What do we need to do

[alamb200]

Hi,
I am looking at having some sort of NAS on our network so that I can back up all our servers to it and then use on backup device to backup the NAS instead of the 5 devices I have at the moment.
I currently have an IBM EXPM2512 device which only has three drives in it and space for a few more so my plan is to utilise this in some way.
Please can you give me some advice on how I should proceed with this?
Thanks,
alamb200

 

[jgreco]

So that looks to be some sort of external disk expansion unit.

What you need for FreeNAS is a server. In order to connect to an external disk expansion unit, you need a server that has an HBA with an external IPASS connector (or cobble together an equivalent setup). FreeNAS works best with HBA's, not RAID controllers, so the ideal FreeNAS setup will omit IBM's preferred M5025.

Without any information on what you're backing up, it is difficult to comment further. The way you design a server is dependent on the expected workload. For example, backing up ESXi VM's via NFS requires some different strategy than storing dump or tar files from a bunch of UNIX servers.

It is unclear what your "backup device" is. The NAS itself is acting as a backup device, and of course it is aggregating the backups from the other servers. If you're looking to push that off to a tape device, I'm not sure how complicated that would be to accomplish.