Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS

Protection
October 2022

H18883.2

White Paper

Abstract
This white paper describes how Dell PowerProtect Data Manager
protects NAS storage arrays and generic NAS shares using a dynamic
NAS-protection solution.

Dell Technologies
 Copyright

The information in this publication is provided as is. Dell Inc. makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect
to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular
purpose.
Use, copying, and distribution of any software described in this publication requires an applicable software license.
Copyright © 2021-2022 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved. Dell Technologies, Dell, EMC, Dell EMC and other
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Published in the USA October 2022 H18883.2.
Dell Inc. believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change
without notice.

2 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection

 Contents

Contents
Executive summary ........................................................................................................................ 4

Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 6

Architecture overview ..................................................................................................................... 8

Protecting the NAS asset ............................................................................................................. 13

NAS backup workflow................................................................................................................... 24

NAS restore workflow ................................................................................................................... 25

Restoring the NAS asset .............................................................................................................. 26

Performance Results .................................................................................................................... 31

References ..................................................................................................................................... 32

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection 3

 Executive summary

Executive summary

Overview Network attached storage (NAS) is an IP-based file-sharing storage device which is
attached to a local area network (LAN). NAS can serve various clients and servers over
an IP network. A NAS device uses its own operating system and integrated hardware and
software to deliver a range of file-service needs.

NAS is widely used for its simplicity, ease of use, and outstanding performance. With its
simple use come challenges regarding data protection. For years, NAS and backup
vendors have used the NDMP protocol to protect NAS data. The NDMP protocol has its
own limitations, such as manual slicing of a NAS share to achieve multi-stream backup,
limited parallel streams, and periodic full backups. Customers also face challenges to
protect their growing amounts of data and to back up this data within their specified
backup windows.

PowerProtect Data Manager for NAS protection addresses today’s customer challenges
of protecting evolving NAS environments. Unlike NDMP-based solutions, dynamic NAS
protection is a NAS-vendor-agnostic solution. With dynamic NAS protection, customers
can overcome the challenges with the NDMP protocol.

Protecting NAS assets with Data Manager is a non-NDMP solution. Dynamic NAS
protection uses the NAS Protection Engine for backup and recovery orchestration. This
solution is easy to use, and provides automatic discovery, orchestration, and
management through the Data Manager UI. With its snapshot technology and intelligent
slicing, Data Manager protects NAS data efficiently within the required backup window.

This solution addresses some of the challenges to dynamic NAS protection with the
following capabilities:
• Vendor-agnostic solution for NAS protection
• Forever incremental backup and no periodic full
• High number of parallel streams and multiple virtual containers to address scale
and performance
• Index, search, and restore
• Restore to any NAS device, such as NFS/CIFS

Audience This white paper is intended for Dell Technologies customers, partners, and employees
looking to protect NAS storage arrays using Data Manager.

Revisions Date Description

September 2021 Initial release

July 2022 Includes 19.11 updates

October 2022 Includes 19.12 updates and enhancements

4 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection

 Executive summary

We value your Dell Technologies and the authors of this document welcome your feedback on this
feedback document. Contact the Dell Technologies team by email.

Authors: Vinod Kumar Kumaresan and Breno Lourdu

Note: For links to other documentation for this topic, see the PowerProtect Data Manager Info
Hub.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection 5

 Introduction

Introduction

PowerProtect PowerProtect Data Manager for NAS protection is a software-only solution that supports
Data Manager for centralized backup and recovery for NAS assets. Dynamic NAS protection provides a
NAS overview non-NDMP, crawl- and backup-based solution by leveraging the NAS Protection Engine
internally using Filesystem Agents (FSA) File based-backup (FBB) technology. Data
Manager for NAS protection supports multi-stream backup and restore. With centralized
support, Data Manager controls and manages end to end backup and recovery
operations.

