It’s the “West’s World” feature again where James West, Sales Engineering Manager at PHD Virtualhas written a guest post for us imparting some advice gleamed from his daily workings with PHD Virtual clients!
This particular post has James looking at the question “What should I use for backup storage?”:
I would say one of the most common questions I get from customers I speak with is what route to go for backup storage. They want to know what storage vendors to go with and which specific platforms are going to serve them best for their needs. Now given that PHD Virtual is strictly a backup software vendor this is actually one of the more difficult questions for me to answer. I never want to steer anyone in the wrong direction but my lack of knowledge around all of the various options that are available is not something I can ignore. There’s always little nuances to hardware and software that typically can only be known with hands on experience which is something I don’t have in this case. Those nuances could potentially lead to that brand of storage not performing very well in an environment because of certain variables. However, I can speak to some common areas that should be considered when looking for some new backup storage to ensure you make a smart decision.
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What is generally the slowest point of access for data? Hard drives. It could be the latest and greatest storage system but if you skimp on the drives then you’re setting yourself up for failure. Now with hard drives there’s a couple points worth mentioning about this.
• Drive Types – The most common I come across are SATA, SAS and Fiber Channel. Within those types SAS and Fiber Channel are going to give you the best performance due to their higher RPM rates. The faster the platters can rotate then the faster data can be read and written.
• RAID Levels – If it’s possible in an ideal situation you will want to use RAID 10 to provide the best write performance. The overhead of RAID 10 can sometimes be a deterrent because of all the disks it requires so in that case RAID 5 then RAID 1.
• Drive Sizes – As time goes on the max size of hard drives continues to go up. These days a single hard disk can support a couple terabytes of data. With that said, if you lower the number of drives in a RAID group then that in itself can lower performance because you now have less drives handling the I/O load.
• USB Drives – I see this is as being one of the biggest pitfalls customers run up against. Yes, USB storage is cheap and easy to use but typically is not going to perform the best for backups. It’s great for home use but not the best for business use. What I normally see with this is things run fine for a couple days or couple weeks but eventually the storage isn’t able to sustain itself and leads to a number of reliability issues and customers aren’t able to get consistent backups. If you can avoid this type of storage then please do.
With this I do realize that backup storage doesn’t always get this type of attention. Normally you might repurpose old hardware or simply just not buy high-end storage to house the backups. That can be fine in some cases but it’s important to understand that it isn’t realistic to expect the best performance. However, as more data is generated in an environment then naturally so does the backup data but backup windows don’t grow with that. Backups are an I/O intensive operation so if you can put in place storage to meet those demands the investment is definitely worth it.
