BDRSuite Backup Server Sizing
Follow the sizing guide to analyze your Microsoft 365 data and customize the BDRSuite Backup Server for improved performance and stability.
BDRSuite Backup Server
- BDRSuite Backup Server can be deployed on both physical machines and virtual machines. However, we recommend you install BDRSuite Backup Server on a dedicated Windows physical server to get better performance.
Storage Repositories
You can use either block storage (NAS, SAN, or Directly Attached Storage device) or Object storage (AWS S3, S3 Compatible, Azure Blob) to store the backup data. There are no limitations with any hardware vendor. So, we never recommend any specific hardware vendor.
The performance of the backup/recovery depends on the IOPS. So, you will get better backup performance, if you have higher IOPS.
BDRSuite for Microsoft 365 Sizing Table
The following tables illustrate how the BDRSuite for Microsoft 365 performance parameters change depending on multiple factors.
Underlying Assumptions
The estimates provided below are not ‘stretch estimates’; they are safe estimates and are more pessimistic than optimistic. Typical bottlenecks you should look out for are:
Bandwidth bottlenecks
Slowing down of data transfer due to low-performance switches/routers, etc.
The hard disk write speeds at the storage targets
CPU & RAM utilization by other non-related processes running on the BDR Backup Server
Sizing Tables
BDRSuite Backup Server Machine Configuration
OS | Windows 2019 (Physical Machine) |
RAM | 16 GB |
CPU | Intel XEON CPU 2.10 GHz (4 cores) |
Network | 1 Gbps |
BDR Server Version | v5.5.0 BETA |
Backup Environment
Users | 39 |
No. of Mails | 103371 |
No of OneDrive Files | 89850 |
Compression & Deduplication Metrics
Job Details | Mail Count | Source Data Size | Compressed Size | Deduped (%) |
User Count: 1 Job Count: 1 | 103371 | 24.2 GB | 2.07 GB | 82 |
User Count: 3 Job Count: 1 | 8247 | 15.04 GB | 4.55 GB | 50 |
User Count: 3 Job Count: 3 (Average) | 7145 | 12.57 GB | 5.45 GB | 30 |
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Note: The above testing results are obtained from BDRSuite v5.5. We have introduced mail-level deduplication on v5.5. We planned to release v5.5 at the end of October 2022. |
Findings
1. Mailbox Accounts
The storage reduction varies from 30 to 80% across configured mailbox accounts.
2. OneDrive accounts
The compression ratio depends on the type of data and varies from 15 to 30% across configured OneDrive accounts.
3. Parallel Processing
BDRSuite supports the concurrent process of Microsoft 365 user mailbox users. Consider if you have 16 GB RAM will scale up to 20 users' mailbox parallel and gradually improve the backup performance.
However, the backup performance is not solely dependent on the parallel processing as the Microsoft Graph API throttles the number of requests from the BDRSuite application within a specific time range.
So there are likely chances of a reduction in the performance when backing up the M365 account. Based on our observations in our test lab, we see a slightly better backup performance if the parallel processing settings are configured.
We are trying to enhance the performance of the backup by implementing an auxiliary application method in our upcoming release. This method will help to improve the performance significantly.