Planning the Tape Libraries Configuration
Applies To: System Center Data Protection Manager 2010
You can add tape libraries and stand-alone tape drives to DPM to enable short-term and long-term data protection on tape. The tape libraries and stand-alone tape drives must be storage area network (SAN) attached or SCSI attached to the DPM server.
Note
The term tape libraries refers to both multi-drive tape hardware and stand-alone tape drives.
Consider the number of tape backup jobs and the size of the protected data when planning the capacity of your tape library. You must also consider the hardware features: a tape library without an autoloader requires manual tape rotations when jobs are being performed.
To plan for the number of tapes you will need for each protection group, multiply the backup frequency by the retention range.
The tape labels for tapes used for long-term protection are assigned when you create a protection group. DPM will assign a default tape label in this format: DPM - <ProtectionGroupName> - long-term tape <number>. Before you begin creating protection groups, you should plan your tape naming scheme if you do not want to use the default scheme.
For more information, see Managing Tape Libraries (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=187445).