Upgrading our Veeam backup server

scottalanmiller

Another advantage would be the ability to use the two slots that the OS is on as part of your backup storage. You're spending two drive slots on space that could extend your data nodes noticeably.

He could do that physically, too.

Dashrender

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

Another advantage would be the ability to use the two slots that the OS is on as part of your backup storage. You're spending two drive slots on space that could extend your data nodes noticeably.

He could do that physically, too.

what?

Carnival Boy

I was wondering about leaving the server as is, and purchasing something like a ReadyNAS to use as the Veeam repository. For the price of 6 2TB HP drives I could buy a ReadyNAS with 4 x 4TB drives and get 5 years warranty. Then, if the HP server was to die, I could just replace it with a new diskless server for peanuts and keep the ReadyNAS storage as is. But I don't know if this is likely to result in an unacceptable performance hit.

scottalanmiller

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

Another advantage would be the ability to use the two slots that the OS is on as part of your backup storage. You're spending two drive slots on space that could extend your data nodes noticeably.

He could do that physically, too.

what?

Put all of his drives into a single array (replacing the two littles with matching bigger ones) and install the OS and the data partitions to the same array to get a lot more space (and performance) with minimal investment.

scottalanmiller

@Carnival-Boy said:

I was wondering about leaving the server as is, and purchasing something like a ReadyNAS to use as the Veeam repository. For the price of 6 2TB HP drives I could buy a ReadyNAS with 4 x 4TB drives and get 5 years warranty. Then, if the HP server was to die, I could just replace it with a new diskless server for peanuts and keep the ReadyNAS storage as is. But I don't know if this is likely to result in an unacceptable performance hit.

The biggest chance will be the addition of the network bottleneck... but you already have that on the front end with the system talking to the HP, so I doubt that it will be very bad.

Dashrender

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

Another advantage would be the ability to use the two slots that the OS is on as part of your backup storage. You're spending two drive slots on space that could extend your data nodes noticeably.

He could do that physically, too.

what?

Put all of his drives into a single array (replacing the two littles with matching bigger ones) and install the OS and the data partitions to the same array to get a lot more space (and performance) with minimal investment.

I thought I said that? that's why I was confused by your comment.

scottalanmiller

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

Another advantage would be the ability to use the two slots that the OS is on as part of your backup storage. You're spending two drive slots on space that could extend your data nodes noticeably.

He could do that physically, too.

what?

Put all of his drives into a single array (replacing the two littles with matching bigger ones) and install the OS and the data partitions to the same array to get a lot more space (and performance) with minimal investment.

I thought I said that? that's why I was confused by your comment.

I thought that you associated that with a benefit of virtualization.

Dashrender

@scottalanmiller said:

@Carnival-Boy said:

I was wondering about leaving the server as is, and purchasing something like a ReadyNAS to use as the Veeam repository. For the price of 6 2TB HP drives I could buy a ReadyNAS with 4 x 4TB drives and get 5 years warranty. Then, if the HP server was to die, I could just replace it with a new diskless server for peanuts and keep the ReadyNAS storage as is. But I don't know if this is likely to result in an unacceptable performance hit.

The biggest chance will be the addition of the network bottleneck... but you already have that on the front end with the system talking to the HP, so I doubt that it will be very bad.

The network bottle neck is a real concern, assuming your drives aren't a bigger one.

Also, what RAID is the ReadyNAS? RAID 10 or 5? Assuming RAID 10, and 8 TB is enough, you'll probably be fine, but remember you are reducing your IOPs, but for backup and restore, you probably don't care.

Dashrender

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

Another advantage would be the ability to use the two slots that the OS is on as part of your backup storage. You're spending two drive slots on space that could extend your data nodes noticeably.

He could do that physically, too.

what?

Put all of his drives into a single array (replacing the two littles with matching bigger ones) and install the OS and the data partitions to the same array to get a lot more space (and performance) with minimal investment.

I thought I said that? that's why I was confused by your comment.

I thought that you associated that with a benefit of virtualization.

Aww, I see, I didn't spell it out as it's own benefit regardless of virtualization.. gotcha..

