NAS Solution for backups

XenosTech · February 4, 2017

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

They shouldn't be too expensive, but that depends on a lot of things. You'll have vendors such as EMC, Netapp, HPE, Hitachi, IBM, Oracle and Dell all competing with each other who have a wide range of solutions. The outlier here is Dell who doesn't have the very top end offerings as the others but has become very popular and is quite relevant for your comparison.

Below these you have Nimble Storage, Pure Storage, Tintri etc. There's more but having a mind blank and anyway too many. Some of these are cheaper as they focus on block storage only/virtualization so won't have any direct NAS features, you'd need a server/VM in front to do it.

Then below this you have QNAP, Synology etc. QNAP does have some rather high-end offerings now days though.

Lastly there's build your own, FreeNAS, Ceph, Gluster, Storage Spaces etc.

I would have a look at a Netapp 2620, HPE 3PAR and Dell FS7610. This is your higher end and can be price competitive however this tends to be only when you start putting a lot of storage behind these controllers else the $/GB is high. 16TB starting point is likely going to be too low, Dell and HPE 3PAR might be able to do it. HPE does have lower end offerings like StoreEasy but I'd use QNAP over that, there's also HPE StoreOnce which is an actual backup appliance but I'm not sure what software you need to use it.

For 16TB a QNAP TS-EC1280U-E3-4GE-R2 is a good option to look at, this can also scale to very large capacities.

The bigger question is how is this storage going to be used? What is the data source being backed up? What backup software? If it's something like Veeam 9.5 a straight Dell server with DAS disk and ReFS will do a very good job and likely at the lowest price point.

Right now we're backing up VM's like they were actual servers using Netbackup. So we have images of the disks and systems states (plus this huge ass exchange server). Not sure what we're going use to do backups when we upgrade all their servers... Probably Acronis or veeam but not sure at this point since we're still trying to spec all the equipment.

leadeater · February 4, 2017

1 hour ago, XenosTech said:

Right now we're backing up VM's like they were actual servers using Netbackup. So we have images of the disks and systems states (plus this huge ass exchange server). Not sure what we're going use to do backups when we upgrade all their servers... Probably Acronis or veeam but not sure at this point since we're still trying to spec all the equipment.

Ok then I'd highly suggest Veeam, one of if not the best choice out there for backing up VMs. Rubrik is is also very good, currently doing a PoC, and their licensing is super easy. You buy a backup appliance and what ever fits is it. It's scale out so add more boxes to backup more or keep for longer. There's no licensing based on host CPUs or total front end data etc.

So Veeam + Dell server could be a good option and meet the Dell requirement/want.

XenosTech · February 4, 2017

3 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Ok then I'd highly suggest Veeam, one of if not the best choice out there for backing up VMs. Rubrik is is also very good, currently doing a PoC, and their licensing is super easy. You buy a backup appliance and what ever fits is it. It's scale out so add more boxes to backup more or keep for longer. There's no licensing based on host CPUs or total front end data etc.

So Veeam + Dell server could be a good option and meet the Dell requirement/want.

I'll keep that in mind when we get to that part but I like veeam an idiot can configure a backup with that with ease