Hardware RAID setup advice (general storage question)

[mhubert]

We are using the first DSS for serving NFS Volumes to ESX, make a volume replication to the second DSS and create a snapshot of the backup volume every night.
So, I thought, the performance impact of creating snapshots is not affecting the production DSS.

Hi To-M!

What's your opinion of the performance issue I stated above?
Is this a correct way to handle a backup scenario with two DSS?

Thanks
regards
Matthias

[To-M]

If only creating a few Snapshots running at the same time then performance will not be an issue. Link below from our Knowledge Base on Snapshots.

http://kb.open-e.com/entry/2/

The total number of snapshots is dependent on the LVM, but 255 is a safe
number. There are, however, definite limitations as to the number of ACTIVE
snapshots:

32bit system:
- 10 per LV
- 20 per system

64bit system:
- 1 per LV
- 10 per system

[sjg4502]

thanks for the input/replies.

going with the full raid 1+0 and the snapshot/backup combo using NFS.

thanks,
SG

[enealDC]

It seems tempting to put everything on a single volume, but what happens if you need to rebuild that volume? You put all your data at risk. I have been running a 16 Disk RAID5 volume in production for a number of months now. We are going to modify this so it's two RAID10 volumes. The reason is simply to ensure that if we need to run a volume check or we loose a volume or it has to be rebuilt, we don't loose our entire operation.

Just my thoughts..