Data Protection Manager 2010 - Connection to the DPM service has been lost

We are in the process of migrating our backup solution over to Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010 and ran into an issue that other might find useful. Although it's early days, overall I'm very pleased with the product. We are a MS only shop so it's a good logical fit for us.

We are using an IBM TS3200 tape library for our tape storage connected via FC. I installed DPM, configured the FC switch fabric and then I just went into Management/Libraries and hit Rescan. DPM found the library but just identified it as a single tape drive, not the library. Off to the IBM support website for their usual cryptic search led to proper drivers (IBMTape.x64_w08_6209.zip). Installed the drivers and hit Rescan in DMP and just like that DPM recognized the library. So far so good.

The Inventory library option worked like a charm discovering all the tapes in the library, however when we tried to do any other option such as erase or identify unknown tape the entire DPM console would crash and restart. Luckily I found this post System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: Tape problems which took care of my problems.

The issue seemed to be caused by duplicate records getting into the database for the same device - first when it got discovered as a plain tape drive, then when it was properly discovered as a tape library. So the moral of the story I suppose is to properly install your device drivers prior to trying to discover whats on the end of your fiber.

I'll warn you up front, the solution is kind of ugly. You have to fix the database, which involves running a script Query.txt that cleans up the database by renaming duplicate items. Oh and to potentially save you another Google search remember you define the connection to a local express database by (local)\databaseName. I always forget that.

Hope this helps someone.

P.S. The disk storage part of this project is a solution we build using SuperMicro parts and running Nexenta software which gives us a sweet Open Storage platform from which we can mount ZFS volumes. Very nice. I'll have a post later on that, it was much easier than I feared and iSCSI has come a long way since I last looked it over.

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