Alan thanks, I omitted that we have a Spectra LTO6 library which would be SAS attached to the server in question but I didn't mention it as my initial query was more about the hardware specs.
The rough plan would be D2D2T and we'd probably run one of our fileservers (linux) directly to a local directly attached small LTO6/7 library as it's not data where we need a long retention and it feels dumb to be running it over the network just to send it to tape to keep for a week.
Sounds like we're good on the hardware but if necessary throw in some RAM.
We're so new to Bacula that I'll be blunt and admit there's lots I simply haven't got my head around yet if we do go with it so apologies if some of this is dumb/obvious to most of you :)
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Bacula-users] Hardware Specs & Sizing for Bacula?
Local Time: February 19, 2016 6:58 pm
UTC Time: February 19, 2016 6:58 PM
From: ajb2 AT mssl.ucl.ac DOT uk
To: paul.hutchings AT protonmail DOT com,bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
On 19/02/16 18:12, paul.hutchings
wrote:
We're new to Bacula and are still considering if it's viable for us.
Our test environment is quite small (it is a test environment) and when I read the docs I'm not sure how recent they are when they relate to hardware specs.
For example if I were to suggest box with dual 8 core E5 CPUs, hardware PERC RAID card with 1GB cache, 48TB of 7.2k SATA in RAID6 and 32GB (or more) of RAM running as a SD would people be thinking "hmmm may need more horsepower" or would people be thinking "that should handle hundred/thousands of clients"?
It depends. For SD-only use, your CPU is overkill and even 16Gb of
ram would be overkill
Ram requirements are for the director and database. These can be on
the same box and probably should be to avoid networking penalties.
You don't need VMs - and really shouldn't play that game on
backup-dedicated hardware as VMs come with performance penalties
ranging from noticeable to major.
Even with the DB and DIR on the box, your CPUs are more than
adequate.
Assuming SD + DIR + Postgres (don't mess with Mysql for million+file
installations, it doesn't scale well) then, I'd add more ram. It's
cheap enough these days that you should think about running at least
96GB if you're backing up tens of TB and tens of millions of files
(even more if you can afford it)
The real issue if you're running backups at this scale: Disk is a
liability. It's too slow and drives will end up shaking themselves
to pieces, making the backup pool your Single point of failure. You
_need_ tape - A decent robot and several drives along with a
suitably sized data safe.
We currently back up about 250 million files over 400TB and I'm
currently using a Quantum i500 with 14U extension and 6 SAS LTO6
drives, previously we had a Overland Neo8000 with 7 FC LTO5 drives.
Once you bite the bullet and use tape, dump the sata spinning disks.
Use something like a raid1 pair of 500GB SM843s for your OS, put in
second dedicated 1TB raid1 pair for the database and use a _fast_
200-800GB PCIe flash drive for spool.
10GB networking is an absolute must. Don't try to play games with
1Gb/s bonding. Any given data stream will only run at 1Gb/s maximum.
On the other hand, the setup above would be an expensive waste of
time for backing up 10TB of data - although for that size you could
keep the spinning media and keep the rest - but bear in mind that
48TB is only going to allow 3 full backups of 15TB (any fewer than 3
full backups is asking for trouble), without taking differentials or
incrementals into account.
For 20TB+ you may want to look at a single-drive tape autochanger
capable of holding at least 10 tapes. The last thing you want to be
doing is feeding new LTO6/7s into it every 2-3 hours when a full
backup is running (yes, they will fill up that quickly)
Director could be on the same physical box but would ideally be a VM with a couple of CPU cores and as much RAM as is needed to handle a couple dozen clients, though the largest two clients are around 10TB and each have millions of files.
Impression I get is that network and disk will be a bottleneck way before RAM and CPU should be?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Site24x7 APM Insight: Get Deep Visibility into Application Performance
APM + Mobile APM + RUM: Monitor 3 App instances at just $35/Month
Monitor end-to-end web transactions and take corrective actions now
Troubleshoot faster and improve end-user experience. Signup Now!
http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=272487151&iu=/4140
_______________________________________________
Bacula-users mailing list
Bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
