DPM advice please

[Simcfc73]

Hi Guys

I have decided to go down the DPM for backup as its quite funky. I have set it up on a ML110 server with a couple of 1.5TB drives to start with for backup.

It will be backing up my new server which runs 3 hyper-v, 2 of which aren't that important so only need backibg up weekly and the Sims server.

How do you guys organise the protection groups?

I was thinking of this.

1 protection group to backup the 2 hyper-vs thats not important every week.
1 protection group to backup the Sims drive and the SQL every 6 hours
1 protection group to backup the Whole Sims hyper-v (its a DC) nightly
1 protection group to backup the whole hyper-v server that they all live on including the system state every weekend to a external hard drive to take off site.

Over kill?

I am looking at buying a QNAP server to run iSCSI and put it in a different location for more redundancy. I am also running a Terrorstation to backup the kids work which I take away and go solely with DPM....

Any advice would be great.

[alan-d]

We are also looking to use DMP on our virtual setup being installed in the summer, apparently the 2010 release will be even better.

As far as your routine above I'd maybe reduce the time to every 15 - 30 mins for your SIMs\SQL, but again that would depend on how many users\changes are being made by staff. I suppose a small school could get away with 6 hours without any major issues.

Still at the planning stage but we plan to backup every 30 mins or so and a nightly backup to tape in another building.

[Theblacksheep]

Struggling with 2007...

Protection groups have to be the same length of time or data colocation (multiple protection groups on one tape) is not possible.

I have 4 TB as backup drives and I can get about 12 days disk backup before I run out of room.

DPM for the kids file servers have been great, couple of clicks to restore.... takes the chore out of digging up tapes, as well as exchange and sims is easy too..... but overall it's fiddly, eats drives and tape backup consistancy is still questionable. 2010 has to be alot better.

[Modey]

How do you guys organise the protection groups?

I was thinking of this.

1 protection group to backup the 2 hyper-vs thats not important every week.
1 protection group to backup the Sims drive and the SQL every 6 hours
1 protection group to backup the Whole Sims hyper-v (its a DC) nightly
1 protection group to backup the whole hyper-v server that they all live on including the system state every weekend to a external hard drive to take off site.

Over kill?

I am looking at buying a QNAP server to run iSCSI and put it in a different location for more redundancy. I am also running a Terrorstation to backup the kids work which I take away and go solely with DPM....

Any advice would be great.

My DPM2010RC setup has a single group which backs up all of our physical & virtual servers bar 1 or 2. They have 7 days worth of short term disk protection, and are also backed up to tape every night. We then do a weekly backup to tape on every Friday so we have a months worth of protection.

For SIMS and the DPM server itself, they are backed up to a different tape drive (similar rotation as above), but we take out a tape each month and will be keeping those up to 7 years in theory (although we don't have that many accumulated yet). There are some fairly stringent regulations in place (especially in regard to financial data).

As for your proposed setup, you mention the sims drive, then another protection group for the sims Hyper-v. If you are using DPM2010RC then protecting the Hyper-V server will also protect all of the drives on that server. DPM works better with 2008 servers better than 2003 though (in terms of granularity) so if your SIMS is running on 2K3 then you may want to consider backing it up independantly of DPM (like I do). What would give you more control over exactly what is being backed up though would be to install a DPM agent directly onto the SIMS server rather than backing it up from the Hyper-v side of things.

For us it's easier handling SIMS seperatly mainly from the tape point of view, and given than we need to keep a lot of them due to data archiving regulations.

edit: oh yeah and as for short term disk protection, I'm not sure the 2 x 1.5TB drives you have will be enough. It eats disk space big time. Take the total amount of data you are backing up, then quadruple it. Shoud give you a rough idea of the space needed.

[Theblacksheep]

Also, in 2007 you'll need about 20GB of space on the C drive for the system state backup of each machine you want to backup, if you want DPM to do this.

Not sure if this is still such a large requirement in 2010.

[Simcfc73]

Thanks for ther replies,

I can't get the tape backup to work as I don't seem to have a compatable drive. Its a Quantum DLT-V4 standalone which I had hoped would allow me to do a weekend backup.

How do you guys go about taking data offsite if you don't have a tape backup (still using windows backup to a NAS box then copying it to a USB hard drive for my offiste backup)

If I can't work this out then I am dumping DPM, its okay but as flexible as I had hoped.