I really enjoy giving sessions at TechEd – and the international events are great for giving me different perspectives on bandwidth, regulatory compliance, etc.  Over the past two weeks, I gave 6 breakout sessions (AU sessions & NZ sessions), did a few podcasts, press interviews, etc.

In fact, the first article from that week is already published by IT Wire on “The First Rule of Data Protection”

But my favorite moments of these trips are the 1:1 meetings. 

I finally met Paul Schnackenburg (right), one of my favorite technology writers in the southern hemisphere.  After having briefed him on multiple Microsoft product releases and reviews (SCE 2010 and DPM 2010), and routinely reading his articles in various online periodicals, it was great to meet him in person.

Also, had the chance to hang out with Orin Thomas (twitter/OrinThomas), who is almost as passionate about DPM 2010 as I am.  After contributing to the last round of DPM whitepapers, he’s also almost as versed in DPM 2010 as I am these days.

On the Left, I am with Matt Marlor (twitter.com/ohcrap) who is celebrating the first anniversary of AuTechHeads, an IT Pro group in Australia.  These folks are really passionate about server infrastructure, and especially seem to like System Center.

Matt and I have traded email and tweets for probably a year, but hadn’t met in person until this week.

Happy First Anniversary, AuTechHeads !!!

These guys are so much fun that I joined AuTechHeads.  (hey, I am usually in Australia one week per year.  Doesn’t that count?)

In Other News

Was exciting to see the New Zealand kickoff session for System Center was staggeringly beyond standing room only.

I gave away several copies of my book – and was pleased to sign others that folks had already purchased.

Had some great conversations with partners that are looking to provide hosted Disaster Recovery for their small/medium business clients.

Also enjoyed working directly with a few customers who had committed to DPM 2010 and looking for implementation suggestions, based on their special circumstances.

And I did finally get over my fear of heights long enough to climb the Harbour Bridge in Sydney (right).

THANK YOU to all of my Aussie and Kiwi friends, customers, partners, and fellow-Microsofties for making it a great two weeks. 

I hope you got as much out of it as I did.

Am back in Auckland for my third TechEd !  

This promises to be a great week, so here is where you can catch me and hear more about DPM 2010:

Monday @ 14:55 – SVR215 – Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010, Part 1: Technical Introduction

Why is Microsoft in the backup business? This session will answer that, as well as cover installing a new DPM 2010 server, and then provide an overview of the core capabilities and enhanced protection/recovery scenarios. The session is over 50% demonstration.

Tuesday @ 10:40 – OFS204 – How to protect SharePoint and SQL Server with DPM 2010

DPM 2010 was recently released to market, so this session on everything that a systems administrator needs to understand about protecting Microsoft SharePoint with Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager. With the new DPM 2010 feature set, SharePoint Administrators gain the ability to protect entire the entire farm, including the auto-protection of new content databases. And with the removal of the Recovery Farm in MOSS 2010, DPM has an even stronger restore story for SharePoint customers. We will talk about how DPM uses the SharePoint VSS writers and components to provide a wholly supported and reliable protection and recovery experience for SharePoint deployments from 2003 to 2010. And for the other SQL Servers, not including the content database servers, learn how DPM 2010 now provides auto-instance protection, enterprise scale backups, and self-service restores for DBA’s. If you manage SharePoint or SQL Server within your environment, consider “How do you plan on backing up your farms and databases?” and then come to this session to learn the answer.

Wednesday @ 13:45 – SVR315 – Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010, Part 2: Virtualisation & Disaster Recovery

This session will focus on the considerations and best practices for Disaster Recovery and Virtualisation back up. Disaster Recovery without expensive third-party replication products or storage solutions and Virtualization Protection for the modern datacenter. 

 

And thanks to my friends at Wiley Press, I will be giving away a few copies of my new book, Data Protection for Virtual Datacenters.  It is also available from these NZ & AU bookstores, but I think free is better:

Amazon (link) - http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470572140?tag=chrgamdad-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0470572140&adid=0FEA5N6XN21D77YAQ9DY&  (even with US shipping, appears cheaper than AU/NZ store?)

Fishpond.co.nz - http://www.fishpond.co.nz/Books/Computers/Hardware/General/9780470572146/ 

TheNile.com.au - http://www.thenile.com.au/books/Jason-Buffington/Data-Protection-for-Virtual-Data-Centers/9780470572146/

 

Would you like to have coffee?

If you are attending TechEd New Zealand and want to talk about DPM or SC Essentials, please contact me via this blog.

I will also be visiting DPM customers in Sydney on September 2nd and 3rd … so please ping me.

As always, thanks for reading…

Hello to all my friends Down Under !

Am so excited to be back for my third TechEd Australian event.  This week, I will be delivering/co-delivering four sessions:

Thursday, 13:45 -- MGT303 – Introduction to System Center Essentials 2010 – in Meeting Room 6

System Center Essentials (SCE) 2010 is designed to deliver enterprise-class management to mid-sized organizations between 50-500 PCs. This session is full of demos – to highlight each of the major aspects of SCE 2010, including server and client monitoring, software deployment and patching, virtualization management and migration, and how to get started with easy setup and configuration. Come see it here first.

