Thursday, September 8, 2011

DPM Protection Group Design Decsions

Nearly every site I visit that wants to implement DPM is different. Wouldn't it be great if you could just create your protection groups and backup everything every night and have green ticks all the time.

But if you have lets say 8TB of data and your SAN or SAN's are standard gigabit iscsi then just calculate your average data transfer per gb per hour and see if you can get it all in one night!

My server of choice is the HP x1600 Storage Server.HP do great bundles on 6TB , 12TB or even 24TB models. They are very easy to setup and just work , never have any problems with them. Need a LTO5 drive to attach to it. No problem there is a sas adapter ready to go.

Here is a list of items that can influence your decisions on designing DPM Protection groups.

•Which Hypervisors are in use
• What type of SAN is in use iSCSI, SAS, Fiber Channel
• Are snapshots licensed on the SAN
• Does the SAN have capacity for snapshots
• What is LAN Connectivity speed between DPM and Protected Sources
• What is the WAN Speed
• Do you require DPM to DPM DR Replication.
• Is bandwidth throttling required
• Are there any compliance policies in place in terms of retention of data.
• Are there any tape drives currently in use.
• Some servers may require reboots when the DPM agent is deployed.Can this be done during business hours.
• Is there third party vendor support contracts in place for Applications. Can we liaise with these vendors about backing up their applications
• Is self service recovery recovery required for client users.
• Is there a set limit to acceptable downtime.
• Which data is mission critical.
• What is your companies projected data growth.
• What version of exchange, sql, windows server, active directory, sharepoint is in place.