[ale] Bacula backup gathering?

DJ-Pfulio DJPfulio at jdpfu.com
Tue Feb 16 15:17:54 EST 2016


Yeah, I missed that as a middle-man device.


There are some very interesting ARM systems. The banana-pi2 seems
similar to the wandboard. Found an old version with GigE and SATA2 for
$50, but read that systemd doesn't like it somewhere.



On 02/16/16 14:11, Derek Atkins wrote:
> 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
> 
> 


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