DPM Strategy

[PR.]

So after a recommendation from someone on here and some testing we've invested in DPM2010 to backup all our sites.

We will eventually have 10 sites, 9 of these are slow WAN connections to DPM. Every site has an Exchange server with between 9-100Gb of emails, plus 10-90Gb of user data and 2x 9Gb of OS installs. The tenth site has about 110Gb of emails, 260Gb of user data, and 8x 9Gb OS installs.

My current setup is:

1. Protection Group - OS Data, backing up twice daily to HDD with 7 days retention and to a single tape once a week
- OS C:\ drive
- System Protection Data
- Bare Metal Restore data

2. Protection Group - User Data, backing up twice daily to HDD with 30 day retention and a daily backup to 5 daily tapes, plus a month end backup to one of 12 monthly tapes
- User Shares
- Exchange Databases
- SQL Databases

Does it make sense to split the same server backups over two protection groups?

My main issue is that we have a single LTO5 tape drive with a maximum capacity of 3TB my rough calculations suggested merging the two protection groups in to one would have about 3.6TB of data which probably wouldn't fit and if it did would leave very little space for growth in the future.

Would be interested in what others have done. Thanks.

 

[oddjob62]

Yes, you would split up your backups according to retention and schedule.

We have:
Data (user files etc): 30 days (2 daily recovery points)
Exchange/SQL: 14 days (hourly sync).
Servers (OS etc): 7 days for important servers, tape only for lesser ones.

Everything is backed up to tape at the weekend (LTO4 Autoloader)

We also have an offsite DPM servers (connected by a 100meg LL) that replicates our changable data (files exchange sql), although this will be used less once i finish our full DR setup (offsite exchange, DFS and SQL mirrors)

 

[Spammeh]

PR, slightly off topic, but roughly how much did all the agents and the software itself cost for DPM2010? Try to guage a round-about figure for work myself

 

[PR.]

Sorry Spammeh, I got the boss to get the quote.

I will double check with him when I'm back in on Tuesday but I do remember him saying it cost a little more than he'd budgeted (probably as we have quite a few Exchange/SQL servers that need the Enterprise license)

There's is some $ pricing here - http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/data-protection-manager/dpm-pricing-licensing.aspx that might help to get a rough guess

Standard license is fine for file backups, but if you want to backup Exchange/SQL at the application level you'll need an Enterprise license.

 

[Spammeh]

Yeah, would be interesting to see if the resellers over here came in a little bit cheaper. Massively curious about how cheap I can get this in @ our place, alongside System Centre (cross fingers)