Over the last several weeks we’ve been working with QNAP, Veeam and Samsung to develop a set of best practices to unleash the power of NAS when it comes to the problem of data availability and recovery. For small businesses, ROBO, retail and others, the idea of backup is generally well understood. But recovery is where the pain really is, when it comes to restoring files or standing up an environment after something like a ransomware attack. Flash is often overlooked for backup environments though either because of cost concerns or because the backup application can’t take advantage of SSDs.
Over the last several weeks we’ve been working with QNAP, Veeam and Samsung to develop a set of best practices to unleash the power of NAS when it comes to the problem of data availability and recovery. For small businesses, ROBO, retail and others, the idea of backup is generally well understood. But recovery is where the pain really is, when it comes to restoring files or standing up an environment after something like a ransomware attack. Flash is often overlooked for backup environments though either because of cost concerns or because the backup application can’t take advantage of SSDs.
In this solutions brief we explore why flash can play a critical role in an organization’s availability plan. From a NAS perspective, QNAP has a specific set of software and hardware features that take advantage of flash in ways most NAS vendors don’t. Most of their systems offer dedicated flash bays via standard 2.5″ slots in the front or M.2 SSD slots internally. This means almost any of their systems can take advantage of flash technology, like the TS-1685 we used in this paper. QNAP also uniquely offers an SSD Over-provisioning tool to help get the most endurance and performance out of the drives.
In this case, there were four Samsung 860 DCT SSDs front-ended the traditional HDD storage with Veeam Backup & Replication as the backup software. The Veeam Scale-Out Backup Repository pools together the storage to get increased performance for both sequential read and write activities. With just a small amount of flash, that means a 6X performance improvement in reads and 11x in writes. Considering the urgency associated with data availability, this configuration is an absolute winner thanks to the combination of QNAP, Veeam and Samsung.
QNAP Backup and Recovery Solutions Brief (PDF)
