Home > Data Protection > PowerProtect DP Series Appliances > PowerProtect DP Series Appliance: VMware Workload Protection > DP Series Appliance components
DP Series Appliance is an Integrated solution for data protection, combining multiple data protection solutions into a single product.
Appliance Configuration Manager provides a web-based interface for configuring, monitoring, and upgrading the appliance. The Appliance Configuration Manager dashboard displays a summary of the configuration of the individual components. It also enables the administrators to monitor the appliance, modify configuration details such as expanding the Protection Storage disk capacity, change the common password for the appliance, update customer information, and change the values in the General Settings panel. The General Settings panel on the Appliance Configuration Manager dashboard allows you to change the LDAP settings and displays the time zones, NTP server status, external LDAP server status, status of FIPS, and so on. The Appliance Configuration Manager dashboard enables you to upgrade the system and its components. It also displays the health information of the Appliance Server and VMware components.
DP Series Appliance uses Dell EMC Avamar as the backup solution for the workloads. Dell EMC Avamar is proven backup and recovery software that delivers secure data protection for cloud, remote office, and data centers. It has tight integration with VMware interfaces, which makes it a great solution for protecting any workloads running in a virtualized environment.
Avamar has two editions—physical Avamar and Avamar Virtual Edition (AVE). DP Series Appliance uses AVE for DP4400 and DP5xxx series models and physical Avamar for DP8xxx series models to perform backup operations. Optionally, Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) Accelerator can be added to enable backup and recovery of NAS systems. NDMP Accelerator uses the network data management protocol (NDMP) to enable backup and recovery of network-attached storage (NAS) systems. The accelerator performs NDMP processing and then sends the data directly to the Protection Storage.
Data Protection Central provides the advanced monitoring and management of DP Series Appliance activities—backup and recovery, replication, asset management, capacity, health, and alerts. It also includes advanced features such as search and recover options, comprehensive reporting, and cloud backups. The UI has information about protection software (AVE), protection storage (DDVE), search, and reporting and analysis components.
Dell EMC PowerProtect DD Series Appliance is an inline deduplication storage system that uses high-speed processing to perform target-based backups, archives, and disaster recovery. The backups performed by Avamar systems are stored in DD Series Appliance, known as Protection Storage. Like Avamar, the accelerator performs NDMP processing and sends the data directly to the DD Series Appliance physical server or virtual edition.
The Search feature provides a powerful way to search backup data within DP Series Appliance and then restore the backup data based on the results of the Search. Scheduled collection activities are used to gather and index the metadata (such as keyword, name, type, location, size, and backup server/client, or indexed content) of the backup, which is then stored within DP Series Appliance.
Cloud DR is a solution that enables disaster recovery of one or more on-premises backups the cloud. Cloud DR integrates with the existing on-premises backup software and a Protection Storage system to copy the service backups to the cloud. It can then run a disaster recovery test or a failover, which converts a service to an Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance or Microsoft Azure, and then runs this instance in the cloud.
Reporting and Analytics offers a reporting functionality with dedicated sections for various features. The reports help to retrieve information about the Protection Storage and Protection Software. These reports can be used to easily identify outages, diagnose problems, plan to mitigate risks, and forecast future trends.
Note: Components like Cloud Disaster Recovery, Search, or Reporting and Analytics are optional. Also, if these components are already configured in environment, then the appliance can be configured to use the central implementation.
The Cyber Recovery solution maintains mission-critical business data and technology configurations in a secure, air-gapped vault environment that can be used for recovery or analysis. The Cyber Recovery Vault (CR Vault) is physically isolated from the production system or the network.
The Cyber Recovery solution enables access to the CR Vault only long enough to replicate data from the production system. At all other times, the CR Vault is secured and off the network. A deduplication process is performed in the production environment to expedite the replication process so that connection time to the Cyber Recovery vault is as short as possible.
Within the Cyber Recovery vault, the Cyber Recovery software creates point-in-time (PIT) retention-locked copies that can be validated and then used for recovery of the production system. Deploying the Cyber Recovery solution as part of DP Series Appliance enables the protection of mission-critical data that is vulnerable to cyber-attacks. The Cyber Recovery solution is supported for new installations of DP4400 and DP5900 systems only. Customers can deploy their DP Series Appliance as a vault with the Cyber Recovery running on factory-shipped DP4400 and DP5900 systems.