These days, almost every company that stores its own data on-premise, will it be the virtual machines, databases or just plain files, needs to be sure that this data won’t be lost due to some accident or human error. More to say, backup solutions are usually requested to be flexible, feature-rich and utilize different storage-optimization technologies for increased cost-efficiency. The additional requirement of the long-term data retention significantly increases the overall cost of the final solution, which resulted in an increased demand for public clouds like Amazon Web Services and Azure as a backup repository for their data.

Tapes have been on the “backup market” for a long time and still are considered as a good option to store and secure a high amount of backup data. However, the continuous increase of backup size becomes a bottleneck in terms of fitting backup windows and reduces a simplicity and redundancy of backup solutions. Today more and more companies consider backing up their production data to more reasonable storage solutions, like Clouds. Here comes in hand the technology that emulates physical tapes on top of inexpensive, fast, and high-capacity spindle drives.

The reason for writing this article was the goal of eliminating any possible confusion in the process of configuring the StarWind Virtual Tape Library in pair with the Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager. The integration of SCDPM provides a benefit of consolidating the view of alerts across all your DPM 2016 servers. Alerts are grouped by disk or tape, data source, protection group and replica volumes, which simplifies troubleshooting. The grouping functionality is further completed with the console capable of separating issues that only affect one data source from problems that impact multiple data sources. Alerts are also separated into backup failure or infrastructure problems.