Hey all, long time FreeNAS user here - finally getting the chance to do an install at my day job.
We're looking to replace our two Veeam backup repositories. VessRAID iSCSI systems - Currently they're too small and too slow. I've talked a lot of people into FreeNAS and showed them the GUI and features in a few VMs.
They're pushing for using a hardware vendor, and really, I can't disagree since warranty support is always nice. I've been looking at ServersDirect hardware offerings, and they seem to be pretty solid.
Right now, we're looking at the Supermicro SC846E16-R1200B. Filling it up with 4TB consumer drives, I don't expect top notice performance, but I do want something that works well for our backups.
Currently, we pull down and hold about 20TB of VM backups spread across 2 sites. I don't expect needing line-rate disk dumping, since our SAN and the vSphere environment are probably gonna bottleneck first. Therefore, 2 40TB servers will give us a lot of room to grow, and... still be cheaper.
This leads me to my questions to those of you with experience:
We're looking to replace our two Veeam backup repositories. VessRAID iSCSI systems - Currently they're too small and too slow. I've talked a lot of people into FreeNAS and showed them the GUI and features in a few VMs.
They're pushing for using a hardware vendor, and really, I can't disagree since warranty support is always nice. I've been looking at ServersDirect hardware offerings, and they seem to be pretty solid.
Right now, we're looking at the Supermicro SC846E16-R1200B. Filling it up with 4TB consumer drives, I don't expect top notice performance, but I do want something that works well for our backups.
Currently, we pull down and hold about 20TB of VM backups spread across 2 sites. I don't expect needing line-rate disk dumping, since our SAN and the vSphere environment are probably gonna bottleneck first. Therefore, 2 40TB servers will give us a lot of room to grow, and... still be cheaper.
This leads me to my questions to those of you with experience:
- Would a 2.5Ghz 4 core E5-2609 with 64GB RAM handle backup duty no problem? We'd like to get them with the dual 10Gig network adapters (obviously not much hope ever saturating it). We can also do dual 1.8Ghz CPUs if GHz isn't something that is needed, I know dual CPUs let you spread the RAM and use all the PCI-E buses on that board...
- How terrible is it to use ~20 4TB consumer drives? I assume I'd be splitting it up into 5 4-drive Raidz2 vdevs to make up the pool, but I don't really have much experience with large drive counts.
- In talking with ServersDirect, they recommended to NOT get the dual SAS expander and get a LSI 9207-4i4e. Is this advisable, or should I get the Dual SAS expander and get two LSI 9207-4i4e HBAs? I'd like the idea of the external ports, since a JBOD might one day be an easy addition, but since I'm doing ZFS RAIDs, I could put half the disks of each vdev on one HBA and the other half on the other. That's probably a bad idea for some reason, but I don't know what it is..
- Since we can mount NFS and dump the data there, should I consider some ZIL SSDs? I know the use cases for ZILs are specific, but I would like to get the backup jobs done ASAP, and eliminating as many bottlenecks as I can is something I'm really aiming for.
I'd really appreciate any input any of you can give me - even if it is to tell me to STFU and call a "real professional". :p
