Skip to main content

Hi all,

any advantages, other than security with removing attack surface, when using iSCSI attached volumes from a NAS directly to the Windows MediaAgent rather then writing via SMB to the NAS share?

In regards of performance, ransomware protection etc?

Your thoughts are highly appreciated, thanks in advance

regards

Michael

I would recommend to use SMB! Reason for it is because it allows you to really benefit from HA on recovery side. Other than that it depends on the kind of storage array behind it. The ransomware protection capabilities are applicable to both SMB and iSCSI (block) and most storage vendors are adding additional ransomware mitigating improvements on their side like snapshot eradication protection or file level monitoring. 


Old thread, sorry to steal, but any word on the performance aspect? We’ve got smb-connected disklibrary behind commvault, and honestly it sucks bigtime but replacing it ‘just for try’ is not feasible. Even accounting for the excessive random access (it’s deduplicated, so rehydrating for restore or tape-out is expected to take a massive hit), speeds of 10-20Gb/hour are ridiculous. Not to mention what happens when there are simultaneous writes from commvault to that disklibrary - it can handle >1000Gb/hour, but if random reads are happening, writes are done at lowest prio and almost zero. Just browsing through disklib from mediaagent is ridiculous, it just grinds to a halt. It’s not an issue on the NAS itself though, as other user-clients still fly by at >400Mbyte/s read/write and no noticable delay while browsing….  


Reply