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 cloud. 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 differentials 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 discusses about Deduplication of DPM Storage. By leveraging deduplication, customers can gain tremendous storage savings and so reduce overall backup storage cost.
DPM enables Deduplication by leveraging Microsoft Windows Deduplication technology introduced in Windows 2012. This feature 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.
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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.
While actual storage savings are dependent on actual data that is being backed up, our internal tests showed storage savings anywhere between 50% to 90%. Further details on the best practices and configuration details have been captured here.
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