Data Manager for NAS protection supports all the Data Manager objectives such as DD
Replication, Cloud Tier, progress monitoring, and SLA compliance.

Figure 1. Data Manager for NAS overview

The dynamic NAS solution supports protection for Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity, Dell
PowerScale (Isilon) NAS products, and any NFS or CIFS share using generic NAS for
other vendors such as NetApp, Windows, and Linux file servers.

Note: Supported hardware or software platforms may be updated in subsequent releases. See the
support matrix at https://elabnavigator.dell.com/eln/modernHomeDataProtection for the latest
product information.

Data Manager can protect NAS assets in two ways:

• Appliances: Automatic discovery of shares on supported PowerStore, Dell Unity,
and PowerScale (Isilon) products.
• Shares: Network File System (NFS) and Common Internet File System (CIFS)
shares from other NAS platforms.
Shares on the supported Dell Technologies appliances (as listed above) are automatically
detected, and NFS and CIFS shares from other NAS platforms can be manually added.
NAS protection backs up and recovers ACLs and extended attributes for NFSv4 and
CIFS/SMB shares.

6 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection

 Introduction

Data Manager for NAS protection supports following restore use cases:
• Share-level restore
• Restore to any device, NFS, or CIFS
• Restore to original and alternate NAS shares
• File-Level Recovery (FLR): NAS backups are indexed on the Search Engine for
search and restore operations.

Dynamic NAS The features of dynamic NAS protection are:

protection • Software-only solution
features
▪ Data Mover NAS Protection Engine as Virtual Machine with containerized NAS
agents
▪ Protection Engine OVA
• Auto discovery of NAS shares for supported Dell NAS appliances
• Intelligent share slicer for parallel backups
• Auto slicing of NAS share to achieve multiple parallel streams
• Auto distribution of backup streams to single or multiple NAS Protection Engine
• Crawl and backup appliance snapshot or generic NAS share
• Forever incremental backup
• Supports large number of backup parallel streams:
▪ One to 256 (see the section Protection Engine parameters for more details
about the scalability of stream counts)
• Restore with parallel streams:
▪ Eight streams (see the section Protection Engine parameters for more details
about the scalability of stream counts)
• Index, search, and FLR
• Support for multiple protocol shares (discovers two shares: one CIFS and one NFS)
• From Data Manager 19.11, backups completed with an exception will have
▪ Complete list of skipped elements in backup and ACL backup skipped. This will
be present in the backup logs, which can be exported to list the number of
skipped files/folders with the reason they were skipped.

Note: See the PowerProtect Data Manager for Network Attached Storage User Guide
for details on how to review protection logs.

▪ Consolidation of error to indicate cause of exception in the job summary

• From Data Manager 19.12, backup of non-English (Japanese and Chinese) file and
path names is supported. These languages generally contain file names with multi-
byte characters and length of more than 255 bytes.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection 7

 Architecture overview

Architecture overview
The following high-level architecture describes the dynamic NAS asset backup and
recovery solution with Data Manager.

Figure 2. High-level architecture overview

The NAS array is the primary storage location for the NAS data from where the data is
read and sent to the secondary storage location which is PowerProtect DD series
appliances. Data Manager protects the NAS assets using specialized NAS Protection
Engines.

The NAS Protection Engine is used as a data mover for backup and recovery.
Containerized NAS agents run on the NAS Protection Engine to support multiple NAS
protection operations. Each NAS container is pre-installed with NAS agent and FSA
agent. NAS Agent will use FSA binaries for backup and recovery and orchestrate them to
run backup and recovery with multiple threads or streams to achieve optimal scale and
performance. Once the backup is completed, the Search Cluster creates indexes for the
NAS backup and supports search and FLR.

