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The ability to protect critical data and to manage and view system health, performance and efficiency is imperative in an enterprise environment.
Dell Technologies offers various solutions to make managing your data protection systems easier. You can integrate the following data protection management solutions with a 3 Tier Platform:
Data Protection Central provides the following features:
Data Protection Central requires the following resources:
Table 92. Data Protection Central resource requirements
Resource | Requirement |
CPU | 4 CPUs |
Memory | 8 GB |
Disk Space | 560 GB |
Dell Technologies recommends that Data Protection Central be deployed to the 3 Tier management platform as a VM, Once it is deployed, the Data Protection Central console is accessible through a web browser.
Through the console, you can perform the following actions:
Data Protection Advisor is a platform for performing reporting and analytics in a data protection environment. This solution can provide full visibility into the health and effectiveness of the data protection strategy and monitor technologies including backup software, storage array replication, servers, databases, and virtual infrastructures.
The Data Protection Advisor reporting engine provides highly customizable reports for:
Troubleshooting
The Data Protection Advisor Predictive Analysis Engine provides:
The following systems are discovered and monitored in the initial release of Data Protection Advisor:
You can add other hardware or software that is listed in the Data Protection Advisor Software Compatibility Guide for monitoring after the initial deployment.
A Data Protection Advisor deployment includes the following installations:
Note: Installation of both the datastore server and application server on a single virtual machine is not supported. Each virtual machine listed above also includes the installation of a Data Protection agent. These agents are intended for monitoring the Data Protection Server environment only. Data Protection Advisor agents should be installed on separate hosts or virtual machines for performing remote data collection on monitored object such as Avamar or Data Domain.
To determine the sizing for the Data Protection Advisor datastore server and application server, use Solution Builder by engaging a Dell Technologies professional.
The sizing estimator uses the following input to size the Data Protection Advisor environment:
Using this input, the sizing estimator provides the following output for both the datastore server and application server:
The sizing estimator is not exact and may only provide a general recommendation based on assumptions and expectations. Therefore, it is a best practice is to virtualize each of these components for flexible system resource expansion.
Dell Technologies recommends that the Data Protection Advisor datastore and application servers be installed on Microsoft Windows Server VMs that are hosted on the 3 Tier management platform.
The following resource settings are applied to the memory, CPU, virtual disk, and NIC of each of the VMs:
TAble 93. Data Protection Advisor resource settings
VM | CPU Shares | Memory Shares | Memory Reservation | Reserve all guest memory (All locked) | Virtual Disk Format | vNIC Type |
Data Protection Advisor Datastore VM | High | High | Maximum | Yes | Thick Provision Eager Zeroed | VMXNET3 |
Data Protection Advisor Application VM | High | High | Maximum | Yes | Thick Provision Eager Zeroed | VMXNET3 |
To safely back up the Data Protection datastore, Dell Technologies recommendss that the datastore be exported to a flat file on a regular schedule. Back upthis using a backup product such as Avamar or NetWorker. This is the only supported method for backing up the Data Protection Advisor datastore.
Note: Do not rely on VMware snapshots or replication solutions such as RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines or RecoverPoint Classic for the datastore backup. The only supported method of backup and recovery is the export and backup of the datastore flat file.
The Data Protection Advisor (DPA) agents perform data collection from objects that DPA monitors. For objects such as PowerProtect Data Manager and Data Domain, deploy a DPA proxy agent on a designated host, other than the datastore and application servers, for data collection services.
When monitoring objects at remote sites, deploy DPA proxy agents at each site for collection duties. The agents typically communicate with monitored objects by using CLI, SNMP, SSH, or direct database connection. The DPA proxy agents may be sensitive to latency, which might cause data collection to fail.
No limit applies to the number of objects that a single DPA agent can monitor, and there is no limit on the number of DPA agents that may be deployed. There are also no additional licensing costs for the DPA agents themselves. However, additional licensing costs may apply for the operating systems on which the agents operate.