Advice for backing up RAID 10

[frowertr]

I have a Poweredge Server I use for my business. It currently runs in RAID 10 (four 1TB SAS 7.2K drives). I recently just got into using VMs so I need a backup solution now so I thought I'd ask for suggestions.

The server has 8 bays that are hot pluggable. The RAID 10 array takes up half of those bay. I thought about simply purchasing two 2TB drives (identical to those used in the RAID 10) and setting them up as RAID 1. I could install those into the server chassis itself. I could use VEEM (pretty damn cool software by the way - just started playing with it) to backup my VM to the RAID 1 array.

Of course, the downside to that is theft/fire/power surge and I lose not only my RAID 10 array but also my backup RAID 1 array.

What would be some other alternatives? I'm not really interested in cloud backup. I'd choke my upstream internet connection daily if I had to backup to a cloud service. What about external HD's? Are there enterprise solutions that won't break the bank?

Edit: Just looked on the back of my server and it appears that I don't have any eSATA ports which is disappointing. Only USB.

 

[Jeff7181]

There's always tape, but as someone who manages a tape backup environment, I'd recommend against that, especially if you're just backing up one server. Switching tapes can be annoying, finding bad tapes can be annoying, restoring from tape can be annoying... tape works best in large environments with a tape library so you don't have to manual move tapes in and out of drives.

Sounds like a NAS device that supports deduplication would be your ideal option. Whether you choose to buy one or build one, I think that's going to be the way to go. If you build one yourself, I'd highly recommend looking into using BTRFS as opposed to ZFS.

 

[milee]

Is the current PowerEdge a rackmount system? An eventual new system has to be rackmountable?

I would advise against backing up to an array in the same physical system. I would just use a new PowerEdge T20 w/ G3220. It takes 4x 3.5'' and 2x 2.5'' drives. It also depends on your backup process. If your backup consists in transferring large amounts of data at once, you could use a 2Gbps connection on the network and should use a minimum of 4x 1TB drives RAID 10 on the backup server. If you version your backups (and they're large) you should use 4 larger disks (2, 3, 4 TB). Sequential throughput on SATA NAS drives for a 4-drive RAID 10 would be ~2Gbps (a little faster at the beginning, somewhat slower at the end).

 

[frowertr]

There's always tape, but as someone who manages a tape backup environment, I'd recommend against that, especially if you're just backing up one server. Switching tapes can be annoying, finding bad tapes can be annoying, restoring from tape can be annoying... tape works best in large environments with a tape library so you don't have to manual move tapes in and out of drives.

Sounds like a NAS device that supports deduplication would be your ideal option. Whether you choose to buy one or build one, I think that's going to be the way to go. If you build one yourself, I'd highly recommend looking into using BTRFS as opposed to ZFS.

I haven't done much research into tapes. I thought their read/write times were so slow that they weren't as heavily used in production environments as they once were.

I'm thinking a NAS may be the way to go. Another toy I get to build!

 

[frowertr]

Is the current PowerEdge a rackmount system? An eventual new system has to be rackmountable?

I would advise against backing up to an array in the same physical system. I would just use a new PowerEdge T20 w/ G3220. It takes 4x 3.5'' and 2x 2.5'' drives. It also depends on your backup process. If your backup consists in transferring large amounts of data at once, you could use a 2Gbps connection on the network and should use a minimum of 4x 1TB drives RAID 10 on the backup server. If you version your backups (and they're large) you should use 4 larger disks (2, 3, 4 TB). Sequential throughput on SATA NAS drives for a 4-drive RAID 10 would be ~2Gbps (a little faster at the beginning, somewhat slower at the end).

It's a T420. I have no current plans to rackmount it. That T20 is tiny! I'll check into it a bit more. What OS would you put on it?

 

[_Rick_]

Well, first of all you need to tell us about the usage of the actual array, and what kind of backup you want.

If you need 24/7 availability, first of all to get proper backups you need an FS with snapshot functionality. Backing up an FS that is being written to is going to break things, but if you remount read-only for a few hours a day, that will get you to the point where you can make backups, without snapshots.

If you want drop-in fast backups, disk images can't be beaten. Unmount, pull two disks from your RAID10, replacing them with new ones: voilà you have created a snapshot backup.

File based backup is going to be an order of magnitude slower and bind I/O and compute/memory resources for a longer time. At the bottom level is creating a tar archive, which you can optionally compress and then put onto either network or local storage.

A level above that is rsync, again to local or remote storage. It reduces the overhead of transmission of unchanged files.
Beyond that you'll get into versioning.

If you need versioning backups, you might need more specialized software.

