Huge Congratulations to my friend, Matt Hester.

Matt is a one of the folks that taught me how to blog, so that I could use social networking to convey my passion for technology products.  He also happens to be an IT Pro Evangelist for Microsoft, meaning that he spends most days speaking at local events events with customers and partners, and blogs/podcasts about every cool technology that he can get his hands on.   It is the second coolest job at Microsoft behind Technical Product Manager.  <grin>

His new book is now on shelves:  The Windows Server 2008 R2 Administration Instant Reference

All your Windows Server 2008 R2 questions answered—on the spot!

Get up to speed on the new features of Windows Server 2008 R2 with this indispensable guide. Designed for busy IT professionals, it's the perfect go-to resource for quick answers and real-world solutions as you administer the new server OS. You'll find easy-to-read lists, quick-reference tables, helpful thumb tabs, and much more in a handy, compact format that puts the information you need at your fingertips.

Topics include:

• Getting started and adding roles and functionality

• Automating tasks

• Managing users, groups, directories, and the centralized desktop

• Handling folder security, disk management, storage, backup, and recovery

• Monitoring and maintaining web servers

• Troubleshooting IP and managing remote access

• Doing performance tuning and maintaining virtual servers

originally posted on

Yes, it really is an established day.  Check out http://dataprivacyday2010.org/:

Data Privacy Day is an international celebration of the dignity of the individual expressed through personal information.  In this networked world, in which we are thoroughly digitized, with our identities, locations, actions, purchases, associations, movements, and histories stored as so many bits and bytes, we have to ask – who is collecting all of this – what are they doing with it  – with whom are they sharing it?  Most of all, individuals are asking ‘How can I protect my information from being misused?’  These are reasonable questions to ask – we should all want to know the answers.

This is a great day to think about “How private is your backup?”

System Center Data Protection Manager has quite a few capabilities that support this kind of goal.

Is your data protected on Tape?   Are the tapes encrypted?  

It seems like a simple question, and the process is straightforward.  You check the box that says “Encrypt Tapes”.  But so many folks forget or choose not to.  Sometimes, these kinds of settings are mandated at corporate, but seem to be forgotten by the time that the backup administrator actually is clicking the boxes.

Thankfully, DPM 2007 and DPM 2010 are PowerShell controllable.  So, consider running a PowerShell script that reaches out to the list of DPM servers and setting the “Encrypt Tape” option after the fact.  This way, no matter how the initial jobs are done, you can push out corporate policies to ensure that your backup tapes are private.

We covered this and several other easy PowerShell DPM management scenarios in a webcast quite a while ago at http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032353820

And while we are looking at tape…

What happens if your tapes are lost in transit?

I often joke as to “Why should you pay some guy in a truck to come lose your tapes for you?”.  That is not a knock against all courier and vaulting providers (though it is a ding on a few).  My point is to challenge, why ship tapes when you can replicate the data offsite and then create the tapes there?

DPM 2007 and DPM 2010 provide the ability to replicate from an on-site DPM server to an off-site DPM server.  Once the data is at the off-site DPM server, THEN do your backups.  Regardless of SOX, HIPAA, GLB, CO-OP or any other regulation, the tape is in a different geography than where your production server is.  It is an off-site backup tape.  The regulations and compliance guidance doesn’t say “you must pay a third-party to ship tapes”.  The goal is simply to ensure a recoverability capability that will survive a catastrophic site crisis.

And if you don’t have two sites to replicate between, or even if you do but would prefer to outsource these processes – DPM has partnered with one of the best names in the business for offsite vaulting and data preservation, Iron Mountain.  To check out our partnership around DPM, please check out www.microsoft.com/DPM/cloud.

Is your data private over the wire during the backup itself?

For that, consider an easy IP SEC policy that can be mandated within Active Directory Group Policy.  It can be as easy as configuring a policy where, “Any network traffic going to IP address 192.168.0.91 should be encrypted”, where that IP address is the DPM server.  Data to and from the DPM server is encrypted, while other traffic remains unscathed.  Some routers support this capability as well.

Thanks for reading …

originally posted on

As an old-school backup guy, one of my favorite sayings is:

“If you are putting all your eggs in one basket, it better be a good basket”

It’s true for Virtualization (which I will talk about in a future post) and it’s true for collaboration platforms like Exchange or SharePoint.  And when I refer to the “basket” being good, I am not talking about the SharePoint platform or the Exchange platform or the Virtualization platform – I am talking about your backup. 

Are you confident that once you put all of your good information into your collaboration platform, will you be able to protect it, how will you restore it, is it supported?

That is the question that I ask of anyone who is planning their deployment of:

• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Exchange 2010
• SharePoint 2010
• Hyper-V R2

I am especially interested when you are planning to do a large and (keyword) distributed SharePoint farm, or when you are planning on using DAG in Exchange 2010 (or CCR/SCR in Exchange 2007).  Because, those are some of the scenarios we most often hear hesitation from customers that use legacy backup solutions.

In fact, one of the main reasons that Microsoft originally entered the backup market with System Center Data Protection Manager is to ensure that when Microsoft customers were planning their deployment of one of our premier server products, they would have confidence that they would be able to back up and successfully recover their data.

Last week, I gave a webcast called Get Ready for DPM 2010 Release Candidate to about 500 of my new best friends.  The RC software is expected in the first week of February, so we wanted folks to start planning for it.  We talked a lot about the new features, including enhancements that we made for these newest server technologies from Microsoft.  We also talked about new features around Windows Client protection and Disaster Recovery.  If you get the chance, please check it out the on-demand webcast.

