QNAP QNAP TS-859 Pro+ for Veeam... or something else?

[gshaw]

Trying to find a good solution for our disk backups, the main issue is that to have the box outside of the server room it can't be too large \ noisy \ hot which rules out using standard servers (already had an HP server that's going back as it sounded like a plane taking off).

 

Looking around this seems ideal...

 

QNAP TS-859 Pro+ 8TB NAS Server with iSCSI - Misco.co.uk

 

From reading on Veeam forums the iSCSI implementation isn't great so would probably be using it as a CIFS file share target for Veeam. Only downside of using a NAS appliance is that backing off to tape becomes a bit more awkward, although comparing cost of a new tape drive I wonder if there's an Internet-based solution that might work (although adding another yearly contract isn't ideal at the current time).

 

Any feedback on the box above? What drives do they provide in the off-the-shelf box? If it's Seagate I'll get it bare and order separate drives

 

Closest competitors seem to be Netgear or Synology...

 

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/storage-appliances/366463/synology-diskstation-ds1511

 

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/storage-appliances/367018/netgear-readynas-pro-4

 

Again any experiences with any of these boxes would be most useful

Edited July 5, 2011 by gshaw

[localzuk]

We have that exact model, and it is excellent. We don't use iSCSI - it isn't that great I've found. CIFS works fine.

 

We stuck 8 x WD WD2002FAEX drives in there, giving us 10.7TB of space in RAID 6.

 

I'd advise getting your own drives, rather than an off the shelf box, that way you can spec to the requirements you have, and I found pricing better if you do it yourself.

 

We use ours with BackupAssist, and have it backing up into TrueCrypt containers on the shares.

 

However, it all depends how much stuff you want to back up in what time-frame. Our best backup time so far has been 520GB of data in 1 day 8 hours, encrypted. This is over a single 1GBps link and is down to the server it is coming from rather than the device itself. This works out at about 37MBps and if I fiddled more I'd get better speeds no doubt.

[gshaw]

It'll be doing Veeam change block tracking based backups so once the initial job goes through it should only be changed data during the backup window. The Synology box also looks well regarded and looks to have a better warranty, which makes it interesting.

 

What's the noise level like on the QNAP? If put in say a standard comms cabinet would you hear it in a quiet office?

[localzuk]

Its nearly silent. Only thing you hear is the drives clicking and whirring away. Quieter than my work PC.

[gshaw]

That's what I wanted to hear

 

Having read your thread about the WD Green drives and QNAP's not altogether confident stance on them was looking at filling it with these...

 

Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB 3.5 SATA 6GB Inte - Misco.co.uk

 

Also looked at the RE4 series drives due to being Enterprise class drives for reliability purposes, might be worth forking out the extra to be on the safe side if it's the primary backup device

Edited July 5, 2011 by gshaw

[localzuk]

Yup, the linked drives are the same drives I got.

[zag]

I would buy the drives with the Qnap device. Its more expensive but at least you know the drives will be reliable.

 

I have 2 x 419 models one I bought the WD green drives and the other was bought with drives installed.

 

1 WD green drive has already failed and needed to be replaced.....

[localzuk]

I would buy the drives with the Qnap device. Its more expensive but at least you know the drives will be reliable.

 

I have 2 x 419 models one I bought the WD green drives and the other was bought with drives installed.

 

1 WD green drive has already failed and needed to be replaced.....

 

They specifically say not to use 'green' drives in the devices - their site has a compatibility list of drives guaranteed to be reliable and tested.

 

Note5 (WD Caviar Green)

These hard disk drives have passed QNAP lab's initial verification of compatibility. However, because many users have reported unstable experience with these hard disk drives, we do not recommend using these had disk drives with QNAP products. WD10EADS-00P8B0 and WD15EADS-00P8B0 are not suggested because of slow performance and stability issues.

 

Same for Seagate Barracuda Green.

[gshaw]

I would buy the drives with the Qnap device. Its more expensive but at least you know the drives will be reliable.

 

I have 2 x 419 models one I bought the WD green drives and the other was bought with drives installed.

 

1 WD green drive has already failed and needed to be replaced.....

 

What drives are in the box that had them pre-installed? Must be one of the major manufacturers? If it's Seagate I might as well go back to tape, wouldn't trust a re-branded Maxtor with anything remotely important

 

For anyone using disk-based backup do you have a secondary backup method i.e. tape or online? Having data only on spinning disk makes me somewhat nervous but on the other hand I'm not sure if all my VM data will always fit on tape (once you go virtual I would want to be backing up in such a way that I could bring the VMs back up onto replacement hardware otherwise I'm losing a lot of the benefit of the virtual environment and DR improvements)

[localzuk]

Our secondary system here is USB hard drives which we plug into the device and do one off backups to, on a yearly basis.

 

We don't use tape at all. Hard disks are plenty reliable, especially with RAID 6 in place - as you can lose 2 of your drives at once.

[gshaw]

It's more if we had say an electrical surge or a meteorite lands on the building (might have some end of world related issues if that occurred though I guess)

[gshaw]

One other thing, if we put say 5 disks in it now then added 3 more later on does the box dynamically expand the RAID pool to include the extra disks? Not sure if we'd need the 16TB RAW initially but might do in the future.. or maybe just worth biting the bullet and getting the extra room to grow into as we can use it for other purposes as well (ISO storage, SCCM images etc)

[RobFuller]

We have 2 of theses I’m using iscsi to present to DPM and they work a treat. Not very loud, just the hard drives clicking. I did have one were the power supply went but was quickly replaced. If its important you could go for the rack version which also has more ram and faster processor and redundant power supplies.

Transfer rate I’m not sure but I’ve completely filled one and just starting on the second, but backing up our entire system doesn’t take long. I have these connect on 2x 1G links using multi pathing.

[plexer]

I'm getting one to be used as a mirror of my primary cdp datastore.

 

Going to use RE4 drives.

 

Ben

[gshaw]

We have 2 of theses I’m using iscsi to present to DPM and they work a treat. Not very loud, just the hard drives clicking. I did have one were the power supply went but was quickly replaced. If its important you could go for the rack version which also has more ram and faster processor and redundant power supplies.

Transfer rate I’m not sure but I’ve completely filled one and just starting on the second, but backing up our entire system doesn’t take long. I have these connect on 2x 1G links using multi pathing.

 

What's the size of the data set you're backing up? Just interested to see what the ratio is between amount of data you have vs disk space required to keep *** amount of restore points

(*** being how far back you can go to restore a file)

 

Have you experienced any of the iSCSI issues that seem to be quite well known with QNAP boxes?

 

Thought about the rack one but space is a bit of an issue, looks too deep for a comms rack and a server rack takes up a considerable chunk of our office. Shame they didn't give a dual PSU option on the non-rackmount option

[gshaw]

Another quick qu for the QNAP users, have you got encryption enabled on the device and if so does it affect the performance?

 

QNAP Systems, Inc. - How to use the data encryption feature on QNAP Turbo NAS