Carnival Boy

@scottalanmiller said:

The biggest chance will be the addition of the network bottleneck... but you already have that on the front end with the system talking to the HP, so I doubt that it will be very bad.

We also offload the backup files to an external hard drive, weekly. The 1GB network connection in the server is going to be much slower than the USB 3.0 connection, I believe.

With a ReadyNAS, I'd be tempted to connect it directly to the server, but a quick Google brings up a quote from @scottalanmiller on Spiceworks saying NAS should never be a solution for a one to one connection and DAS is always preferable. Is that still the case?

Carnival Boy

@Dashrender said:

Also, what RAID is the ReadyNAS? RAID 10 or 5? Assuming RAID 10, and 8 TB is enough, you'll probably be fine, but remember you are reducing your IOPs, but for backup and restore, you probably don't care.

RAID10 I believe. Why wouldn't I care about IOPS? The HP 410 RAID controller may also be faster than whatever is used by the ReadyNAS. Speed is always important with backup and recovery - especially recovery.

scottalanmiller

@Carnival-Boy said:

@Dashrender said:

Also, what RAID is the ReadyNAS? RAID 10 or 5? Assuming RAID 10, and 8 TB is enough, you'll probably be fine, but remember you are reducing your IOPs, but for backup and restore, you probably don't care.

RAID10 I believe. Why wouldn't I care about IOPS? The HP 410 RAID controller may also be faster than whatever is used by the ReadyNAS. Speed is always important with backup and recovery - especially recovery.

You would care, but only up until it has enough IOPS then you wouldn't care further. Backups have a maximum potential write throughput, once you can accept it at full speed, you don't care that you could take more because there is no more to take (currently.)

scottalanmiller

@Carnival-Boy said:

Speed is always important with backup and recovery - especially recovery.

Read speed is the same across all RAID types and not a factor, though. It's only the write speed that differs.

Dashrender

@Carnival-Boy said:

@scottalanmiller said:

The biggest chance will be the addition of the network bottleneck... but you already have that on the front end with the system talking to the HP, so I doubt that it will be very bad.

We also offload the backup files to an external hard drive, weekly. The 1GB network connection in the server is going to be much slower than the USB 3.0 connection, I believe.

With a ReadyNAS, I'd be tempted to connect it directly to the server, but a quick Google brings up a quote from @scottalanmiller on Spiceworks saying NAS should never be a solution for a one to one connection and DAS is always preferable. Is that still the case?

How would you connect the NAS directly to the server? USB? iSCSI? Using either of those solutions turns them into a SAN solution which would be much more fragile than a NAS solution, though might not matter substantially in this case - Scott would know better than I.

In this case, your NAS or DAS would nearly the same. Same hardware, you'd just be picking which protocol to use to communicate with the hardware. NAS would be using SMB, and DAS would be using iSCSI (it would be DAS only if you connect ethernet directly from the server to the ReadyNAS, otherwise it would be considered SAN, because you would be talking over the network.

scottalanmiller

@Carnival-Boy said:

With a ReadyNAS, I'd be tempted to connect it directly to the server, but a quick Google brings up a quote from @scottalanmiller on Spiceworks saying NAS should never be a solution for a one to one connection and DAS is always preferable. Is that still the case?

It's true as a theory. You don't have a reasonable "pure DAS" option here with a SAS connection, though. No one makes a good one in the price and size range. Using the NAS as a "direct attack file server" is fine here.

Dashrender

@scottalanmiller said:

@Carnival-Boy said:

@Dashrender said:

Also, what RAID is the ReadyNAS? RAID 10 or 5? Assuming RAID 10, and 8 TB is enough, you'll probably be fine, but remember you are reducing your IOPs, but for backup and restore, you probably don't care.

RAID10 I believe. Why wouldn't I care about IOPS? The HP 410 RAID controller may also be faster than whatever is used by the ReadyNAS. Speed is always important with backup and recovery - especially recovery.

You would care, but only up until it has enough IOPS then you wouldn't care further. Backups have a maximum potential write throughput, once you can accept it at full speed, you don't care that you could take more because there is no more to take (currently.)

Said so much better than I could.