DS-Client sizing recommendations

The role of the DS-Client Server within the Asigra cloud backup solution is to gather data from any datasource on the customer’s network and process/compress/deduplicate/encrypt the data and send it to the DS System for online storage.

Properly sizing DS-Clients involves many considerations. This document outlines recommended practices and configuration requirements to best assist partners in determining what hardware/software to deploy to accommodate their customer’s varied cloud backup requirements.

Number of DS-Clients

Partners can deploy as many DS‐Clients as necessary to accommodate the needs of their customers. Typically one DS-Client per Operating System (i.e. Windows or Linux) would be deployed for each customer network with some exceptions/stipulations.

There is no precise formula to determine how many DS‐Clients are needed to cover a particular size of network. The number often depends on the amount of data changing daily, type of data, number of files, network speed, hardware used for DS‐Client, and the capacity of the source computers.

Number of Concurrent Activities

Examples of concurrent activities are backup/restore/synchronization/daily admin/weekly admin and delete processes. A DS‐Client, by default, runs a maximum of twelve (12) concurrent activities. Performance may decrease if the number of concurrent activities is too high for the DS‐Client’s processing power. It is possible to ‘configure’ the number of activities based on processing power.

An additional option for mitigating heavy loads resulting from too many concurrent activities, is to deploy a DS-Client Grid. A DS-Client Grid is comprised of multiple DS-Client nodes, from two and up depending on requirements.

Activity Load

If high levels of processing usage are observed at a particular time, consider rescheduling backup sets to distribute the load more evenly. If levels are high at all times, consider a more powerful computer or delegate some backup sets to another DS‐Client machine. You can also choose to upgrade to a Grid DS‐Client.

Asigra – DS-Client Sizing Guidelines/Considerations:

DS-CLIENT – Hardware Considerations: 

RAM

• TheDS-Client’s database will utilize more RAM as the number of files being successfully backed up increases. Therefore, the larger the number of files/e-mails being backed up, the larger the recommended amount of RAM recommended per DS-Client.
• Most of the RAM usage for the DS-Client comes from Master/Delta generation processing. The amount of RAM depends on the size of the source file. In case large files need to be processed, the DS-Client will require more available RAM. In addition, parallel large file processing (e.g. concurrent database backups) requires more RAM on the DS-Client.
• The database engine’s performance is also very sensitive to the amount of RAM, in particular when dealing with sets with large number of files or folders.
• Multi-threaded delta processing (configured as DeltaThreads and DeltaThreadsFS) will result in DS-Client use of more memory, the more the DeltaThreads, the more RAM it is likely to use.
• A DS‐Client running many backups can run into a system resource problem, and DS‐Client may report Error "Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the Requested Service". This can occur due to a shortage of ‘pool memory’ in the operating system, even if the system has plenty of RAM and disk space.
• If these problems occur, partners can either reduce the number of activities running at the same time or reduce the configurable number of threads used for backup and restore activities.