Thursday, 15:30 -- MGT304 – Protecting Application Servers with DPM 2010 – in Arena 2

This session will focus on protecting and recovering Exchange 2010 and 2007, SharePoint 2010 and 2007 and SQL Server 2008 with System Center Data Protection Manager 2010. We will cover how the application VSS writers work with the applications, as well as what is specific to protecting one application or version from another. The session will include demonstrations and unveil most of the DPM application-centric capabilities to help you plan/deploy/manage the backups for Microsoft application servers. If you are managing or planning to deploy Exchange, SQL, or SharePoint, ask yourself "How am I going to back that up?" and then attend this session to learn the answer.

Friday, 08:15 -- MGT31 – Technical Introduction to SC Essentials 2010 – in learning area, Theatre 2

I will be supporting Orin Thomas (twitter @orinthomas) and his delivery of an Instructor-Led Lab for System Center Essentials (SCE) 2010.  This is a great chance to get some hands-on experience with SCE 2010, and visit with Orin and I.

Friday, 11:30 – SVR315 – Disaster Recovery and Virtualization Backup, Best Practices – in Arena 1A

This session will focus on the considerations and best practices for Disaster Recovery and Virtualization back up. Disaster Recovery without expensive third-party replication products or storage solutions and Virtualization Protection for the modern datacenter.

 

And thanks to my friends at Wiley Press, I will be giving away a few copies of my new book, Data Protection for Virtual Datacenters.  It is also available from these AU bookstores, but I think free is better:

TheNile.com.au - http://www.thenile.com.au/books/Jason-Buffington/Data-Protection-for-Virtual-Data-Centers/9780470572146/

TheBookDepository.com - http://www.bookdepository.com/book/9780470572146/Data-Protection-for-Virtual-Data-Centers

Fishpond.co.au - http://www.fishpond.com.au/Books/Computers/Hardware/General/9780470572146/?cf=3&rid=1786713317&i=1&keywords=data+protection+for+virtual+data+centers

Amazon - 0470572140-tag=chrgamdad-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0470572140&adid

 

Would you like to have coffee?

If you are attending TechEd Australia and want to talk about DPM or SC Essentials, please contact me via this blog.

If you are in Auckland (Aug-30-Sept.1) or Sydney (Sept.2-3), I am in town visiting customers and partners, so please ping me.

As always, thanks for reading…

This week, the OpsMgr team added two new items that are hopefully of interest to some of y’all.

A new Technical Product Manager … me !!  

I am very excited to be taking on OM!  Yes, I will still have DPM and SCE roles, but with those products wholly launched, am looking forward to joining a great OM 2007 R2 team as they start the ramp towards OM vNext.  Please do not start sending your 400-level, no-one-else-can-answer questions on OM to me yet.  Thankfully, there is a phenomenal community of OM MVPs and bloggers out there, with a great heritage of peer-level sharing and expertise.  But, as I ramp up and the vNext story gets closer, look for more OM stuff from me and highlighting some of the great OM SME’s in cyberspace. 

Having been a TPM for nearly five years now, its more of the same for me – conferences, webcasts, content, social-outreach, etc.  This is going to be a really fun year !

Management Pack for AD Certificate Services

I have been on the job less than a week and here is a new MP – how is that for productivity?!?!   Of course, most of the work was already done on it.  My contribution was simply to click an OK button, but still there was a small sense of excitement and trepidation as I reached for the mouse.  The Active Directory Certificate Services Monitoring Management Pack monitors service availability for Certification Authority (CA) servers running on a Windows Server 2008 SP2 or Windows Server 2008 R2 managed machines, including server core installations, and provides alerts for critical events.

Click here to download the new MP for AD Certificate Services

As always, thanks for reading

 

Hello backup friends,

This week, I am happy to announce three new whitepapers, each around protecting a different workload:

	Whitepaper : How to protect Exchange with DPM 2010  which goes along with the DPM 2010 datasheet for Exchange
	Whitepaper : How to protect SQL Server with DPM 2010  which goes along with the DPM 2010 datasheet for SQL Server
	Whitepaper : How to protect SharePoint with DPM 2010  which goes along with the DPM 2010 datasheet for SharePoint

And here are a few new datasheets on additional topics:

	Datasheet : How to protect Hyper-V with DPM 2010  (yes, a whitepaper is coming)
	Datasheet : How to protect Windows Clients with DPM 2010  (yes, a whitepaper is coming)

More content is coming for these and a refresh of the TechNet Virtual Labs are almost complete.  The older vLabs are being replaced since their beta software has expired.

As an FYI, here is a single uber link to all DPM 2010 content that is available for download from Microsoft.com: 

Search for everything on Microsoft.com/Download related to 'DPM 2010'   :-)

As always, thanks for reading…

   

What’s New with Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2010

While traditional data protection tools provide visibility into the complete IT infrastructure, they are often substantially more complex, hindering the management of cross-platform environments.

This expert e-guide, brought to you by our editors, examines the key features of Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010 and explains how they can be leveraged to protect diverse infrastructures. Learn how the latest release of this tool compares to previous versions with respect to:

• Operating system and application support
• Management of system state and bare-metal recovery
• Virtualization and Hyper-V

And more

Click here to download this new whitepaper, brought to you by i365, a Seagate Company.