On 11/04/10 10:08, Oliver Hoffmann wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'll do backups to disk on a raid6 (28 TB) which is attached via
> fibre channel.
> 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? 
> 
> Should I do one big volume pool or better a few smaller ones?
> I think one big pool is easier to manage.

I have a total of four pools:  a Full pool on tape and a Full pool on
disk, both with one-year retention; a Differential pool on disk, with
two months retention (thus spanning across two monthly Full backups);
and an Incremental pool on disk with one week retention (sufficient to
span from one weeky differential backup to the next).

> What is the best size for the volumes? 
> 100 GB seems to be reasonable. 

I do not limit my volume sizes.  I manage their size using volume use
duration instead.  Each days backups go into a single volume, whatever
size that volume needs to be, a few GB or several hundred.

> Which file system to have the best transfer rates? xfs? ext4?
> 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.
> 
> What do you think?

If your backup server will be running Linux, then for the time being I
would suggest XFS.  It is optimized for sustained streaming reads and
writes, with multimedia and video originally in mind, but just the thing
for Bacula volumes.  You might want to consider btrfs when it becomes
production-ready, though.

My backup server runs Solaris 10 x86, and backs up to ZFS.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
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         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.

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