> I'll do backups to disk on a raid6 (28 TB) which is attached via
> fibre channel.

I recommend against using a single raid for backups. If the raid
controller silently corrupts your raid or there is a file system
problem you can easily loose all of your backups. I have seen both
happen in my 15 years in the industry. I was not in-charge of the data
when either happened and we were not using bacula.

> There will be 50 clients with data ranging from a few MB to 100 GB or
> more for a full backup, tiny files from mail servers as well as large
> database ones.
> Speed and reliability are both important (as always).
>
> The question now is simply what is the best setup?
>

I do not think there is one simple best setup.

>
> Should I do one big volume pool or better a few smaller ones?
> I think one big pool is easier to manage.
>
This is a user preference. I have 15 to 20 pools with about the same
amount of space and clients but most of these pools are for archival.
I only have 2 pools for backup.

>
> What is the best size for the volumes?

My opinion is 5 to 10 GB. But others use much larger volumes. Since
you have so much space 100GB would be fine. Remember that recycling is
all or none. I mean an entire volume needs to be recycled to reclaim
any space from after a job expires. So if you make your volumes too
large the recycling may take longer than you think.

> 100 GB seems to be reasonable.
>
> Which file system to have the best transfer rates? xfs? ext4?

Either xfs or ext4 are good choices. On the subject of filesystems I
do not believe ext3 is a good choice however since it will take
minutes to delete a large file like this with xfs and ext4 taking less
than 1 second.

> xfs could be better here but I am not sure about it.
>
> I like ubuntu. 10.04.1 LTS or the newer 10.10?
> I tend to LTS.
>
I would go for the newer.

John

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