Storage...Lots of storage needed

Syngress

Syngress

Syngress

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Has anyone used the Synology RS18016xs+ in anger? I am looking for a solution to give me approx 100TB of usable space. As this will be in RAID10 (I don't fancy the rebuild times with Raid6) it will also need to use the RX1216sas expansion.

I plan on using HGST HE8 SAS drives, the storage doesn't need to be amazingly fast, hence no need to use SSD's for any caching.

This is to store backup data, and a 2nd unit will be used in another location for replication.

Cost for a single site is approx £15k and I can't think of a cheaper way of achieving this, am I being silly thinking the Synology will be upto this? Any better way to do this without spending a significant amount more?

Any help/ideas appreciated :)
 
buy a 24 bay enclosure and something supported like a lsi 9211 8 or 16i and put freenas on it?

I have done this for like 500 quid without drives.
 
I wouldn't trust a Synology with 100TB of data, I wouldn't trust it to replicate, and I wouldn't put 100TB of stuff on a device with no real support. There is no way that 100TB of backups are worthless so don't treat them like they are.

Get some pricing for Data Domain and see how it goes. You might want to work out how your backup sets will react to dedupe and compression as well because you may not need to purchase 100TB of capacity.
 
I'd stay away from the helium drives as the helium will gradually leak out. Not for a year or three, of course.

Rather than two identical boxes, perhaps you might consider a tape silo instead of the second disk array?
 
For that level of storage you want enterprise grade or don't bother. Dell (EMC), HPE etc.

It's not going to be cheap, but it will work.
 
Depending on the type of backups being stored an enterprise de-dupe appliance seems like the most reasonable solution. With a high dedupe ratio, compression & low data change rate you could most likely forget about your 100TB requirement.
 
I'd avoid DIY for this kind of stuff, stick to Netapp/EMC/etc. and you'll actually be able to sleep at night. You'd be surprised how low you can get the price by the time you've finished bashing their heads together.
 
As people have said, that's a lot of backup data to entrust to a homebrew system - don't know that I'd want to be responsible for supporting that...

Data Domain is perfect for this, but it doesn't come cheap. We've been quoted £100K for 2x50TiB usable space appliances.
You shouldn't need anything anywhere near this beefy though, backups are pretty good for dedupe and compression.

We have a mix of file level, DB, and VM backups and our current DD appliance is using ~15TiB, the pre-compression stats say we're storing 723Tib of data.
I believe a lot of this gain is from our VM backups, as I think it counts them as if a full were being run every day which is a little disingenuous - but it certainly looks impressive.
 
Caged already suggested, and I second: Data Domain is perfect for this. It can behave as a virtual tape library, and will do compression and de-dupe. It also does cross-site replication, and assuming you have decent backup software, you can archive to tape, keeping only recent backups on disk, and sending the older 7-year stuff to tape.
 
HP Storageworks D2D option personally, we use one at work and it's fine on the later firmwares.
 
What are you using for backup?

I've installed a few Synology RS3614RPXS for Veeam backups, but usually off site or for customers who want to keep a large number of restore points and have a primary backup storage. I like them and I've never had any problems with them, they perform well and are easy to use. However, the lack of proper support limits them - my rule of thumb with them is if you can manage without it for a week, go for it. If not, look elsewhere.

At your scale I'd probably be looking at either a HP MSA 2040, but it's a SAN so you'll need a server in front of it, or just a server with a decent RAID controller and some SAS shelves. We put a lot of HP DL380 Gen 9 with 12 LFF disks in out as backup servers, adding SAS shelves as needed. Works really well with Veeam. 5 year support on these is not massively expensive, especially compared to NetApp/EMC etc.
 
If you really need something cheap then wait until Server 2016 is out because it finally supports asynchronous replication as well as dedupe and compression so you can fill a Dell R730xd with huge SATA disks and use storage spaces to handle the parity, then just expose the storage as an SMB share to whatever you are backing up with.
 
What data types are you backing up?
How are you currently doing your backups?

I work within HPE Storage so obviously biased towards HPE. If you've no idea how well your data will dedupe, i'd suggest trialling out our VSA (virtual storage appliance). You can get a free 1Tb licence and deploy it within a virtualised environment. There's three "interfaces" to backup to - NAS/VTL/Catalyst, most customers are moving away from NAS/VTL as these are old technologies. You obviously won't see the performance capabilities when running virtualised compared to a dedicated box. But you can at least have a play around with the features and run some test backups to see how it dedupes.
 
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