In lab or low performance production environments it can be useful to throttle bandwidth between  the backup agent (server) and the DPM server. System Center 2012 Data Protection manager has this feature. Navigate to «Management», right click on a «protection agent», select «Throttle computer».

This can enable you to preform backup and not have to think
about affecting network performance.

As you can see in this dialog Box, you can define work hours and non-work hours, then set maximum bandwidth to be used by the DPM agent for each timeframe.