Chapter 2. Planning For Your Backup Needs

In this chapter we will explore backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) as well as planning for a DPM deployment. You should have an understanding of backup and DR before you can really get into planning your DPM deployment. In the first half of this chapter we will go into detail about what to back up in your environment. Some IT professionals don't really have a good understanding of this and this chapter will point out some best practices regarding this. We will also briefly cover disaster recovery, what it means and how to plan for it.

In the second half of this chapter, we will plan our DPM deployment by digging into how to plan for protection groups and the recovery goals. This is what you need to get ready when making decisions about how many DPM servers your environment will need, where they should be located and whether to use hard drives or tapes, and so on.