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?
hi all,
when it comes to backup-to-disk commvault media library, i would look at any entry-level simple cost-efficient block-based storage array. All drives to be near-line SAS 7.2Krpm drives. depending on the back-end storage you require you need to size the number of disks base on the acceptable IOPS in your environment and your backup plocy.
let’s say you have 100TB of back-end storage and you need to take a monthly full copy to tapes. so you need to have enough read throughput from your SAN medialibrary to pump to the LTO drives.
so if you require to read from the backup-to-disk array at 200MB/s this means around 3,200 iops (where io size = 64K)
so you need to put enough 7Krpm NLSAS HDDs spindles to give your 3,200 iops (around 48 7krpm NLSAS HDD)
so the number of 7krpm HDDs is more important than the capacity it provides.
We have a smaller operation and use a DataOn JBOD enclosure with a MegaRAID controller and 12G SAS connection. It handles everything we need. We AuxCopy to LTO8 for air-gapped copy and Azure Archive tier for offsite.
We generally use NetApp e-series generally for short/mid term dedupe storage and StorageGRID for long term.
The alternative is the HPE MSA class array direct attached to the MediaAgent. Something that’s scalable is the key.
For simple storage usage without any “smarts”, I’ve noticed many customers are choosing Isilon, especially for large scale deployments of PB’s in size.
Other than that, NetApp’s have traditionally offered great balance between performance and capacity.
Lastly, would caution against cheap/low end NAS devices like QNAP or Synology as most of their products have terrible performance when trying to do both reads and writes concurrently as well as having less support / product reliability.
We started using NetApp E 5600 Series and absolutely love them. These things rock and are pretty simple to install/manage.
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