Input on my design: Protection groups, long/short-term, dedup etc
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 Wednesday, September 09, 2015 12:59 PM
September 9th, 2015 12:56pm

Hi and thanks for your reply. The organization I work for is moving buildings in 6+ months so the timing is not right to set up the permanent offsite solution. But our old backup solution is failing so I still need to get backup up&running on DPM asap then deal with the offsite solution later.

I realize having both short-term + long-term on the same SAN is not best-practice or ideal. Still, given our current situation, this seems like the best way to get started, and to add long-term towards the SAN I obviously need VTL. 

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September 11th, 2015 3:44am

Library is good solution if you want to take tapes to secure location or for archiving purposes. 

If you need backup for disaster recovery its sufficient SAN. Other benefit of SAN is good performance for recovery. 

In your situation I suggest at first to tune up DPM to reach your SLA.

On second step I suggest to deploy Library or second DPM server in separate location.

September 11th, 2015 6:17am

yeah but if I configure DPM with short-term to disk only there's the 448day limit, which gives a single recovery point per week. I will need to lower the amount of retention days significantly to be able to raise amount of recovery points. Which is why I see no other option than to start off with both short-term + long-term protection. And to do this with backup to disk only I see no other option than to add long-term + VTL towards the SAN.

Eventually I will add offsite backup. Right now I need to find the best config using SAN only, while taking into consideration I will have a future offsite solution (Secondary DPM or Azure).

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September 11th, 2015 6:40am

Maybe your SAN have functionality to create VTL.

I had EMC DD. It have VTL function compatible with DPM.



  • Edited by Gerardas 20 hours 30 minutes ago
September 11th, 2015 7:12am

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