Data Protection Manager 2010 features/limitations

We are planning to implement DPM 2010 to backup our mix of 2003/2008 2008R2 servers (some virtual on Hyper V) to 4 NASes.

We have purchased QNAP 509 NASes for continuous backup and was planning to use iSCSI as the technology to allow the backup server to connect to the NASes. What other options are there, can it backup to UNC on the NAS?

Does anyone know whether the backup of a physical server can be restored directly into a Hyper-V host as a VM, as I can imagine this being a very powerful DR feature?

Does the support of bare-metal recovery automatically mean that this is possible in a given scenario?

I learnt from a post in another thread that DPM2010 doesn't support bare-metal recovery for Win2003, which presumably implies that backups done using it cannot be imported into a Hyper-V host?

I wouldn't trust online backups as the only backup type as it won't protect you against viruses and worms destroying all the backups on the NAS.

So we would like to do a full backup once a week to removable storage, does DPM 2010 allow this? As I understand it it can but not to USB HDD, but using a third party software, you can get it to do this?

The other option for this is the NASes allow you to backup the entire contents to a extenal USB HDD (by pressing a button on the front or on a schedule).

Any advice or ideas is much appreciated :)

Thanks,

Bruce.

Leeds, UK.

Hi Bruce,
I can only help you with the later question. You are correct, it does not support the backup to USB HDD. The solution is to purchase Firestreamer. This is around £500 with an educational discount. I have been in contact with the company and they let me know that a cheaper, smaller "lite" version might be in the works.

We currently cannot afford the full version :(

Hi,
not sure about earlier questions - still testing full capabilities of dpm but have got firestreamer - cost £497 from MR ICT Ltd | IT support, services and consultancy in Leeds, York, Yorkshire - works ok backs direct to e-sata drive connected to nas. Also using qnap nas TS419U - backing up exchange and sharepoint as well as hyper v servers.

Am I right in thinking that DPM2010 has two forms of backup;

Continuous to a permanent online device (e.g. NAS)

and

(Full) Backup to tape drive (but not USB HDD)?

And is firestreamer's function to allow you to use the latter backup type but to USB HDD (presumably by tricking DPM 2010 into thinking it's a tape)?

This would sound ideal, and I notice that our QNAP 509's have external SATA ports for this.

For info: we actually 4 QNAP 509+ and 15 1TB SATA drives.
3 of the NASes will be setup with 3 HDDs and the 4th will be setup with 5 HDDs. All RAID 5.
This would give us around 2TB of storage on 3 of them and 4TB on the 4th.

Thanks,

Bruce.

DPM uses plain old disks that are unformatted in your server / iScsi.. AFAIK you cannot use Nas boxes or UNC paths;

You can restore a Hyper-V client straight back where it came from.. its very powerful... and as long as you don't change the disks in the clients to dynamic (which I did and wish I didn't) you can recover files from inside the client.

Not sure about the bare metal recovery.

I have used Firestreamer for a while now and it works pretty good (didn't pay £500 for it). I plug the USB hard drive into the DPM server, load the file the lock the backup door... the backup writes to the hard drive. I recently got some 2Tb USB 3.0 drives to speed it up, I can back up easily over one night now.

The recovery sets let you decide how you want the backups to run... short term for the disks... long term for the tapes.. you can back up different drives on the server using different schedules.

I am currently backing up 6 servers, all Hyper-V clients and it never fails..

There are some crappy bits, there doesn't seem to be a way to replace the drives without losing all the backups... you can't tell it what data goes on where.

As far as I can tell it does a bare metal recovery by starting an install of Server 2008 then uses a recovery mode at the start of setup to bring the backup in on top of the base install, hence the lack of support for Server 2003.

I'm considering DPM but it depends on what virtualisation route we go down... still weighing up VMWare vs Hyper-V (if we go down the VMWare route I'm not as sure about running the backups through agents on each VM as compared to backing up via the VM itself)

As above I like the option of backing off to tape, not sure how big the backups for that will come out at though?