Wednesday, October 30, 2013

DPA - Data Protection Advisor - Overview

EMC's Data Protection Advisor is one of the few customer-installable software packages from EMC.  It is a monitoring tool only, and will keep metrics on all aspects of the backup system.  It will touch storage, network, applications, and provide analysis and reporting, alerting, troublehshooting assistance and capacity planning.  It provides no ability to modify configurations, however.

The main component of the DPA is its Proactive Analysis Engine.  This software runs continually against the data being collected and stored in DPA's database to provide comprehensive visibility in to the backup environment.  It gives a higher rate of compliance satisfaction because of the ability to see quickly what jobs are running/ran/failed and which component most likely caused any failure.  It allows reduction in resources by measuring capacity of disk and tapes in a backup system.

It is targeted at very large, very complex data centers with multiple backup technologies with heterogeneous environments.  The use case discussed includes some 87,000 backup jobs over better than 4000 clients.

No comments:

Post a Comment