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

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.