feemelvis Posted October 5, 2007 Report Share Posted October 5, 2007 Can anyone recommend a piece of hardware to run Retrospect Multi-Server? I'm currently backing up 2 Xserves and a database to an old Dell PC (minimum requirements) with XP and would like to upgrade. It's too damn slow. I'm backing up about 1 TB of data so need a lot of space and a RAID configuration. Any suggestions welcomed. Thanks, Jason Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted October 10, 2007 Report Share Posted October 10, 2007 For retrospect I am running a Xeon 2.4 (single cpu/core) 2gb ram, raid 5 6x250gb. I use this to backup my desktops/laptops .. not servers. I have a Dell 2950 (my main fileserver) with raid 5 6x750GB and its smoking fast. This has around 3TB of space. This should be plenty for you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richy_Boy Posted October 16, 2007 Report Share Posted October 16, 2007 If you're looking at buying new hardware I'd personally suggest a dual or quad core CPU to help with data crunching for compression and encryption - you can never have too much power! As for discs, well, it all depends where you plan to store your data and how you're getting this data offsite (depending on your architecture). I personally run 2x Xeon 2.8GHz CPUs with 2GB RAM... which catalog onto RAID1 OS drives and backup onto 500GB SATA hot-swap units that are swapped out each night and taken home. I also have a USB2 external 750GB drive which duplicates user machine data, allowing them to 'self-restore' the files even when the daily backup drives are no longer avaliable. It's been very stable thus far. The server brand I chose is supermicro which is like a brebones system allowing you to build it to your own specification - you might not have time (or the business ability) to do this though as they don't come with any support agreement, obviously. Rich Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
misleb Posted October 19, 2007 Report Share Posted October 19, 2007 Quote: If you're looking at buying new hardware I'd personally suggest a dual or quad core CPU to help with data crunching for compression and encryption - you can never have too much power! As far as I can tell, Retrospect will rarely, if ever, use more than one core. I've heard of peopel with 8 core servers only getting 13% utilization. Even dual core would be a waste. Your best bet is to get the fastest single core CPU around. And even then, speed isn't a huge issue unless you're dealing with more than a few hundred thousand files per volume. Then you might need some CPU power to do the file matching and stuff. Well, unless you're writing backups to software RAID. Then you'll want another core to do the parity/mirroring stuff. And don't be fooled by some of those cheap SATA RAID adapters like the ICH?R series which are really "fake" RAID. -matthew Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aandi Posted October 22, 2007 Report Share Posted October 22, 2007 I can't watch it at the moment, but I'm pretty sure I've seen Retrospect spread itself out nicely on multiple cores. Of course, it can only use one core while one backup is running, but I have had up to 8 backups running very smoothly in parallel on a 4-core server. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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