Solution Data Manager components for NAS

components NAS Data Manager (NASDM): The NASDM micro-service in Data Manager is the pillar
for NAS workload backup and recovery.
• Orchestrates NAS backup and recovery operations
• Performs NAS backup copy management
• Maintains Protection Copy Set (PCS) and Protection Copy in Elasticsearch
database
• Initiates index and search with Search Engine
• Support for DD Replication, Cloud Tier, and Telemetry

8 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection

 Architecture overview

NAS discovery plug-in: The discovery plug-in enables automated discovery of supported
Dell Technologies NAS appliances as assets and stores the asset information to the
Elasticsearch database.

Virtual Proxy Orchestrator Daemon (vpod): NASDM uses vpod to orchestrate NAS
assets protection using NAS Protection Engines. NASDM integrates with vpod component
for backup and recovery.

NAS Protection Engine components

The Protection Engine is an external virtual machine running on a VMware vCenter for
NAS backup and recovery. Each Protection Engine can run multiple containers and each
container is pre-installed with NAS agent and FSA agent. A Protection Engine can receive
multiple NAS backup and recovery jobs for different shares, and a separate container
runs for each job.

NAS Container: Docker container running on Protection Engine for NAS data protection.
• Docker-based container for NAS workloads on the Protection Engine
• Runs on-demand on Protection Engine and destroyed after backup/recovery job
completion
• Each job will run in a separate NAS container
• Multiple containers can run simultaneously
• NAS container is packaged with NAS Protection Engine
NAS Agent: Backup and recovery agent for NAS shares.
• Manages NAS asset snapshot (Create, delete, and mount)
• Uses intelligent share slicer to create slices of NAS asset for parallel backups
• Performs multiple stream backup to achieve optimal scale and performance
• Manages Filesystem Agent for backup and recovery
• Manages NAS metadata records for each NAS asset
• Periodically collects backup and recovery progress
FSA Agent: Dynamic NAS Protection uses FSA-FBB as data mover for NAS data
protection. FBB method uses a crawl-and-backup method, which means that it crawls the
given file system and backs up files and metadata.
• Packaged with NAS agent and installed as part of NAS container deployment on
Protection Engine
• Moves the NAS data to and from PowerProtect DD series during backup and
recovery respectively
Search cluster
The search cluster consists of one or more Search Engine nodes to index the NAS
backup data.
• PowerProtect Data Manager search cluster is a multi-node Search Engine (up to 5)

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection 9

 Architecture overview

Note: Each search node can index up to 1 billion files. If there are no virtual machine
backups configured and only NAS shares are being protected, each node can index up to 1
billion files over single (or different) shares.

• Deployed as a virtual machine

• NAS protection solution provides file index, search, and FLR
• Allows user to search file or folder across the backups using the File Search option
• Search is based on file name, folder name, size, time, protocol.

Intelligent auto The NAS file-share auto slicer is a new library that is embedded in the Data Manager NAS
slicer for NAS agent. The slicer splits NAS assets (NAS share, a file system) into multiple sub-assets in
protection preparation for multi-stream data movement to PowerProtect DD series. Slices are
created using parallel threads, and each slice is backed up concurrently using available
NAS Protection Engine containers and moved to a PowerProtect DD series appliance.

The slicer partitions NAS assets dynamically before each backup. Based on backup
history and changes in the content of the NAS asset being sliced, relevant slices are
added, removed, or rebalanced. Periodically, unbalanced trees are automatically
managed as content changes over time. No manual reconfiguration is required. The
default slice size is 200 GB or 1 million files (tolerance of 30%).

Figure 3. Overview of intelligent auto slicing

Full and incremental behavior:

• Full backup slices: A complete share is traversed in parallel to create slices
• Incremental slices: Only modified slices are traversed to add or delete slices
• Dynamic re-slicing, re-balancing, consolidation of slices is based on backup history

10 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection

 Architecture overview

Auto distribution Dynamic NAS solution enables automated load balancing of protection engine hosts, and
of backup automatic scaling for containers to achieve maximum backup streams and reduce manual
streams management overhead.

