Hi everyone, I've installed a SCCM 2012 R2 DPM installation for the first time I would much appreciate your input on how to best configure my backup. Will give some general info then raise a few questions below.

General info
SCCM 2012 R2 DPM installation (HyperV VM), 34TB SAN inhouse cabinet dedicated for backup, mostly taking backup of various HyperV VMs/VHDs consisting of Microsoft platforms (Sharepoint, Exchange, various SQL servers and other Windowsbased servers). I currently have roughly 10+ TB of actual data to backup.

Goal
Get backup up&running on DPM asap to the SAN, then within the next 6 months or so get an automatic offsite backup running (I'm thinking either Azure or to a secondary DPM installation). Not gonna go into details, but due to various reasons right now I just need to get the best inhouse backup towards the backup SAN up&running, and of course take into consideration an offsite solution will be implemented later.

Questions

1) Short-term vs Long-term planning
First I was thinking I could just add short-term protection to disk then add and deal with the long-term protection later. However if I add too many retention days I only get a single weekly recovery point. So I am going back and forward on how to solve this. Right now I'm thinking
-Short-term protection to DISK (VHD on the SAN)
-Long-term protection using Virtual Tape Library (with FireStreamer?) storing data on the same SAN as short-term

If this is a doable solution, I have the following follow-up questions related to such a setup:
-Hence VTL/Firestreamer, what would be the best VHD configuration? DPM kinda "steals" an entire VHD you add for disk backup, so I recon I will need a separate, dedicated VHD for the VTL/Firestreamer config?
-How would the VTL long-term backup on same SAN as short-term backup work when I am going to implement offsite backup? What will be the best solution: Replace current VTL long-term backup with the offsite solution (Azure or secondary DPM site) or do an offsite backup of the data that will be stored in my current VTL long-term protection
-If I need to create separate VHDs for short-term & long-term, is there some neat way to estimate disk usage required over time, to select suitable sizes on the VHDs?


2) De-duplication
I'm reading about DPM supporting de-duplication, and I'm thinking there could be a vast amount of storage to save (especially on long-term protection) implementing this. Currently my DPM virtual machine is linked up to a 20GB VHD on the backup SAN, which I added as disk in DPM. I haven't dug into the details here yet, but with such a setup I assume it would be possible to implement de-duplication on the 20GB VHD through my virtual machine OS, then DPM will be able to take advange of the de-duplication? What would be the procedure, and whenever I am ready to set up the offsite backup: Is there a way to use de-duplication to sync less data to the offsite location, to reduce bandwidth requirements? I.e. through a secondary offsite DPM site


Appreciate your time, and much appreciate all suggestions. And feel free to correct me if there is some fundemental thing I'm getting wrong here :)

Have a nice day!

• Edited by ptbNO 18 hours 36 minutes ago