I agree with what Jason wrote, particularly in regards to a 3ware
controller. I also like reiserfs, but for 1.5 Tb a strong case could be made
for XFS or JFS, depending on your standard issues like many small files in
the backup, or fewer larger files.
I would also consider raid 5 or 6. Nothing is wrong with 1+0, but you do
lose much space to parity that way. With a new controller and Sata II disks,
slow writes shouldn't be much of a factor. My backups rarely see more than 3
mb/sec of new data coming across, and with Sata II claiming 3 Gb per sec
(which we know it won't reach), unless you're doing a great many
simultaneous backups, you should be cool. Another advantage of raid 5 with
this setup is you could get a cheap 4 port card like this one -
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816116031 for a PCI X
interface. That and 4 500 Gb drives and you're in great shape. They make the
same card for PCI as well.
I would use hardware raid even with multiple servers. Its so cheap now, it
doesn't make sense to deal with the headache of software raid when hardware
is well within corporate budgets. A controller at $300 + 4 drives at $150,
for $900 you have 1.5 Tb of safe space. Even with raid 1+0 you only go up a
few hundred dollars, but you would need a larger controller.
Peace,
JimBass
On 3/14/07, Jason Hughes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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
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