What type of storage array do you use?

  • 28 January 2021
  • 31 replies
  • 3988 views

Userlevel 3
Badge +5

We currently use IBM V5000 arrays for our Commvault backup target to land our deduped backups.  We are starting to review other options to see what other fast, cost effective options are out there.  I do prefer to use Fiber Channel connections, but open to options.   Since Commvault is really the brain in our scenario, the storage array does not really need any features, just good speed.

 

What Vendor Storage arrays do you use?  Are you happy with it?  


31 replies

Userlevel 6
Badge +15

We have a customer that has an Isilon for disk storage.

Backup speeds are ok, but DASH to DR or Copy to Tape speeds are terrible. “Last night’s” backups copy to DR at no more than 500GB/hr, if we’re lucky and copy to tape speeds do not exceed 200GB/hr.

Fallen Behind Copies are literally years behind.

Both Commvault and Isilon have checked it out and cannot do anything about it.

We did spec Hyperscale before implementation but we were overruled and now I sit with this issue. Very frustrating.

Open another thread in the proper area and we would discuss about such, to avoid beeing off-topic here.

This is the perfect example of ‘intelligent storage’ that delivers performance while writing, but when reading data from outside of the ‘buffer’/’landing zone’ (or whatever they call it), the performance is degraded, as it has to be rehydrated from the array to be provided to Commvault, before it can be processed.

Always try to have only 1 deduplication level : Commvault’s (best) or hardware (worst, as you become hardware dependent), and not 2.

Userlevel 1
Badge +6

Nice topic, found it just now.

IBM’s V7000’s are our bottleneck in backup speeds..

Having NLSAS spinning disks is a logical option for a backup solution, but when you have databases which are in 50-150TB size and you need to back them up over the weekend - problems arise.
And it does not matter if you have multiple mdisks/pools or one pool with a bigger spinning capacity to have generally better IO rates.

We manage 1-2 TB/hr for SQL and 1-3TB/hr for Oracle databases backups, but still. 

 

We have also tried Hitachi’s ObjectStorage - what a bad option for backups! We’ve been in read-only mode more time rather being available once commvault starts to send requests during backups..


Would be interesting to find better solution.

 

Badge +3

Pure Storage - FlashBlade (NFS) for Rapid recovery

I’m curious as to what OS you have on your media agents?

Userlevel 7
Badge +19

@Laurent @JamesS can you share your experiences with Flashblade so far? we're strongly considering buying the new Flashblade/S version that was release earlier this month?

Are you leveraging the S3 protocol? 

Userlevel 7
Badge +19

We have deiced to migrate the primary landing zone for backup data to a Pure Storage FlashBlade/S array located in one of our DCs. To make sure we always have a copy available we will create a near synchronous copy to our large archive tier which writes the data using replicated EC across 3 DCs. Really looking forward to be able to deliver a fast recovery tier to our customers! We'll definitely share our experiences with you all! 

Badge +5

Have used EMC Clarion’s and VNX’s in the past however have moved to Dell EMC Unity All Flash HP Nimble Hybrid storage systems during the last couple of years.

 

Performance wise the difference is night and day. Very happy with the new storage ecosystem.

Hi,

is it attached via SAN or NAS Protocol?

 

thanks

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