DPA Architecture

Data Protection Advisor is made of 3 components.  They are:

1. Application Server, which is a JBoss Application that replaces the Controller, Reporter, Listener, Publisher and Analysis Engine
2. The Datastore, which consolidates the Config, Datamine and Illuminator
3. Agent - client software.  Version 6 supports agents from both version 5.5 or newer and version 6.  It sends data as XML

The REST API is the common way-in for all data.  The REST API talks to the agents, datastore and executes service commands which in turn work on the services.

The message bus manages its own persistence.  It uses a series of journal files, each of which fits in a single disk cylinder to maximize performance .

The datastore is a Postgres 9.1 database, communicates on port 9003 and will support up to 100 simultaneous connections.  Root user access is prohibited, and all access to the database are done using the "apollosuperuser" account.  FIles are located in /opt/emc/dpa/services/datastore, and logs rotate automatically at 250 MB and/or daily.

The Application server and datastore can be split into two separate servers for performance.  The datastore cannot reside on a CIFS or NFS share due to latency.  An agent will be installed on both servers.  They can run on Windows 2003-2008R 64-bit, Solaris 10-11 SPARC (64-bit), Red Hat 5 or 6 64-bit, and SuSE 9-11 on both x86 and 64-bit platforms.  They each require 8 GB RAM, and in a combined solution for small environments 4 CPUs are required.  In a split environment, 2 CPU per server are required.

Performance tuning is largely done automatically.  It's recommended to put everything on fast drives, suche as Ultra-320 SCSI or SATA drives in a RAID1+0.  RAID5 can be used if there are more than 6 disks, and increasing RAM removes dependency on disk cache and improves performance.

Data can be collected remotely without an agent in some situations.  Using WMI, an agent can collect data on multiple Windows hosts that do not have an agent installed.  System performance data can not be collected on *NIX boxes without an agent installed.

DPA uses port 3741 for communication with agents, port 9002 for the HTTPS front-end and port 9003 for the Postgres database.