Using FreeNAS as an S3 Gateway

[bbennett]

Hello everyone. First post. I want to do something seemingly unique with FreeNAS.

My company is using a managed services provider and the storage is rather expensive, about $0.15/GB. We currently back up about 28 TB of data to this storage, so as you can understand, this is quite expensive. We're currently using a VMWare ESXi environment with Veeam Backup And Replication. The backup repository is currently a Windows 2012R2 server with large VMDK's attached to it.

So, I've been tasked with taking all of our Veeam repositories and storing them directly in the cloud instead of having them on local storage. How can I use FreeNAS running in a virtual machine, to act as a kind of a "proxy" which translates SMB and NFS into S3 storage? Cloud Sync seems like a great idea, but it looks like we'd have to continue storing all of the data on the local, expensive disk.

Anyway, if any of you have an idea as to how I can accomplish this, please let me know. I've also looked at SoftNAS and Open Dedup, both of which seem to do this, but SoftNAS and Open DeDup only support Amazon S3 and not BackBlaze. Also Amazon already provides a storage gateway for S3, which makes this redundant, so I'd be using it more for BackBlaze B2.

 

[kdragon75]

First things first, Get those backups out of the VMDKs! I have no issues with Veeam backup proxies running as VMs just get he backups out of the environment that they are backing up. Though I guess you could have a dedicated management cluster with HA and uber redundant storage with snapshots...

Anyway! I know eFolder offers a service that hooks directly into Veeam. How do you plan to manage roll ups with S3? Or are you just pushing intermittent fulls and purging expired chains?

 

[kdragon75]

but it looks like we'd have to continue storing all of the data on the local, expensive disk.

Yeah I'm guessing that's going to be the case. I don't think local disk is expensive at all. 12 4TB disks in 6x2 RAIDz2 should provide 32TB and just a quick look for HGST 4TB NAS drives shows this should be under 3k and your current bill is ...4k+!?!? holy bonkers! build a second server and drop it in a colo!

 

[bbennett]

Thanks KDragon, I already run a backup copy job to an offsite SAN right now, but I'm planning on decommissioning it because the support costs for it are quite expensive. I want to replace it with S3 storage. Setting up a NAS in a Co-Lo really isn't an option at this point. I took a peek at eFolder, they're a solutions provider that offers DRaaS, which is OK, but I have a few on my plate. With S3, I'm planning on just pushing weekly fulls there as if it was nothing more than a NFS export. It looks to me like FreeNAS can't do that, at least not right now anyway. If I did want to use FreeNAS for this purpose though, I'd basically have to move my entire Veeam repo's into a FreeNAS VM which then would use Cloud Sync. That would basically replace the Veeam Proxy, which is OK, but that could potentially impact backup performance.