IU's Data Protection Service (DPS)

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Overview

Indiana University's Data Protection Service (DPS) provides a fast, reliable, and efficient data management solution for IU's Intelligent Infrastructure (II) environment.

DPS integrates with IU's enterprise-level virtualization and SAN infrastructures to create crash-consistent snapshots of the VMs. Each VM will have copies of these snapshots stored at both IU-owned and -managed Data Centers (that is, both in Indianapolis and Bloomington), allowing for full data redundancy.

Levels of protection

DPS provides two levels of protection to choose from: All Disk backups and OS Disk backups. You can opt out of any level of protection.

All Disk backups

  • Provides full VM protection
  • Lets clients self-service file-level recoveries from any of the 31 days of available backups
  • Provides a full VM disaster recovery process that can be performed on either the entire VM, the OS disk volume (labeled "Hard disk 1"; usually SCSI 0:0), or any of the attached disks; this type of recovery is not available for self-service and requires assistance from the Storage and Virtualization team

OS Disk backups

  • Provides disaster recovery protection for your OS disk volume (labeled "Hard disk 1"; usually SCSI 0:0)
  • All other attached disks will be skipped and unavailable for recovery
  • Full backups of the OS Disk run once weekly per VM
  • Backups are kept for four weeks
  • Only eligible on VMs with a "Hard disk 1" size of 128 GB or smaller (larger sizes must either use AllDisks or opt-out of backups entirely)
  • OS Disk recovery is not available for self-service and requires assistance from the Storage and Virtualization team
Note:
The DPS Environment is updated regularly to ensure continued functionality, security, and bug remediation. To ensure continued usability, UITS recommends that all clients install the DPS Restore only Agent (ROA) and keep it up-to-date. Restore attempts for VMs that do not have the ROA installed, or that have a down level version of the agent, could potentially run into issues when attempting browse and restore operations. For more, see Data Protection Services (DPS): Known limitations.

Documentation

This is document apfd in the Knowledge Base.
Last modified on 2023-08-25 14:28:36.