Figure 4. Overview of auto-distribution of backup streams

Auto-distribution of backup streams performs the following:

• Orchestrates NAS workloads from Data Manager on multiple Protection Engines
• Spins up and tears down NAS protection containers as needed
• Provides automated calculation of containers required for a backup
▪ Containers are calculated based on slices and required backup window
• Provides automated load balancing of Protection Engines for every backup cycle
▪ Throttle up or throttle down the containers depending upon the workload
• Provides automated throttling or number of parallel streams for optimal impact on
NAS array

Sizing During backup, each asset is divided into smaller slices based on the threshold values as
recommendation mentioned below. Each slice is then serviced by an individual stream.
s • Number of Slices = (Assets Size) / (Slice Size) (The threshold slice size is 200 GB
and/or file count of 1 million; with a tolerance of 30%.)
• While deciding the number of Protection Engines, it is recommended to use a factor
of 1.2-1.5x size of the above slice count.
• Each Protection Engine supports up to 24 concurrent streams.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection 11

 Architecture overview

The following are the recommended guidelines for Protection Engine count to achieve
optimized throughput.
▪ Number of Protection Engines = (Number of Slices) / 24 (24 is the total count of
streams per Protection Engine, where eight streams a piece are served by a
different container.)
▪ With the current Data Manager v19.9 release, the recommendation is to scale
up to 11 Protection Engines for larger shares (for example 50 TB or larger).
• To achieve optimum performance, it is recommended to use a dedicated 10 GbE
network per Protection Engine. The Protection Engine throughput is bounded by
underlying network stack on ESXi host. Hence, a dedicated 10 GbE network per
Protection Engine would achieve better performance.
• Multiple NAS Protection Engines with a dedicated 10 GbE network can achieve
better net aggregated throughput. This includes reading the data from NAS array
and writing it to protection storage.
• If the whole environment is 10 GbE network (NAS array, PowerProtect DD series
and multiple Protection Engines), the overall throughput is bound by 10 GbE
network speed.
• If the read throughput from the NAS array and write throughput to PowerProtect DD
series causes a bottleneck with multiple Protection Engines, it is recommended to
have more network ports on NAS array and on PowerProtect DD series.
• The asset parallelism per asset helps to load balance the number of streams across
multiple shares. Asset Level Parallelism enables all asset backups to run in parallel,
and each of these assets has many concurrent streams (as per user Input of asset
parallelism). Also, if there are enough containers available, all these assets will run
in parallel. The Asset Level Parallelism parameter maximum supported count with
Data Manager v19.9 release is 256 concurrent streams per asset.
• Also, we can use the sizing tool created by Dell Technologies to determine the
number of protection engines which must be deployed for a certain protection load.
Contact Dell Technologies support to download and use a recent version of the
tool. The yellow highlighted sections in the tool can be edited to give us the approx.
number of proxy engines which need to be deployed without any manual
calculation. Some of the inputs required from the customer are:
▪ Array type (PowerScale, Dell Unity, PowerStore, or generic)
▪ Total amount of NAS data to be protected in TB
▪ Total number of files in millions
▪ Expected backup duration for full (Gen 0) backup
▪ Network parameters like the number of Array nodes/ ports, PowerProtect DD
series ports and Proxy ESXi’s ports involved in the backup. Same data will be
used to account for any bottlenecks in the proxy engine calculation.
▪ Expected backup duration for Synthetic full/ Incremental (Gen 1) and the
approx. change rate expected between backups.

12 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection

 Protecting the NAS asset

Protecting the NAS asset

Steps for NAS The following objectives are required to be completed for protecting the NAS assets.
protection

Figure 5. Steps for NAS protection

Note: See the PowerProtect Data Manager for Network Attached Storage User Guide or release
notes for details about prerequisites and initial configuration settings.

