[ale] Bacula backup gathering?

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

On Tue, February 16, 2016 1:48 pm, DJ-Pfulio wrote:
>
>
>> I wonder how much RAM/CPU would be required for this?  I wonder if I
>> could
>> use a low-power ARM board?
>
> ARM has an I/O limitation which makes it a poor choice for almost any disk
> or
> network I/O.  You can use a Pentium G3258 (MB+CPU around $100) and have an
> amazing NAS box, however. 35W typical power use.  Have 6 drives in mine
> now and

Sorry, I think I was less than clear in my use case.  I already have a
FreeNAS box with lots of storage (16TB usable).  For my proposed ARM
device the idea was it purely to be a go-between, running rdiff-backup to
pull backups from my servers and then write them out to the NAS through an
encfs/NFS link.

So I'm not depending on an ARM board to do lots of Disk I/O, only CPU and
Network I/O.

My Wandboards certainly have GigE; I haven't tested to see if it can
saturate that link.  But I've got one as a mythtv backend and it seems to
do fine :)   And it uses significantly less that 35W  :)

> it does lots of other things as a plex media server. It transcodes 1080
> MPEG2 to
> h.264 (for a R.pi) nicely while not impacting storage access for other
> systems
> at all. There are low-power options from Intel, but those will cost $100+
> more.
> I haven't looked at the AMD > 20W stuff in a few years.  It can be very
> attractive for $70-ish. A4/A6 APUs, interesting.  When AMD changed from
> Athlon
> naming, they completely lost me. I can't look at an AMD CPU name and have
> any
> clue about performance or power use these days.  Had an AMD/E350 box that
> used
> only 20W with 2 spinning disks, but the storage ports were highly limited
> and it
> was only USB2. Had GigE, so that was nice. The small case prevented most
> add-on
> cards, etc.  PicoPSU made it almost silent - couldn't hear standing next
> to it -
> it was in a corner working 24/7/365 for years as a XBMC/Kodi box with a
> remote,
> until the GPU couldn't keep up with HiDef content.  Oddly, a Raspberry Pi
> v2
> does that job now. Arm has enough I/O for streaming and playback, but not
> enough
> for much more.  USB2 storage and 100base-tx are pretty limiting.  2 yrs
> ago, the
> J1900 was the answer for this stuff. Seems pricey for what it can do
> compared to
> a G3258.
>
> Good idea. Just don't think ARM is the way, yet. Or are there ARM devices
> that
> can do the 200Mbps+ I/O and GigE?  Some of the Marvell CPU devices have
> been
> used for storage for years, but they seemed to be just at the limit for
> the I/O
> that those devices could handle.

Like I said, my wandboards have GigE.  Don't know if it can do 200Mbps,
but they do have onboard SATA ports so I would expect it to..

>
>>> I thought that most enterprise tape drives had HW encryption built in?
>>
>> I'm not using tape, myself, so this is mostly irrelevant.
>
> To you. And to me too. ;)  The convenience of a few 4TB HDDs for backups
> more
> than outweighs the added cost-per-GB. The 4T Hitachi prices have been
> bouncing
> all over the place - $139 or $185 in 1 week! Crazy. I missed a $139 deal
> last
> week. Boo on me. :(
>
>>> We're all looking for "the best" backup tool for our personal values of
>>> "the
>>> best." The search continues?
>>
>> Yep.  It does.


-derek


-- 
       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
       derek at ihtfp.com             www.ihtfp.com
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant