100TB Backup device advice

DearSX

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Hi, looking to buy or build an 80-100TB device to back up 20 VMs using Veeam locally and to cloud. Most servers are 200GBs and dont grow much. One sever is 15TB and growing by 500GBs a month. Hope to have all except the large server up and running within a day if disaster strikes.

Please help me choose a good solution.
 

DearSX

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I'm thinking maybe a Dell 740xd2 with 12 x 8TB drives in Raid 6, 10, or 60 would be a enough for 4-5 years and can be purchased with warranty refurbished from dell for under $9000. Then adding TrueNas to it for software and Veeam backups, the Wasabi cloud.
 

Dice

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Hello and welcome to the forums,

Are you interested in piecing together a machine yourself, or would you like a turn key solution?
For turnkey solutions, have a look at ixsystems.
 

Patrick M. Hausen

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c77dk

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blanchet

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DearSX

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Thanks all for the advice. A turn key solution is pretty nice, the supermicro option is can do also. Im going to present both options to management and the pros and cons.

What do y'all think or a Dell or HP server as a middle ground between those 2 options?
 

blanchet

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In my opinion, a DELL server is a wrong choice for TrueNAS because they come with a RAID controller instead of a HBA. So you will have to hack them to install a HBA, either by replacing the RAID controller or by installing a new firmware. In this case you lose all the benefits of having a DELL server like the one-step firmware upgrade with the Platform Specific Bootable ISO.

I cannot tell for HPE servers because I do not know enough them, but I guess that they have similar issues with TrueNAS.

For a professional usage of TrueNAS, there are only two options:
  • iXsystem hardware
  • SuperMicro server. It is cheaper especially with pre-owned hardware but you will have no software support.
 

DearSX

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Yeah, I was thinking of ordering a Dell with the BHA300 controller perhaps. Support is the biggest reason I think for going with Dell. If I am not around another engineer can call them up and get support easily and 5 years of support is very affordable. I don't have as much confident in the average engineer/technician working with TrueNAS yet.

We currently have several SuperMicro based backup devices in use, but these are small 3-4TB units with 4 bays and running a Ubuntu based backup with support called Continuum. I changed out the drives in 2 of them with 4 4TB drives in raid 5 (highest it supported), which I don't have as much confidence in anymore and those are filling up.
 

mrpasc

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Well, you can buy Dell servers with Dell HBA (HBA350, HBA355, HBA355i) at least here in Germany. Works out of the box like a charm with iDRAC and Dell server update utility. Maybe you have to contact your sales rep to have your server configured like this.
 

DearSX

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Thanks, I am going to take a look at those and discuss with our support.

Do you think a Dell Server (R740) can handle 12 large (8-14TB) drives well with that controller and TrueNAS and be enterprise reliable backup repository?
 

Nick2253

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Support is the biggest reason I think for going with Dell. If I am not around another engineer can call them up and get support easily and 5 years of support is very affordable. I don't have as much confident in the average engineer/technician working with TrueNAS yet.
Make sure you understand the limitations of that support. In my experience, Dell's support is great for hardware issues, but it's pretty useless for anything else. So no matter what software you install, even if its the Windows that you buy directly from Dell, Dell won't be able to provide very good support for that.

However, if you get something through iXsystems, then you'll be getting proper support for both hardware and software. In my opinion, that's the big win for iX: turnkey solution, 100% guaranteed hardware compatibility with TrueNAS, and support directly from the company that writes the software (which is small enough that you might be working directly with the actual developers depending on the issue). You pay a premium for that, but you get a premium product in return.
 

DearSX

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Yeah, I agree Nick having software also support is a big plus. I have reached out iX systems to see what the pricing and options will look like on their side.
 

Chris Moore

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Yeah, I agree Nick having software also support is a big plus. I have reached out iX systems to see what the pricing and options will look like on their side.
Around four years ago, I reached out to Dell, HP and iXsystems all to quote me on the same amount of storage. The iXsystems quote was much more competitive than either of the ones from Dell or HP... The only way to beat the price from iX was to buy a "raw" SuperMicro server and configure TrueNAS Core for ourselves. I felt comfortable doing that but four years later, I am moving on to a new job and the company I work for will be struggling to figure out how to support the four "roll your own" NAS systems I built.
If you have the budget to buy from Dell or HP, you should be able to afford the system from iXsystems with no difficulty and their support is well worth the investment.
 