Enabling the Enabling the asset source in Data Manager allows you to add and register the asset
NAS asset source for the protection of NAS assets. From the Data Manager UI, the NAS asset
source source can be enabled from New Asset Source section as given below.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection 13

 Protecting the NAS asset

Adding a NAS For supported appliance types, the NAS appliance can be added as an asset source for
appliance to Data Manager to automatically discover any assets to protect.
Data Manager

Field Description

Name Enter a descriptive name for the appliance.

14 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection

 Protecting the NAS asset

Field Description

Select a supported appliance type from the drop-down menu (PowerStore,

Array Type
Unity, PowerScale)

Address Enter the FQDN or IP address for the appliance management interface.

Port Enter the port number for HTTPS REST API access to the appliance.

Select an existing set of management credentials of the NAS array.

Alternatively, Add Credentials option can be selected to provide new
Credentials
credentials, and click Save. These credentials should be root or admin
credentials for NAS array.

Dell PowerScale Data Manager 19.12 has added the following features to support Dell PowerScale
SmartConnect SmartConnect and multiple access zones:
and multiple
access zone • PowerScale SmartConnect names can be added as an asset source without
duplication of assets during discovery. Through this we can leverage
support
SmartConnect for client connection load balancing, and dynamic NFS failover and
failback of client connections across storage nodes to provide optimal utilization
of the cluster resources.

• SmartConnect access zones are used as a data path where backup and restores
execute over the network, mapped to zones of which the asset is part.

• Discovery and protection of shares/exports in all PowerScale access zones. Non-

system access zones can now be added as an asset source.

Note: See the PowerScale OneFS Web Administration Guide for more information about
SmartConnect and non-system access zones.

Adding a NAS For appliances where Data Manager does not support automatic discovery, the NAS
share to Data share can be added as an asset source.
Manager

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection 15

 Protecting the NAS asset

Table 1. Syntax and port numbers by protocol

Default Port
Protocol Syntax
Numbers
<NAS>:/<share-path-and-name>
NFS 2049
<NAS>:<port>/<share-path-and-name>

CIFS \\<NAS>\<share-path-and-name> 139, 445

Note: <NAS> can be either the fully qualified domain name or IP address for the NAS. Verify and
use the user-defined port numbers, if any.

See the Dell PowerProtect Data Manager for Network Attached Storage User Guide for
more detailed steps about adding the NAS appliance or share to Data Manager.

Discovering the Discovered NAS asset sources

NAS asset Once the NAS appliance or share is successfully added to Data Manager, all NAS asset
sources and sources are listed on the asset sources section as given below. By default, initial
assets discovery is done automatically once the NAS asset source is added and subsequent
discoveries are either manual or scheduled. Using the Schedule Discovery option (see the
section Adding a NAS share to Data Manager) a full discovery at a certain time every day
can be scheduled on a given time. At any time, an on-demand discovery of the assets can
be done using the Discover option.

16 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection

 Protecting the NAS asset

Note: The discovery status of generic NAS asset sources is displayed as Unknown.

Discovered NAS assets

After a successful discovery, the NAS assets that are discovered from the appliance
appear. The discovery time is based on the network bandwidth.

Notes:
• For Generic NAS assets, the size of the share is shown as 0 bytes during the initial
discovery. However, the size of the share is determined and displayed after the first
successful backup.
• In case of multi-protocol shares in supported Dell Technologies appliances, Data
Manager displays two entries of the same asset with different protocols
(CIFS/NFS).

Deploying a The NAS Protection Engine is deployed on the selected VMware vCenter, and Data
Protection Manager registers the Protection Engine. The NAS Protection Engine hosts the NAS
Engine for NAS agent and FSA.
asset protection

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection 17

 Protecting the NAS asset

Protection Engine parameters

A NAS Protection Engine can protect multiple NAS assets simultaneously by hosting
separate containerized agents for backup and restore operations on individual shares.
Data Manager selects a Protection Engine for each protection job based on availability.
• Each Protection Engine has 24 parallel streams that can be used to protect NAS
assets. However, a user-defined count of parallel streams can be specified for a
particular NAS asset.
• By default, Data Manager allocates eight streams per NAS asset and can allocate
from 1 to 256 streams per asset, which is tunable. For restore operations, eight
streams are allocated, and it is not tunable.
• To set the stream count for a particular NAS asset, go to Infrastructure > Assets on
the Data Manager UI. From the NAS table, select an asset from the list and click
More Actions > Set Stream Count.

