TS-1263U-RP as iscsi Target (12TBs /SSD Cache/QM2 card)

[Stalliondz]

Hey guys,

We have 2x Qnap ts-1263u-rp that were previously used as a backup drive for 6 months, but now we are thinking to actually use it in our production environment for some time as a hyper-v iscsi storage for our file server, and SQL Databases.

We will be having about 13 TB of file storage space.

The TS-1263u-rp will be connected to a 2-node HA cluster server (HP-DL380G9)

We are thinking to hook the qnap ts-1263u-rp with the following:
Array1:
- 6x 12TB Ironwolf Pro HDDs.(Raid 5) /for File Storage (iscsi LUN).
Array2:
- 2x 8TB Ironwolf Pro HDD (Raid 1) /for HA Guest OS (iscsi LUN).
Array 3:
- 2x Samsung 860 Evo 4TB SSD (Raid 1)/ for SQL Databases(iscsi LUN).

QM2 Network Expension card:
- 1x QM2-2P10G1TA (10Gbe expansion card)
- 2x Samsung 970 Evo NVMe 1TB (Raid 1) for SSD Cache for Array 1.

I prefer to keep the rest 2 bays empty for now, maybe in the future I will add new HDDs to it.

A similar configuration will be on another Qnap ts-1263u-rp that will be residing in our DR data center (Off-site)

I would like to know your thoughts, and if the above configuration is right or might be some sort of compatibility issues?

Thanks in advance.

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[storageman]

Not the fastest box for VMs.
Check the approval, should be ok
Personally with 12TBs I'd use RAID 6
https://www.windowsservercatalog.com/it ... CatID=1282

[Stalliondz]

Not the fastest box for VMs.
Check the approval, should be ok
Personally with 12TBs I'd use RAID 6
https://www.windowsservercatalog.com/it ... CatID=1282

Thanks Storageman for the feedback.
We mostly are going to use Raid6. But I have 2 questions in this regards.

Will the Qnap allow me to expand the array in the future if we decide to add another HDD, or even replace the drives with a bigger size without loosing the data nor recreating the array from scratch?

Also, do you think the NVMe which will be attached to the QM2 card and acting as SSD Cache acceleration (2x NVMe/ Raid 1) will have a significant improvement on the IOPS of the Raid 6 array?



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[dolbyman]

qnap supports raid expansion (adding drives or replacing all disks with larger ones..see the manual)

[storageman]

Adding cache would increase random IOPs possibly to x 3 times
So say 12 x 200 IOPs = 2400 IOPs from HDDs will increase maybe to 8/9k IOPs