But for those of you who cannot wait to deploy DPM 2010, I wanted to draw your eye to some DPM guru’s out in cyberspace that are doing some great work around using DPM to protect and recover your collaboration platforms:

Chris Whitehead is a Premier Field Engineer for SharePoint in the UK and a fan of DPM.  He recently posted a series of blogs on SharePoint and DPM.  One of the things that I like about Chris is that he has a different point of view. 

- We in the DPM team think about “backing stuff up” … and what is necessary to protect each workload, such as SharePoint.

- Chris thinks about SharePoint … how to architect it, how to deploy it, how to manage it, how to troubleshoot it, as well as how to back it up.

Chris’ perspective has helped us build a better protection and recovery experience for SharePoint, and hopefully his blogs will help you too.

· DPM and SharePoint - Part 1 - A love/love relationship

· DPM and SharePoint - Part 2 - How does DPM protect SharePoint data?

· DPM and SharePoint - Part 3 - How does DPM restore SharePoint data?

· DPM and SharePoint - Part 4 - Why do I get this error?

· DPM and SharePoint - Part 5 - What's coming next?

· DPM and SharePoint - Part 6 - What about Search?

· DPM and SharePoint - Part 7 - OK, you've convinced me, where do I find out more?

Thanks Chris !!

And the Exchange feature owner in the DPM development team recently started blogging about what is coming in DPM 2010 for Exchange 2010, and especially why you still need backup – even when you are running DAG.

Check out his post on the DPM team blog.

Another of my new favorite sites is SCDPMonline.com, which is run out of the UK who is becoming scary good at helping DPM do things even better than how it comes out of the box – between his new Management Pack, as well as scripts and customizations.  But I digress…

So, before you become a “Basket Case”.   If you are deploying a collaboration platform, let me ask you …

How are you going to back it up ?

Thanks for reading.

Hi DPM Fans !!

Yesterday, we did a TechNet webcast on what is coming in just a few weeks with the Release Candidate for DPM 2010.

Well, “Good news travels fast”, as our friends at SearchWindowsServer.com (Tech Target) have already done a write-up on what they heard.

Other than one misspelling of “DMP” (which I occasionally do too), its a good summary of our release candidate – and I appreciate Brendan and the folks at SWS.com taking the time to watch the webcast and offering the info to their readers.

Thanks for reading.

If you liked the first Cars game from Disney and THQ, then you ought to really, really like this one.  If you didn’t (but did like the movie), then you should still probably give this game a shot.

Cars Race O Rama took the better parts of the original game and made them so much better and added some new stuff, too!

Check out my other blog (XboxDad.com) for my complete game recommendation

If you have a Cars-fan in your family, this is an easy way to get a lot of smiles from your little gamer (age 7-12).  And I must admit, as the kid-at-heart gamer myself, I have clocked more than a few hours in it.  It’s a fun little racer for those of us that don’t want the reality of Need for Speed or Forza.

As always, thanks for reading…

DPM 2010 is getting sooooo close !!

For months, it seemed far away, but with the calendar now officially 2010, it is time to sprint to the finish line.  Last year, I said that we would have a Release Candidate for DPM 2010 shortly after the holidays.  True to our word, please join us this Thursday, January 14 at 9:00 AM Pacific US Time to see what is coming in the Release Candidate 

I will be showing what I have been running for the past several weeks - CTP3 (Customer Technology Preview 3), which is what our early adopters have been running in production.  We’ll demonstrate the new Windows client protection capabilities, the new SQL/SharePoint/Exchange protection and recovery features, as well as the enhanced Disaster Recovery scenario.  We’ll also update you on our auto-healing/auto-scaling features, as well as a few surprises that weren’t in the beta.  Come join us to see what is coming in DPM 2010.

TechNet Webcast: Get Ready for Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 Release Candidate (Level 300)

Start Date:  Thursday, January 14, 2010 9:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)

Duration:  90 Minutes

Audience(s):  IT Generalist

Click Here to Register for this week’s webcast

As always, thanks for reading

This is a really clever game that has captured my family’s heart.  In fact, I think that it is the only game that I have ever purchased twice.  We have two Xbox 360’s and it allows my kids and I to collaborate across systems.  Kingdom for Keflings is one of the first Xbox Live games to use your personal Avatar in the game in a meaningful way.  There had been games that showed your picture, but in AK4K your avatar is a giant among the little Kefling people (literally). 

In this game, you (your avatar) are going to build a town with the help of the native Keflings.  There are lots of raw materials around in the form of never ending forests and rocks and gems and sheep.

Read my whole review on my other blog about family friendly gaming.

But don’t wait to try this game, because it is the Deal of the Week at Xbox.com. 

For the week of January 4 thru January 10, 2010 – A Kingdom for Keflings is 50% off at Xbox Live Arcade, at only 400 points.  That is only $5 US !! 

A big hat’s off and ‘thank you’ to the folks at LEGO and Harmony for a great game in LEGO: Rock Band

For those that have read my blog before, you know that I am a big fan of all of the Lego titles, including Batman, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Battles.  And I have been waiting for this game since it was first announced. 

Check out my Family Gaming Blog to see how my family enjoyed LEGO: Rock Band.

Thanks for reading