18 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection

 Protecting the NAS asset

Enter a new value (1 to 256) for Maximum Streams and click Save. The default value is 8
streams.

Centralized Data Manager supports centralized protection for NAS assets, where all the stages of the
protection policy protection policy are managed by Data Manager.
for NAS assets

Note: Data Manager uses these credentials at the policy level for all shares unless otherwise
specified at the asset level. The credentials provide snapshot creation and export permissions on
the appliance and read/write access to the NAS shares.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection 19

 Protecting the NAS asset

If credentials are set at the protection policy level, all shares should use the same
credentials for access. Otherwise, if individual asset credentials are set at the asset level,
multiple assets use their respective credentials.

See the Dell PowerProtect Data Manager for Network Attached Storage User Guide for
more detailed steps about creating a protection policy for NAS protection.

Individual asset credentials settings

Individual asset credentials can be set from the Data Manager UI.

Enable indexing and selecting backup behavior for file exceptions

When the Search Engine is installed, the Enable indexing for file search and restore
option is available while creating the protection policy to enable indexing the NAS
backups as given below.

With Data Manager 19.12, we can now continue the backup even if there is a data access
denied or ACL access denied failure encountered on files. We can set these flags as
shown in the following figure.

20 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection

 Protecting the NAS asset

Manual When performing the NAS backup using the Protect Now option, Data Manager provides
protection of Synthetic Full or Full as the backup selection type.
NAS backup

The following screen shows the protection job details from Data Manager UI for the NAS
protection job in progress.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection 21

 Protecting the NAS asset

The following screen shows the job summary details from Data Manager UI for the NAS
backup in progress.

The following screen shows the protection job details from Data Manager UI for the
successful NAS backup.

22 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection

 Protecting the NAS asset

The following shows the job summary details from Data Manager UI for the successful
NAS backup.

Backup From Data Manager 19.12, the skipped element(s) count of ACLs and data backed up is
completed with captured in the job summary, as shown in the following figure.
exceptions

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection 23

 NAS backup workflow

The user can see all skipped elements in the UI, using the Show Skipped files button, for
index enabled backups.

Existing “Export Log” functionality is used to download the skipped element list in CSV
format.

NAS backup workflow

The NAS agent backup workflow is a three-step procedure, and it supports only a
centralized backup workflow. The NAS-share backup is initiated by Data Manager through
a protection policy. The NASDM micro-service running on Data Manager initiates the
NAS-share backup request using the Virtual Proxy Orchestrator Daemon (vpod). Backup
requests are received on the Protection Engine and are routed to the NAS agent.
Depending upon the array support, the NAS agent creates the snapshot and uses the

24 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection

 NAS restore workflow

slicer to create slices of NAS data. The file system agent moves the data slices in parallel
to the PowerProtect DD series appliance. NASDM initiates the indexing once the backup
is complete.

Figure 6. NAS backup workflow

NAS restore workflow

The NAS agent recovery is a single-step procedure, and it supports only a centralized
restore workflow. The recovery is orchestrated using NASDM and Protection Engine
infrastructure. Upon user selection for recovery (share level or search and restore), the
recovery is initiated from Data Manager.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection 25

 Restoring the NAS asset

Figure 7. NAS restore workflow

Restoring the NAS asset

Data Manager provides support to restore a NAS asset to the original location or to an
alternate location. Data Manager also supports FLR using the search engine to restore
individual files and folders from NAS backups.

