Tuesday 26 April 2011

Microsoft DPM - A breath of Fresh Air (almost!)

Having finally reached the end of our patience with Backup Exec and its never ending failures to simple requests, the terrible performance issues it suffers and all the other problems we hear about and witness every day, we decided to give Microsoft's Data Protection Manager a whirl.

There are a few important things to think about though if you are looking to switch, since Microsoft DPM is really only about Windows, SQL, Exchange and Sharepoint. If that's what you're running, and you're on 2003 SP-2 or 2008 and above, you should be fine. If you need other platforms and apps which Backup Exec supports you're probably out of luck using this.

Microsoft DPM is a very different product. One of the key differences is that it is truely snapshot based. Backup Exec still does far too much by using file by file methods - this has terrible scaling consequences.

It is mostly about Disk backup, whereas Backup Exec has a wider range of support for traditional tape backup. DPM can do it (it calls this "Long Term" Storage, and uses Disk for "Short Term" (you define what short/long term is...)

So in a nutshell (kind of) here's the story so far:

1) Installation of DPM failed because the install folder was "C:\!Software\DPM2010" whereas the installer ignored the existance of ! and tried to load "C:\Software\DPM2010" and couldn't find its own files. So we just put up with that and put DPM2010 in the c:\ folder root so we could get started.

2) Installation takes a while as it also rolls out SQL 2008 (you can get it to use an existing Database but we opted not to - and this is the recommended approach).

3) Take time to read the pre-req's and understand how DPM works. For example, make sure you have a huge volume on each DPM server (the best scenario) you have left unformatted so it can claim this for itself.

With those basics covered, the initial installation was completely succesful and our first DPM server appeared.

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