Assistance building a backup server

[Chris Murphy]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 9:48 AM, Alex Regan <mysqlstudent at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I have a fedora20 system acting as a backup server, and I've exceeded its
> capacity. I'd like to build a bigger one, probably using fedora21.
>
> I currently have a 3TB backup system using five 1TB disks in RAID5. Restore
> times in case of disk failure are already exceedingly long, so I'd like to
> consider another method of providing redundancy, and would like suggestions.
>
> I'd like to have 6TB of usable space using 2TB disks.

If you're concerned about rebuild times, go with more small drives and
move to raid6.

Another option is considering two 6TB drives in a raid1, per GB the
6TB Red drives are lower priced than the 2TB Reds. Of course, raid1
makes it more expensive in any case, but at reduced complexity.

And yet another option is GlusterFS either with multiple bricks on a
single node, or multiple nodes. These can even be done with ARM
boards. So you could have a volume that's for things you wan "3
copies" or, and have it automatically keep two local copies with one
async offsite copy; another volume that's more disposable, e.g. maybe
just one copy for VM images, and those would never get copied offsite.

CentOS 7's installer has Backup Client and Backup Server options as
Add-Ons, I haven't looked into what that is, but might be an idea
worth exploring.


>
> Is ext4 still best for this?

Sure, it's fine, no complaints. I'd probably opt for XFS due to its
long standing optimizations for both hardware and software RAID,
parallel IO, etc. And piles of NAS, SANs, and even DVRs using XFS. It
has a huge install base for this use case.

>
> Some RAID variant or is there something better?
>
> Are there any NAS projects that may be beneficial?

lwn.net has recent reviews of Rockstor, EasyNAS, OpenMediaVault,
FreeNAS (BSD ZFS based).



-- 
Chris Murphy