26 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection

 Restoring the NAS asset

The following shows the options to restore and overwrite the original share or restore to
an alternate share or array.

If restoring to an alternate location, a table of available shares appears. Review any

warnings and click OK. The yellow warning on the shares indicates the presence of a
warning for the destination share, when the destination free space is less than the size of
the actual restore data.

NAS file-level NAS Protection solution provides File Index, Search, and FLR which allow you to search
restore using the file and folder from the entire NAS backup. When the Search Engine is deployed and
File Search NAS protection policy is enabled with indexing, you can use the File Search option to
restore individual files and folders from one or more NAS backups.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection 27

 Restoring the NAS asset

From Data Manager 19.12, we can now search for skipped files that have not been
backed up using the File Search option.

Note: Indexing must be enabled for the File Search option to become available.

File versions: Select how Data Manager should distinguish files from different backups, if
the selected files and folders exist in multiple backups of the same NAS asset.

28 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection

 Restoring the NAS asset

Option Description

The restore appends a suffix to the filename. The suffix identifies

In the Same Folder
the backup from which the file or folder was restored.

The restore uses separate folders to group files from different

In a Separate Folder backups. The folder name identifies the backup from which the file
or folder was restored.

The following shows selecting the destination restore location options for FLR.

Option Description

Restore and Overwrite the The restore operation overwrites any files at the original location
Original Files and Folders with the same names.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection 29

 Restoring the NAS asset

Option Description

Restore to an Alternate A table of available shares appears. Complete the following sub
Share or Array steps.

Note: From PowerProtect Data Manager 19.11, having FLR restore to the original location allows
you to overwrite the existing files on the export/ share without creating the entire path hierarchy of
the restored file/folder.

For alternate share restores, we can now recover the files/folders directly at the root level of the
alternate asset/ share/ export. This helps to retain the complete folder hierarchy when performing
the FLR action.

30 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection

 Performance Results

Performance Results

Figure 8. Backup performance results

Disclaimer: Backups were performed using PowerScale storage as the source and PowerProtect
DD series as the backup target with PowerProtect Data Manager. These results were derived
from Dell Technologies internal testing performed under varying conditions.

Filesystems come in all sorts of complex topologies. In this section we will observe the
average write throughput achieved when performing backups for filesystems with
Balanced directory structure and Unbalanced directory structure. Data Manager uses auto
slicing and intelligent scaling through proxies to support faster multi – stream backups
irrespective of the filesystem type.

With a Balanced directory structure (Millions of 512 KB files distributed in multiple

directories), the initial full backup to PowerProtect DD series completes with a write
throughput of 4 TB/hr and a subsequent incremental backup (with 4% change in data)
shows an increased throughput of 5 TB/hr.

Comparable results are seen in case of Unbalanced directory structure as well (Millions of
files varying from 32KB to 4GB file sizes distributed in multiple directories). During an
initial full backup to PowerProtect DD series, write throughput is 2 TB/hr and the
incremental backup (with 4% change in data) shows an increased throughput of 3 TB/hr.

For these tests, multiple proxy engines were used to support the workload and the asset
level parallelism was set to 256. To learn more about calculating number of proxies
required and setting protection engine parameters, see the section Sizing
recommendations.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection 31

 References

References

Dell The following Dell Technologies documentation provides other information related to this
Technologies document. Access to these documents depends on your login credentials. If you do not
documentation have access to a document, contact your Dell Technologies representative.
• The Data Protection Info Hub
For PowerProtect Data Manager:
• Dell PowerProtect Data Manager for Network Attached Storage User Guide
• Dell PowerProtect Data Manager Administration and User Guide
• Dell PowerProtect Data Manager Deployment Guide
• Dell PowerProtect Data Manager Release Notes
For Dell PowerProtect DD series appliances:
• Dell DDOS Administration Guide

32 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection