DPM, SharePoint, and Database Mirroring
Lately I've been working on System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 for protecting our SharePoint and SQL servers. If you are not familiar with DPM, DPM is all about protecting your servers by replicating block level differences to a disk based store. This has amazing ramifications on how much data you need to backup, how long you need to backup, and how much resources are required to backup. The give you some quick perspective, we implemented DPM on one of our Asian SharePoint farms and reduced backup times from 6-8 hours to 2 hours. SQL utilization during backup went from 50-60% (using SQL compression) down to 5-8%. Unfortunately, DPM for SharePoint does not support database mirroring at this time. We are working closely with the product group to rectify this situation and will update you as soon as I have more information.
