server hardware recommendation for PBS with about 50 tb usable storage

[sherminator]

Hi there,

we're planning a new backup server (migration from Bareos to PBS) including new hardware. Therefore I would like to throw the following setup into discussion:

https://www.thomas-krenn.com/loadproduct?id=y4cd0fdaaa218617b&lang=de

in short:

CPU: 1x AMD EPYC 7343
RAM: 64 GB DDR4-3200
SSD (system): 2x 240 GB Samsung PM893 (ZFS RAID1)
NVMe (storage): 8x 7.68 TB Western Digital SN640 (RAIDZ-1)
Network: Broadcom P425G

What do you think? Any severe mistakes? Too much? Too little?

Thanks for your opinion and many greets
Stephan

 

[Dunuin]

Keep in mind that you usually want 10-20% of your pools capacity always free so ZFS got space for its CoW operations and doesn't get slowed down. Then you would just get around 43 to 48 TB of usable storage for backups.

 

[sherminator]

Keep in mind that you usually want 10-20% of your pools capacity always free so ZFS got space for its CoW operations and doesn't get slowed down. Then you would just get around 43 to 48 TB of usable storage for backups.

Thanks for this info! In fact I have almost no experience with ZFS so far. Is this basically the way to go when it comes to building local storage with multiple devices? Until now mdadm is our tool for that.
And what about the NVMe devices? Are these WD devices suitable? Is there a cheaper way to build flash based storage?

 

[Dunuin]

mdadm isn't officially supported but it will work too and might result in a faster storage. Because most of the great ZFS features that cause alot of overhead aren't really needed as stuff like compression, deduplication, encryption, hashing/bitrot protection, replication/syncronization and so on are already done by PBS on the software level so you might not want to do it again with ZFS on a storage level.

 

[sherminator]

thanks again!
Ok, when mdadm isn't supported by Proxmox, it's not an option for us. So ZFS is king, isn't it?
And from the few replies I conclude that my hardware suggestion isn't that bad.

 

[ness1602]

Zfs or hardware raid for you. Whatever it is easier for you to maintain.