Partner Live Meeting: Providing DR for SharePoint with System Center

Just a quick post to make you aware of an upcoming Partner Live Meeting, which will provide a technical drill-down into how you can achieve disaster recovery of SharePoint, through use of 2 key System Center technologies; Data Protection Manager 2007, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

The Live Meeting will take place on November 18th, and will run from 16:00-17:00 GMT (08:00-09:00 Pacific Time), but if you can’t make it ‘Live’, I’m sure the session will be recorded so you can catch it at a later date.

Abstract

They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. With a little advanced planning, SharePoint customers can be prepared to handle the simplest to the most complex data loss situations for their Microsoft SharePoint infrastructure.  Together, System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), part of the System Center Suite Enterprise (SMSE), pair together to deliver an effective solution for disaster recovery of the SharePoint environment.

• From a data protection perspective, SharePoint customers have had to use up to multiple technologies to deliver data – which even when fully deployed hasn’t been always been a successful recipe. Designed with SharePoint and other often integrated Microsoft applications in mind, DPM provides centralized and automatic backup and restore for Windows Servers and the SharePoint environment using near continuous data protection to disk, long term data retention to tape, and offsite replication for disaster recovery.
  
• Once the data is reliably replicated, the next challenge is staging a disaster recovery location. Historically, customers had to purchase nearly identical hardware that would remain fairly idle at the DR site.  Virtualization, using Hyper-V and VMM, provides a cost-effective alternative where instead of maintaining nearly identical physical servers, one can maintain virtual servers per physical production servers. Two VMM capabilities are needed to accomplish this, P2V migration and virtual machine assignment. System Center provides the ability to migrate physical machines to virtual machines, using a ‘P2V’ tool. Normally, this would be for a one-time migration, but one can also routinely use P2V as a way to refresh a virtualized server for DR staging purposes. In addition, when it is time to recover from the disaster VMM provides an automated way of allocating the virtual machines among a farm of virtual server hosts.  Other SMSE technologies also elaborate on this solution, including monitoring of the environment with alerting and automation of tasks.

Disaster recovery, including planning and preparing for how to restore the SharePoint Server implementation, after a technical failure or disaster is a key part of business continuance and compliance planning.  Join our Academy Live session to learn more.

Registration

If you’re a Microsoft Partner, you should be able to register here.

If you’re interested in other management sessions, you can find a list here.