I have seen some questions regarding SIS that is installed with DPM. After doing some investigating and talking with Microsoft and some of the DPM MVP’s I can offer some clarification.
The SIS-Limited that is installed on a DPM server is actually a SIS Filter driver. The SIS Filter driver is what runs on DPM. You will not be able to manage the scaled down SIS like you can with full blown SIS. For example with the full blown SIS you can administer SIS using a command line tool named Sisadmin.exe. Well with SIS-Limited this tool does not exist.
DPM enables the filter driver so it can properly handle SIS files on a protected server. For example you may have SIS running on an Exchange server and DPM will know how to handle the SIS data properly when protecting it by using the SIS filter driver. DPM does not use SIS to conserve space in the storage pool when running SIS-Limited, so there is no de-dup by SIS on your DPM storage pool in this setup.
However there is a way to run a full SIS deployment on DPM, this is by installing DPM on top of Windows Storage Server. If you install DPM on a Windows Storage Server you’ll be able to use SIS for all data you store in your storage pool.
Here is the only article/documentation on installing DPM on Windows Storage Server:
http://www.itexpertmag.com/server/turn-dpm-and-windows-storage-server-into-an-appliance
Links regarding DPM supported on Windows Storage Server:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff399021.aspx (Below in Community Content)
