John, IMO, the point behind BackupPC is to use cheap, easily upgradeable disk media to make backups available and easy. That kind of steers me in the direction of several low-end backup servers, either with separate storage or all sharing a big fat fiber channel NAS. Buying a high end machine and trying to handle what is essentially a very parallelizable task on a single box is sort of self-defeating, I think. So, my response would be to keep what you've got and buy another machine to offload some clients.
There is definitely some tuning involved with respect to server performance, given the various file systems, operating systems, physical hardware choices. But BackupPC can be tuned considerably based on the transfer protocols and number of simultaneous backups. Have you exhausted these options? I'm sure you'll get a different answer from every person on the list, since most of what you're asking is kid-in-the-candy-store questions. If you're maxing out a single server, chances are, you'll be better off with two (or more) servers, or the one you have isn't configured for maximum efficiency. And get a good 3ware RAID card. :-) Hope that helps, JH John Pettitt wrote: > > > It's time to build a new server. My old one (a re-purposed Celeron D > 2.9Ghz / 768M FreeBSD box with a a 1.5 TB raid on a Highpoint card) > has hit a wall in both performance and capacity. gstat on FreeBSD > shows me that the Highpoint raid array is the main bottleneck (partly > because it's in a regular PCI slot and partly because it's really > software raid with crappy drivers) and CPU is a close second. I'm > going to build a new box with SATA disks and a better raid card. > > So my question: Has anybody does any actual benchmarks on BackupPC > servers? > > Which OS & Filesystem is best? (I'm, leaning toward Ubuntu and > RaiserFS) > > RAID cards that work well? Allow for on the fly expansion? > > RAID mode ? 5? 6? 10? 500GB drives seem to be the sweet spot in > the price curve right now - I'd like to get 1.5TB after RAID so 6 > drives in RAID 10. > > I'm leaning towards a core 2 duo box with 2Gb of ram. > > Any hardware to avoid? > > John ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
