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SharePoint Online - Number of streams

  • 22 November 2021
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Hi, In Command Center I have created an Office 365 app for SharePoint backup. I left basically everything default and configured 10 Azure Apps and 10 Service Accounts for backup.The backup, although very slowly, runs. Schedule is default (daily 9PM), I created 1 Office Plan and 1 Server Plan However, I notice the backup uses only 1 stream. What can I do to make the SharePoint backup automatically use more streams, or how can I divide the SharePoint sites (5000+) in something that would be similar to the SubClients in the CommCell Console? Again, I have not used the CommCell Console, only Command Center,

Thanks!

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Best answer by Henry Lay 23 November 2021, 01:02

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Hi iConsultant,

We noticed the same thing with SharePoint Online backups. Backup jobs only used 1 stream per access node. Commvault added multi-streaming support in FR25 version for SharePoint Online. We just did an upgrade to FR25 and SharePoint Online backups are completing much faster now.

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Hi @iConsultant,

Thank you for the additional information. Because you’re using Modern Authentication, you’ll only just need one service account to make the connection to the SPO tenant, as the backup utilizes the Azure apps to fetch the data. Having several Azure apps is beneficial because it means there is more to use in the pool in case one does get throttled since we round robin between them.

Given the number of Azure apps you are using, I don’t believe throttling will be an issue. You’ll also be able to see this in the job which will mention that a particular Azure app is getting throttled, and the job logs will show particular exception errors e.g. HTTP status code 429 ("Too many requests") or 503 ("Server Too Busy"). However, if we encounter throttling, the job will switch and utilize a different Azure App.

 

Hope that helps!

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Hi Henry, Thanks for your feedback, that's all good to know. A first check doesn't show the error messages you are referring to. But when I double-click on the job in the Job Controller / Progress tab it invariably indicates the “Read” load is above 99%, sometimes even 100%! I see a difference here with for example OneDrive backup, which is normally faster and can give a high load on the on-prem DDB. Maybe I should check if I can access SharePoint fast enough from the SharePoint Powershell or something (meaning outside of Commvault), but for the moment I accept it as it is.

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Hi @iConsultant,

Thank you for your question. Although the SharePoint job appears to be running with a single stream, the job is actually being multi-threaded and will honour the stream value that is set. A couple of things you can do 1) Increase the streams value 2) Manually run backups on specific sites in parallel to the schedule backup job (Please ensure you run the manual jobs first before the scheduled job runs).

 

Could I please get a bit more information on your setup?:

  1. What Feature Release and Maintenance Pack is your environment on, including the Access Nodes version?
  2. Are you using basic or modern authentication?
  3. How many streams are configured in the SharePoint app?
  4. Are you using the “All Versions” option in the Office 365 Plan?
  5. How large is your SharePoint environment - application size and file count?

 

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Hi Henry,

  1. 11..24.7
  2. Modern
  3. 20 (streams, apps and service accounts)
  4. Yes
  5. I didn't run any command. According to Commvault Command Center so far: 3107 sites, 7,26TB and 4,894.25K items. Biggest site 794 GB.

I am indeed running manual backups (selecting limited number of sites only) in parallel.

I have the feeling that Commvault is working great but that I am fighting against the throttling of Microsoft. As a third party backup vendor (not Commvault) states in an internal forum: “we have discussed this with Microsoft and in the future it might even become worse where initial backups could take months and longer.”

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