Co-Location of data on Tape

A nice feature that was already present in DPM2007 was the ability to co-locate data on tape. The simple definition of this is to put more than one protection groups members on the same tape. The utilization of tapes in DPM is in many administrators opinion high since DPM will allocate two or more tapes for a protection group. Other backup software uses the same tape and compress, append and do a lot of neat things to fit that data on to the tape. As far as I can see and understand DPM keeps it more simple, and you know what, that’s a good thing. Since DPM can use a lot of tapes if you have a larger environment it could be a good thing enabling co-location of data on tape. This is also useful if you having a lot of small protection groups.

There are some restrictions:
1. You cannot apply co-location selectively. If enabled, it applies to all protection groups.
2. Only protection groups with the same retention period can be co-located on the same tape.
3. Encrypted and non-encrypted datasets cannot be co-located on the same tape.
4. Datasets from different vaults cannot be co-located on the same tape.

If you fine with that open the DPM PowerShell and type: Set-DPMGlobalProperty -DPMServerName -OptimizeTapeUsage $True