Arwen

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I'm thinking maybe a Dell 740xd2 with 12 x 8TB drives in Raid 6, 10, or 60 would be a enough for 4-5 years and can be purchased with warranty refurbished from dell for under $9000. Then adding TrueNas to it for software and Veeam backups, the Wasabi cloud.
Everyone else covered your other questions, but I do HIGHLY recommend reading about ZFS & TrueNAS before jumping into a roll your own, (software only, or both software & hardware). An integrated box, with hardware & software, it's less important because somethings are helped by sales staff. And then sometimes post sales training, if available.

That you used RAID 6, 10 or 60 terminology indicates that you don't yet know enough about ZFS. Here are some reading materials that help new users to ZFS & TrueNAS. Beginning with terminology and abbreviations primer;


We, the community forum uses, have written both Resources like those I listed. And have written sticky forum posts.
 

Ericloewe

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Patrick M. Hausen

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I admit we did not bother to check how exactly they do it, but looks good:
Code:
[root@backupr03 ~]# for i in `jot 24 0`; do smartctl -A /dev/da${i} | grep 'Current Drive Temperature'; done
Current Drive Temperature:     26 C
Current Drive Temperature:     27 C
Current Drive Temperature:     25 C
Current Drive Temperature:     28 C
Current Drive Temperature:     29 C
Current Drive Temperature:     28 C
Current Drive Temperature:     28 C
Current Drive Temperature:     29 C
Current Drive Temperature:     28 C
Current Drive Temperature:     27 C
Current Drive Temperature:     28 C
Current Drive Temperature:     26 C
Current Drive Temperature:     27 C
Current Drive Temperature:     25 C
Current Drive Temperature:     24 C
Current Drive Temperature:     31 C
Current Drive Temperature:     30 C
Current Drive Temperature:     27 C
Current Drive Temperature:     32 C
Current Drive Temperature:     31 C
Current Drive Temperature:     28 C
Current Drive Temperature:     27 C
Current Drive Temperature:     26 C
Current Drive Temperature:     25 C
[root@backupr03 ~]# 
 

DearSX

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Around four years ago, I reached out to Dell, HP and iXsystems all to quote me on the same amount of storage. The iXsystems quote was much more competitive than either of the ones from Dell or HP... The only way to beat the price from iX was to buy a "raw" SuperMicro server and configure TrueNAS Core for ourselves. I felt comfortable doing that but four years later, I am moving on to a new job and the company I work for will be struggling to figure out how to support the four "roll your own" NAS systems I built.
If you have the budget to buy from Dell or HP, you should be able to afford the system from iXsystems with no difficulty and their support is well worth the investment.


Thanks, I agree on the issue with building my own NAS, I want ongoing support for the same reason you outlined.

So far a Dell R750 is cost effective vs an iXsystem only if I source my own drives. Dell charges $1500 for each 18 TB drive or $18,000 just for 12 of them vs $5000 buying WD 18TB drives separate.
 

DearSX

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Everyone else covered your other questions, but I do HIGHLY recommend reading about ZFS & TrueNAS before jumping into a roll your own, (software only, or both software & hardware). An integrated box, with hardware & software, it's less important because somethings are helped by sales staff. And then sometimes post sales training, if available.

That you used RAID 6, 10 or 60 terminology indicates that you don't yet know enough about ZFS. Here are some reading materials that help new users to ZFS & TrueNAS. Beginning with terminology and abbreviations primer;


We, the community forum uses, have written both Resources like those I listed. And have written sticky forum posts.

Thanks, Yeah there is a lot of to learn about ZFS, to where I would prefer to just pay support/sales to figure things out for me in terms of config for our needs. I will continue to learn about it but won't be confident about it for a while.
 

Chris Moore

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So far a Dell R750 is cost effective vs an iXsystem only if I source my own drives. Dell charges $1500 for each 18 TB drive or $18,000 just for 12 of them vs $5000 buying WD 18TB drives separate.
That is exactly why I found, that both Dell and HP priced themselves out of the ballpark. Naturally, iXsystems wants you to buy the disks from them, but they were a lot more reasonably priced and flexible with regard to building me something that I thought was appropriate.
Honestly, Dell and HP have no excuse for the price they charge for disks and the problem I had with ordering servers from Dell that did not include drives was that the servers came with blanks where the drives were supposed to go that were not usable as drive trays. This required that drive trays needed to be purchased separately and at a significant cost and time delay.
 
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