There are some things I wish Microsoft hyped a bit more. System Center Data Protection Manager is one of those products that typically falls off an IT admin’s radar, even when they already have System Center in place on the network in some form or another. Don’t forget, if you threw down for a System Center license, you own the whole suite! The world is your Systems Management oyster.

All aboard the hype train. Did you know that you can replicate your DPM backups? This can be a key component in your DR strategy. There are a few different ways you can configure DPM replication, but only one really matters. Essentially, DPM can be configured to back up another instance of DPM like it were any other server. Luckily for us, DPM is smart enough to realize it’s trying to protect another DPM instance and will configure itself accordingly. Let’s dive in:

Have two DPM instances configured and running. Using your secondary DPM instance, attach to the DPM agent on your primary server.

Add the primary server to your secondary DPM server’s protected items.

Note: you’ll definitely want to configure a unique protection group for your replicated DPM instances.

That’s it. No matter what, make sure you’ve protected the DPM database of your primary server, as you cannot restore protected DPM data without it. You can even pick and choose which protected items you’d like to replicate, including app-aware items like SQL or SharePoint backups!

What about failover? Using data that’s already been replicated, you can force your existing servers to utilize the secondary DPM server as their primary.

Happy DPM-ing!