As you climb this ladder, the more likely it is for complications to arise in the backup process, users not realizing the potential of the solution, and the time to rebuild also gets larger.

The most common SOHO solution, which indeed sounds suitable for you, is a NAS, if just pulling drives and rebuilding is not an option.

Depending on how much data is generated in the course of a day, you might want to get an initial image to an offsite location via pulling/cloning the disks, and then rsync over a smaller pipe to keep the offsite data up-to date. If you have a lot of modifications happening though, that will require a pretty big interconnect.

Otherwise, I would honestly recommend growing the RAID 10 array to another set of mirrors, getting 4 disks, and cycle the disks to one set at an alternative location, one set syncing and two sets in production.

 

[Jeff7181]

I haven't done much research into tapes. I thought their read/write times were so slow that they weren't as heavily used in production environments as they once were.

I'm thinking a NAS may be the way to go. Another toy I get to build!

LTO6 will write 200 MB/sec uncompressed.

 

[frowertr]

@Rick

Wow, thanks for all that info. The server mainly run my Quickbooks server program that attaches to my POS system in my retail store. It is really overpowered for what it does but that gives me a chance to play a bit on it and use it for a lab as well. Just got into using VMs so am trying to learn a few new tricks.

I think what I am going to do is create another RAID 1 array in the server for a local/in-chassis backup AND build a small NAS to backup to as well that will also run RAID 1 or 10. I should have most of my basis covered that way excluding fire/theft.

 

[milee]

@Rick Assuming Windows, pretty much every DBMS is now VSS-aware. If the data needed to be backed up is a set of databases and a few VHDs, he can just use the built-in DBMS backup management and the VM Manager's built-in backup options. If the data is more complex, the imaging approach is the best option. I wouldn't physically swap hard drives for daily (or more frequent) backups considering HDD connectors wearing.

@frowertr Yes it's tiny, but it takes 4x 3.5'' SATA, and for your situation looks like a great option to consider. Only Windows Server 2012/R2 are supported by Dell. I would put R2 on it. Going for an additional RAID 1 in the same system and for a basic NAS appliance while at the same time choosing some sort of image backup will double your backup time compared to a RAID 10 in a new machine and a 2Gbps connection between the two of them. It all depends on your backup frequency and the volume of data.

 

[frowertr]

@frowertr Yes it's tiny, but it takes 4x 3.5'' SATA, and for your situation looks like a great option to consider. Only Windows Server 2012/R2 are supported by Dell. I would put R2 on it. Going for an additional RAID 1 in the same system and for a basic NAS appliance while at the same time choosing some sort of image backup will double your backup time compared to a RAID 10 in a new machine and a 2Gbps connection between the two of them. It all depends on your backup frequency and the volume of data.

My plan was just to use VEEM to back up the VM's totally and not mess file backups at all. So I'd use VEEM to backup to the local RAID 1 array AND I'd use VEEM to backup to the NAS box with an additional RAID 1 (or 10 if budget allows). My data isn't critical enough that I need to actually work with individual file backups.

As far as 2012/R2. I have never used Microsoft server products. Always use Ubuntu/Slackware so there will be a slight learning curve I guess trying to figure out Windows server.

 

[Carson Dyle]

You have 4 x 1TB drives in RAID 10 array, correct? So you have less that 2 TB of data.

If this is mostly static data such as large media files, use an external 2TB drive and backup to that drive by mirroring the array. If the data changes frequently you'll want more room so you can do full and icremental or differential backups, so a 3TB or 4TB drive would work better.

 

[frowertr]

Hmm.. Ran into a snag I didn't think about.

I installed twin 2TB drives into the server and setup a separate RAID 1 mirror. Going to start with local backups onto a separate RAID array until I purchase a NAS. I then installed free Veeam onto one of my client computers. Added in the server/VM information into Veeam and it picks those up nicely. Here is the problem:

How the heck am I supposed to point Veeam to backup to the target RAID 1 array in the server? When I click on one of my VMs in Veeam and then click Veeamzip, it wants to know where it needs to write the backup to. I guess I assumed Veeam would interact with ESXI and "see" the RAID 1 array.

Ideas?

 

[Jeff7181]

Create a new VM, give it a 2TB VMDK on your RAID1 datastore and use backup software that allows you to back up remote machines.

 

[frowertr]

Create a new VM, give it a 2TB VMDK on your RAID1 datastore and use backup software that allows you to back up remote machines.

Will Veeam do this?

 

[Jeff7181]

Will Veeam do this?

I don't know, I've never used Veeam.

You might also look into Acronis. They have a couple different tiers of their product and they may be able to do full image backups of your VM's without requiring Virtual Center to plug into.