Certainly. Our DFM server is a SunFire x86 host, I forget the model. It's got 4 quad-core AMD Opteron 8384 CPUs and 128G of RAM, and a fair amount of local storage mainly used or the DFM installation, with a NetBackup server on the side that is only used once a week or so. We host our DFM database locally, so backups take about 45 minutes - such is life. The DFM server is running RHEL 5.7, soon to be downgraded to RHEL 5.6 due to OS support issues with OnCommand 5.0.
As of this AM, we back up 577 primary hosts, 46 of which are NetApp Filers and the rest are Wintel and Unix OSSV clients. There are 2606 primary dirs and 1035 secondary volumes spread across 6 Filers, 2 at our AZ site and 2 each at our 2 sites in MA. Data at the 3 major sites is backed up to local Filers. Someday we hope to be able to cross-pollenate for DR purposes.
Our backup window runs from about 6PM to 6AM in the host's local time zone. We are hoping to compress our backups down to 6PM to midnight so our Operations people aren't paged at 3AM because of a stupid failed backup. We are also currently backing up most of our filesystems using Business Continuity, and are only now migrating to using Protection Manager. I must say, BC was a LOT easier to configure, drive and maintain. DPM has seriously hypercomplicated the backup process, and so far as I can see, with no particular advantages other than more flexible scheduling and better handling of backup snapshot retention. I'm not sure it's worth it, but I have no choice.
We run a lot of reports and general data gathering activities against our DFM installation and our Filers over the course of a day, so the DFM server is kept fairly busy. As many of these data gathering activities as possible are performed via Perl scripts using the NMSDK, which does a really good job but is a major PITA to use and is not very well documented. I've had to figure out 'way too many things by trial-and-error.
It'd be interesting to see how our site compares to others using the same toolsets. I'm sure we're neither the smallest nor the largest. I'm also wondering how other users validate that they are backing up all required data. That's been one of our major headaches since we started with BC several years ago. DPM was supposed to be able to assist us with our validation via reports such as "external relationships" and in particular "unprotected data", but so far those have been a great disappointment. They don't catch all cases by a long shot according to our testing, making them semi-useless.
