Improving a backup NAS

[MtK]

Hey,
in the office I have FreeNAS with 6 x 4Tb drives in RaidZ2, and it is used as an NFS share for backups as well as TimeMachine for a total of up to 5 computers.
The NAS itself provides decent performance and reaches 80-90 Mbps in most backups, over 1Gbps LAN.

The problem and the future problem are that we can barely run 2 backups at the same time and we are about to be 10-15 people on total in the near future.

I was considering:

1. adding another vdev of 6 x 4Tb - will that "double" the throughput on the writes as well?
2. LACP x2 or even x4 from the switch to the server, to allow more throughput.

any thoughts?
will any of these actually allow 2 (or more) computers create backups at the same time without chocking both the network and the NAS...?

 

[depasseg]

You should be able to saturate a 1G link with those drives. Do you have sync writes configured? That could slow things down. If that's the case, then you need a good SLOG (and LACP won't help).
I'm not sure what the Intel G2020 is capable of. Maybe someone else can chime in.
My freenas2 has 6 6TB drives and can saturate 1G on a CIFS share, but not during replication (due to the SSH encryption overhead). I've found out that the CPU is the limiting factor.

 

[MtK]

You should be able to saturate a 1G link with those drives. Do you have sync writes configured? That could slow things down. If that's the case, then you need a good SLOG (and LACP won't help).
I'm not sure what the Intel G2020 is capable of. Maybe someone else can chime in.
My freenas2 has 6 6TB drives and can saturate 1G on a CIFS share, but not during replication (due to the SSH encryption overhead). I've found out that the CPU is the limiting factor.

The problem is that a single backup already saturates the 1Gbps. I'll be really happy to have 2 backups at the same time.
And no, the CPU is way under load...

 

[depasseg]

I was confused by the reference to 80-90 Mbps. It sounded like you were nowhere near 1Gbps.

Yes, then, lacp should certainly help. And the second vdev will also help, but I'm not sure it's needed.

 

[pirateghost]

I was confused by the reference to 80-90 Mbps. It sounded like you were nowhere near 1Gbps.

Yes, then, lacp should certainly help. And the second vdev will also help, but I'm not sure it's needed.

LACP will only help if there are many clients. 2 clients will not benefit from LACP

 

[anodos]

LACP will only help if there are many clients. 2 clients will not benefit from LACP

The OP is currently at 5 client machines backing up to the freenas server with the prospect of increasing to 10-15 in the near future. LACP is probably a good idea if his switch supports it.

On a side-note. Time machine? Ewww.

 

[pirateghost]

The OP is currently at 5 client machines backing up to the freenas server with the prospect of increasing to 10-15 in the near future. LACP is probably a good idea if his switch supports it.

On a side-note. Time machine? Ewww.

I based my comment on the fact they said they wanted 2 backups at the same time

 

[anodos]

I based my comment on the fact they said they wanted 2 backups at the same time

Yeah. I guess we don't know much about the specifics of this case.

@MtK, assuming that you're not doing BYOD, things will probably scale better if you create standard workstation images and proactively encourage people to work off of your network storage (rather than local hard drives). Switch from the pet model (where computers have cutesy names and get lots of love an individual attention) to the livestock model (where computers get numbers and sold off for mcdonalds hamburgers as they age and lose usefulness - or reimaged).

I'm not a big fan of netatalk + time machine. It's a bit too flaky to trust as a backup solution (at least primary backups). I've had my backups get corrupted one too many times.

I guess I feel a bit like rambling today. Don't mind me.