BM3 - P2V to VM hostUse BM2 hardware, install eight 1 TB drives RAID 6, install Appassure and consolidate all backups to this single server with local storage. Cost $1600
@hubtechagain suggested I consider a NAS for the storage. With that option I could do the PV2ing same as before and use the drives already in the server to run Appassure and the NAS as the backup target. To get the best throughput, I'd have to either have two NICs to the switch paired, and the NAS into the switch (single 1 Gb) or direct connect the NAS to the server, but still running NFS or CIFS on that connection, and a single standard network connection.
Thoughts? Something else I should consider?
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Why is the Drobo attached to a VM and not to the hypervisor?
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At the time I didn't know better.
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So basically it sounds like the question is...
- Old bare metal server adding lots of 2.5" drives on RAID 6 to get the capacity that you need or...
- New small NAS with many fewer 3.5" drives on RAID 1, 6 or 10 to get the capacity that you need.
Is that correct?
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Those are the presented options, but I'm trying to be open minded to other options.
I probably don't need more performance than I'll have with a two drive RAID 10 setup, assuming I can get the storage amount I need. Currently I have 4 TB of usable storage, using 2.4 TB.
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Things to consider, if my guess is true, is that RAID 6 introduces a huge write penalty so the performance of the older hardware, if RAID 6 is needed, will not be as good as it would sound like it would be when you mention having eight drives. And I believe that you were considering WD Red drives to make that price point (offline conversation) which would leave you with 8x 5400 RPM SATA which, with 6 fold write penalty of RAID 6, would leave you with the write performance of roughly 1x 7200 RPM SATA drive. That's dramatic.
That suggests that for writes (but not for reads) that you could get nearly identical write performance by getting a super cheap two bay Synology DS214 or DS215+ with two WD Red Pro drives that are 3.5" and much larger capacity while using less power, taking less effort and having everything brand new and vendor supported.
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The drives I found are HP NL SAS 7200 drives for $180/ea
http://www.amazon.com/HP-625609-B21-Internal-MIDLINE-SATAHD/dp/B006G0V12O
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A Synology DS215+ is $400 from Amazon.
WD Red Pro 4TB is $211. You need two.So $822 for everything new from Amazon, full vendor support to get better safety, higher end drives, equal backup performance and far easier time. I think that the old server with lots of drives in RAID 6 is a definitely loser here.
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@Dashrender said:
The drives I found are HP NL SAS 7200 drives for $180/ea
http://www.amazon.com/HP-625609-B21-Internal-MIDLINE-SATAHD/dp/B006G0V12O
Okay, that will be faster than the DS215+ then by maybe 50%.
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OK so I'm left wondering if a 4 drive unit might be better.
This thread, http://mangolassi.it/topic/6830/wd-my-cloud-ex4/7, has some good information too.
Currently we have a single drive onsite DCOM system. It's backed up to someone else's system, but if that one drive fails, it's pretty costly to get our data back from them.
I could backup that data as well, but I'll instantly add another 1.2 TB to the backups. If I have to keep at least two base images of that system I'll need 2.4 TB to hold the two base images, plus another 500+ GB for growth. Appassure is really good at dedup, so I have several base/incrementals inside my current 1.2 TB of used backup storage.
So, my current 1.2 + 2.4 + .5 = 4.1.
four 4 TB drives in RAID 10 (maybe I could go 5400 drives instead of 7200, maybe not, price probably it's big enough to matter) should be plenty for 3-5 years. -
@Dashrender said:
e data to another server, retire server
BM2 - P2V to VM host
BM3 - P2V to VM hostUse BM2 hardware, in
im staying out of this one....
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@Dashrender said:
OK so I'm left wondering if a 4 drive unit might be better.
RAID 10 on four drives would make getting high write performance that much easier. Would just double all of the numbers.
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@Dashrender said:
four 4 TB drives in RAID 10 (maybe I could go 5400 drives instead of 7200, maybe not, price probably it's big enough to matter) should be plenty for 3-5 years.
5400 RPM SATA drops the performance a lot. Not sure that I would do that here for the tiny cost savings.
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My backup software is Appassure
are you kidding me
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@angrydok said:
My backup software is Appassure
are you kidding me
I've had it for 8 years, plus 8 years ago (well, and still today) I had 3 physical hosts.
I'm perfect for the Essentials Veeam offerings once I ditch the the physical hosts. But now I've got @hubtechagain telling me about Altaro which is nearly half the price of Veeam Essentials per host. Testing and decisions to make.
In either case, I need to make sure Exchange is supported until 2017 when I'll probably kick it to O365.
Currently my yearly maintenance costs for Appassure run me close to the full cost of Veeam Essentials - I'm sure I'll be leaving them when renewal time comes along.
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@Dashrender said:
@angrydok said:
My backup software is Appassure
are you kidding me
I've had it for 8 years, plus 8 years ago (well, and still today) I had 3 physical hosts.
I'm perfect for the Essentials Veeam offerings once I ditch the the physical hosts. But now I've got @hubtechagain telling me about Altaro which is nearly half the price of Veeam Essentials per host. Testing and decisions to make.
In either case, I need to make sure Exchange is supported until 2017 when I'll probably kick it to O365.
Currently my yearly maintenance costs for Appassure run me close to the full cost of Veeam Essentials - I'm sure I'll be leaving them when renewal time comes along.
Why wait till 2017 to move to O365? With DirSync and other tools, you can have SSO and all the joys of on premise, and not have to worry about a physical device.
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@gjacobse said:
Why wait till 2017 to move to O365? With DirSync and other tools, you can have SSO and all the joys of on premise, and not have to worry about a physical device.
Because I am already paying a three year SA Open License agreement for my current setup that expires in 2017.
Also, before I can even consider moving, I have to either move most if not all users to OWA or fully implement a complete replacement system for our current calendaring system for physician calendars that will sync with iPhone/iPad/Android.
Outlook cached mode is completely unusable for us. I quickly discovered when we converted from Domino to Exchange that cached mode wasn't anywhere near real time when updating other people's calendars. We require realtime (or very very close to) updates so that all 80+ people viewing calendars are aware of changes/updates, etc. OWA or a third party would work for this, but O365 with Outlook in non cached mode I would only image would be a horrible experience.
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@Dashrender I may have a somewhat self-serving answer here. Not sure it's exactly what you're looking for, but have you tried R1Soft?
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@Dashrender said:
@gjacobse said:
Why wait till 2017 to move to O365? With DirSync and other tools, you can have SSO and all the joys of on premise, and not have to worry about a physical device.
Because I am already paying a three year SA Open License agreement for my current setup that expires in 2017.
Also, before I can even consider moving, I have to either move most if not all users to OWA or fully implement a complete replacement system for our current calendaring system for physician calendars that will sync with iPhone/iPad/Android.
Outlook cached mode is completely unusable for us. I quickly discovered when we converted from Domino to Exchange that cached mode wasn't anywhere near real time when updating other people's calendars. We require realtime (or very very close to) updates so that all 80+ people viewing calendars are aware of changes/updates, etc. OWA or a third party would work for this, but O365 with Outlook in non cached mode I would only image would be a horrible experience.
Have you tried Sharepoint Online shared calendars. I'm fairly certain they can readily sync with an Android/iOS device. Maybe not as a primary calendar but then again your third party app wouldn't be primary either.
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@Dashrender I am sure you'll test that before the purchase, so I have almost no doubts you will decide to go with us
