Hi Everyone..
What is your opinion on best practice on hard drive space for DPM?
I have a 2950 with 8tb of available space on the internal drives and 30tb on an attached MD1000.
My understanding is that DPM gobbles up hard drive space like it's going out of style and from reading the system requirements it's recommended to have 2-3 times the size of the protected data. I have that now. In the future, maybe not but I will cross that bridge when or if I get there.
My question pertains on how to set up the drives for use with DPM. The way I see it I have a couple of options. I could set up a large raid-10 or raid-60 array and lose space but have redundancy. Or I can just set up each individual drive with MBR and have a multitude of 2tb disks available with no redundancy. I understand that DPM sets up all of the attached drives as dynamic disks. Does this mean that DPM is actually setting up it's own software raid system - striping the volumes or??
Is the redundancy really a huge deal with DPM? I mean, if I lost one drive, then I just replace it and I've lost the data on the one drive. Unless of course DPM is setting up striped volumes on the dynamic disks. Then you've possibly lost it all.
But if not, the only danger zone would be if I lost an array on one of my other machines or a desktop drive before DPM could backup whatever data was lost.
Workstations and laptops can get re-imaged if I happened to lose a DPM drive that had that workstation data on it. All of the valuable data is on servers with raid-10 or raid-1 arrays at the minimum plus I run nightly server backups. Of course it would be nice to rely on DPM to eliminate the nightly backups but I wouldn't eliminate them to start with.
Sorry if I kind of rambled. Lots of thoughts on this swirling around in the gray matter.
Michael