DPM, SharePoint, and Database Mirroring

Lately I've been working on System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 for protecting our SharePoint and SQL servers. If you are not familiar with DPM, DPM is all about protecting your servers by replicating block level differences to a disk based store. This has amazing ramifications on how much data you need to backup, how long you need to backup, and how much resources are required to backup. The give you some quick perspective, we implemented DPM on one of our Asian SharePoint farms and reduced backup times from 6-8 hours to 2 hours. SQL utilization during backup went from 50-60% (using SQL compression) down to 5-8%. Unfortunately, DPM for SharePoint does not support database mirroring at this time. We are working closely with the product group to rectify this situation and will update you as soon as I have more information.

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 23, 2007
  Lately I've been working on System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 for protecting our SharePoint

• Anonymous
  September 03, 2008
  Is there any news on this yet? Can I use database mirroring with SQL 2005 and DPM on a Sharepoint farm database?

• Anonymous
  September 03, 2008
  This is rumored to be fixed in an upcoming release, but I have no public confirmation yet. Even though it's not yet supported, you can still configure DPM to protect a mirror under the following conditions. Each mirrored node is treated and protected as an individual node and... The application refers to the node's real (AD joined) name. For example, when using a SQL alias that alias must point to the real server name. e.g. A server named server1 would have an alias named server1.