PowerProtect Data Manager 19.9 Network Attached Storage User Guide

NAS protection deployment recommendations

Use the sizing information presented here to calculate an optimal deployment for your environment.

PowerProtect Data Manager divides NAS assets into slices by using threshold values. The threshold slice size is 200 GB or a count of one million files, with a tolerance of up to 30%. To avoid creating nonoptimized slices, the tolerance allows PowerProtect Data Manager to deviate from the threshold value and keep data together. For example, a single 260 GB folder is still within the 30% tolerance value and would be considered one slice. Empty placeholder slices help protect the asset layout structure.

Each slice uses one stream. Protection engine parameters provides information about the relationship between streams and NAS protection engines. When calculating the number of NAS protection engines, allow up to 120% to 150% of the estimated slice count for overhead such as placeholder slices.

To calculate the number of NAS protection engines, divide the estimated slice count by the number of streams per NAS protection engine. For example, a 50 TB share would require 11 NAS protection engines. The calculation for this example is (50,000 GB / 200 GB) / 24 = 10.4, rounded up.

For optimum performance, use a dedicated 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) network interface per NAS protection engine. The ESXi network stack constrains throughput. More NAS protection engines with dedicated interfaces can achieve higher net aggregated throughput when reading from the NAS and writing to protection storage.

If the entire environment is 10 GbE, including the NAS and the protection storage, network speed constrains throughput. You may find that read throughput from the NAS appliance and write throughput to protection storage are reduced in an environment with multiple NAS protection engines. In this case, increase the number of network interfaces on the NAS and the protection storage.

Asset-level parallelism balances the number of available streams across multiple assets. PowerProtect Data Manager supports multiple simultaneous backups so long as there are sufficient available compute resources. Asset-level parallelism supports up to 256 streams per asset. Set protection engine parameters provides instructions to configure parallelism.