PowerScale OneFS 9.8.0.0 Backup and Recovery Guide

NDMP performance recommendations

Consider the following recommendations to optimize OneFS NDMP backups.

Install the latest patches for OneFS and your data management application (DMA).
To obtain optimal throughput per session, Dell Technologies recommends not to run the maximum number of NDMP concurrent sessions which is eight per Fiber Attached Storage node.
NDMP backups result in high Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs). You can reduce your RPO and RTO by attaching one or more Fiber Attached Storage nodes to the cluster and then running two-way NDMP backups.
The throughput for a PowerScale cluster during the backup and recovery operations depends on the dataset and is considerably reduced for small files and deep directory structures (>13).
If you are backing up large numbers of small files, set up a separate schedule for each directory.
If you are performing NDMP three-way backups, run multiple NDMP sessions on multiple nodes in your PowerScale cluster.
Recover files through Directory DAR (DDAR) if you recover large numbers of files frequently.
Use the largest tape record size available for your version of OneFS to increase throughput.
If possible, do not include or exclude files from backup. Including or excluding files can affect backup performance, due to filtering overhead.

A two-way NDMP backup session with SmartConnect requires a Fiber Attached Storage node for backup and recovery operations. However, a three-way NDMP session with SmartConnect does not require Fiber Attached Storage nodes for these operations.
For an NDMP two-way backup session with SmartConnect, connect to the NDMP session through a dedicated SmartConnect zone consisting of a pool of Network Interface Cards (NICs) on the Fiber Attached Storage nodes.
For a two-way NDMP backup session without SmartConnect, initiate the backup session through a static IP address or fully qualified domain name of the Fiber Attached Storage node.
For a three-way NDMP backup operation, the front-end Ethernet network or the interfaces of the nodes are used to serve the backup traffic. Therefore, it is recommended that you configure a DMA to initiate an NDMP session only using the nodes that are not already overburdened by serving other workloads or connections.

Attach more Fiber Attached Storage nodes to larger clusters. The recommended number of Fiber Attached Storage nodes is listed in the following table.

Table 1. Nodes Per Fiber Attached Storage NodeThe following table displays the recommended number of fiber attached storage nodes for each node type.
Node type	Recommended number of nodes per Fiber Attached Storage node
X-Series	3
NL-Series	3
S-Series	3
HD-Series	3

Attach more Fiber Attached Storage nodes if you are backing up to more tape devices.

Enable parallelism for the DMA if the DMA supports this option. This allows OneFS to back up data to multiple tape devices simultaneously.