What type of storage array do you use?

Not an endorsement for any particular vendor, but my personal observation is that NetApp are usually great performers. Isilon can be too, but often they push the archive class nodes which are cost-effective and backup fast OR copy fast, but trying to do both at the same time overwhelms the cache and performance suffers.

I have heard good things about infinidat as well - fast storage and great UI.

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.

I read your post @Joel Lovell  and immediately smelled that you have to be working for Nutanix. Sorry, to say, but I really do not like to see this kind of advertisements here. Please use Linkedin, and if you really want to make a statement, than please come prepared and give us some proof showing why a v7000 cannot compete against Nutanix Objects. Do not forget to include a budgetary quote for the setup ;-) 

Thanks!

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. 

Interesting discussion - and I am not going to put any vendor or array name into this post because I believe that for backup storage on disk you usually don’t need any features that go beyond “standard stuff” that all vendors of a given class of storage should be able to provide - and performance in the end boils down to actually used physical devices and the Raid / Pooling etc. technology on top.

So when it comes to choosing a disk based storage solution for Commvault Backup there are a few questions one should ask themselves:

• Do I need automated failover for Media Agents on backup as well as restore (Commvault GridStor)
  • This requires all involved Media Agents to be able to read and write to the same storage library at the same time. This can mainly be achieved using NAS or in some cases clustered/scale out filesystems (e.g. Hyperscale)
• Do I want to use partitioned deduplication in Commvault
  • For this at least all Media Agents need to be able to read all the data - write could be to dedicated mount paths per MA. Data Server IP with Read Only sharing could be a solution here if DAS/SAN is used for storage. Keep in mind that if the sharing MA is offline then you won’t be able to guarantee restores/copies - backups will continue to run.
• Do I need to do regular “full” copies (e.g. tape-out) or complete data recoveries
  • This will require to read all “logical” data blocks - meaning it will be quite random (dedupe references could be all over the library) and it will read the same data many times (references could be referenced multiple times)

What I have encountered in the past is that especially the last bullet point has not always been thought of, when sizing backend storage for Commvault. The classic way of thinking has been “it’s backup, so let’s just put few really really large drives into RAID 6 and we should be fine” which is definitely true for a non-deduplicated storage pool. Once deduplication comes into play, the randomness of data is growing on reads - writes will still be sequential as they will only write new data plus some references and metadata - so it’s always “additive”. 

Commvault provides a tool that lets you test disk performance of a disk library to find out if it is sufficient for your needs: https://documentation.commvault.com/commvault/v11/article?p=8855.htm

My personal preference for non-Hyperscale backup storage is high performance NAS as this will give you the sharing of the library across many Media Agents read and write so you can do failovers, AuxCopies using just the target Media Agent, restore through any MA etc. etc. 

It could also make sense to take a peek at Commvault Hyperscale technology which will run on many different server hardware platforms - as this is really easy to buy, setup and run and it gives you all the same benefits plus simple scale out.

@Onno van den Berg Good points, although I have found that is ideal for the primary target to be file for the sparse attribute support and secondary cloud (for all the reasons described).

Hi everyone,

We backup data from the following storage arrays/servers:

• Hitachi VSP F900
• Hitachi VSP G700
• Hitachi VSP G600
• Hitachi HNAS

We have great performance reading from all the Hitachi arrays, and writing to our maglibs which are on the G700 and G600.

Thanks,

Lavanya

Hi David,

Thanks for the feedback. I love Hitachi arrays but I’ll keep this info in my pocket for the future. : )

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 use Synology RS3614XS+ arrays.  We have 2 arrays one in each of our Data Centers.  We have a 22 TB disk in each site for backups and a 24 TB disk in each site for AUX Copy.  We have almost 6 TB of data being backed up and everything is working great.   Performance is great.

I really like the HPE StoreOnce solution, it hit my price point really well, and Commvault can talk natively to the HPE solution. That means I can offload all my de-dupe to HPE, leaving Commvault focused on just data protection. Across all my datasets, I’m getting about 7:1 dedupe ratio, with some stuff getting as high as 11:1.

Note, I’m in the Medium business market, so there are faster solutions out there, but this hit a perfect price vs performance balance for me.

We used / loved HPE StoreVirtual but sadly discontinued so we have tried some MSA 2050 / 2052 arrays for VMWare and Commvault destination, and they have not been nearly as reliable or capable.

Probably will get something else for our next separate SAN expansion.

Our dedupe ratios are more like 100:1 for multiple Windows servers with daily fulls for one year stored.

I’m quite happy with Isilon tbh. The performance issues what we are seeing is most of the time DDB related, and not isilon.