As part of our mission to reduce overall TCO of DPM deployment, we are pleased to announce a new White Paper on Deduplication of DPM Storage . Customers can gain tremendous storage savings and reduce overall backup storage cost by leveraging this technology. While actual storage savings are dependent on kind of data that is being backed up, internal testing showed storage savings anywhere between 50% to 90% .
DPM is an enterprise class backup solution that provides simple yet powerful workflows for protecting server and client deployments in a data center. DPM can be leveraged to backup data to any combination of disk, tape or Azure for long term retention . DPM Central Console enables customers to manage multiple DPM servers under single pane of glass. Even though DPM copies full data only once and only incremental after that, Recovery Time Objective (RTO) remains same irrespective of how old is the recovery point. DPM storage consumption is inherently low because of storing “forever incremental” on disk. To further reduce TCO of overall DPM deployment, we are introducing Deduplication of DPM storage. As DPM backs up multiple data sources and its combination with multiple recovery points, there is lot of redundancy in backup data. This blog entry shows how to reduce overall DPM storage consumption by Deduplicating DPM data.
This scenario is enabled with the combination of DPM 2012 R2 UR4 and Windows 2012 R2 host and file servers with latest KBs on them. For optimal storage savings, DPM is configured as follows.
In above example, DPM is deployed as a VM and its storage is VHDX files residing on a Scale Out File Server. Dedup is enabled on SOFS volumes. As Dedup is a high storage and compute intensive operation, separating storage and Hyper-V will ensure that production VMs are not impacted by Dedup logic. Windows Dedup can be scheduled to run at specific times. Whenever Dedup logic kicks in, it will do Dedup of changed content from last Dedup cycle.
Further details on the best practices and configuration have been captured in Deduplication of DPM Storage White Paper .
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- Learn more about Azure Backup and System Center DPM .
- Download DPM UR4 and follow the steps outlined in the article for installation.
- Need help? Reach out to the DPM forums and the Azure Backup forum for support.