Ctrl P - The Data Protection Manager Blog!

DPM 2010 Beta is available now

JasonBuffington — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:00:00 GMT

The Data Protection Manager (DPM) team at Microsoft is happy to announce the arrival of Data Protection Manager 2010 Beta.

I am Anand Kamat, Group Product Manager for the DPM development team, and since shipping DPM 2007 SP1 in Jan 2009, we have been on an amazing journey to get this feature packed release out to all our customers. This release has been different than our usual model. We moved our development model to shorter milestones. Though it made our pace extremely hectic, it allowed us to validate and stabilize key features in batches (well before Beta). Our 50+ CTP customers have given us a thumbs up for the DPM 2010 Beta feature set; it is ready for the rest of the world to start working with; and our team is looking forward to hear from you.

There are many things that we are excited talk about (not in any particular order) :

Virtualization

This has been one of the biggest investments that we made in DPM 2010, and we hope that you will absolutely love the features. First and foremost, DPM 2010 Beta protects highly available virtual machines (VM) deployed on Windows Server 2008 R2 using Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) clusters -- in addition to standalone Hyper-V servers and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V clusters. For all above mentioned server configurations, DPM 2010 Beta supports:

Seamless protection of Live Migrating VMs (For Windows Server 2008 R2): DPM 2010 is LiveMigration aware and seamlessly protects a VM after it migrates to another node of the Hyper-V R2 cluster to another without manual intervention.

Item Level Recovery from host level backup: DPM 2010 Beta supports item level recovery (ILR) which allows you to do granular recovery of files and folders, volumes and virtual hard disks (VHD) from a host level backup of Hyper-V VMs to a network share or a volume on a DPM protected server.

Original Location Recovery: DPM 2010 Beta supports online recovery of the protected VM to the original location.

Alternate Host Recovery: DPM 2010 Beta supports alternate location recovery (ALR) which allows you to recover a Hyper-V VM to an alternate stand-alone or clustered Hyper-V host.

Laptop Protection

Though we enabled client protection in DPM 2007 SP1, it was designed for desktops and not optimized for mobile/often-disconnected user. DPM 2010 laptop feature is completely built from scratch and offers an optimized experience for DPM Admin as well as the laptop user.

Seamless backups for roaming users (Backup over VPN, Backup when connected, Alert for SLA’s not met)

Rich support for folder inclusion/exclusion and file types exclusion

Integration with local Shadow Copies for Vista & W7

Scales up to 1000 clients per DPM server

Support for XP, Vista, and Win7

Reliability and Manageability

In addition to features, this is an area where we’ve made some really significant investments in DPM 2010, with special recognition of the feedback from our enterprise customers who are deploying DPM across the large Windows farms within their heterogeneous environments.

A new “Auto-Grow” feature that will extend the replica volume as the production data grows.

You will see far fewer “Replica Inconsistent” errors and many of them will automatically get fixed by Auto-Rerun, Auto-CC (Consistency Check).

We have made DPM 2010 very flexible and robust to adapt for environment/configuration changes.

There is a new Backup SLA report that you can configure for your needs and get it emailed every day. You can even view it in the Protection View of the DPM UI, so no more custom scripts to determine if you have met your backup requirements.

Other Good Stuff

In addition to the above, a few of the other areas of enhancement include:

Exchange - DPM 2010 extends robust Exchange protection to Exchange 2010 DAG clusters.

SharePoint - For SharePoint 2010, there is no recovery farm required for item level recoveries and backups are optimized for large scale deployments.

SQL Server – DPM 2010 now includes is Instance-Level Protection and with Datasource Collocation, you can backup SQL servers with ~700-800 DBs. DPM 2007 provided optimized SQL backups and with SQL End User Recovery in DPM 2010, you should be able to give the control back to SQL Admin while retaining the storage benefits of DPM SQL backups.

Disaster Recovery replication (“DPM2DPM4DR”) - we have enabled cyclic protection (DPM A <==> DPM B) as well as chained (DPM A --> DPM B --> DPM C) protection for versatility in long-distance protection.

This beta marks an important step towards a highly reliable, manageable & scaled up DPM solution. We have a great team that is focused on customers and we had many passionate DPM 2007 customers that become DPM 2010 CTP customers to give us a great deal of testing and needs insight before this beta was released. I expect the same from DPM 2010 Beta customers as well – please tell us how you are using the product so that we can be sure DPM 2010 fits what you need in a data protection soltution.

So get ready to try the best ever DPM Beta release! And for more info, please check out the updated webpages on microsoft.com/DPM and look for our webcast on October 8.

I feel extremely proud of what we have accomplished and am excited to hear your feedback!

Thanks

Anand

Webcast on Thursday – Cheaper, Better Backups with DPM 2007

JasonBuffington — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 05:18:23 GMT

On Thursday morning, 8AM Pacific, please join us for a discussion on reducing costs and improving your backup and recoverability with System Center Data Protection Manager.

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032412440

Event Overview

In today’s economy, more than ever, IT Pro’s are looking for ways to reduce costs while still improving existing processes or fixing things that aren’t meeting expectations – including backup. In this session, we’ll discuss legacy protection solutions for backup, disk-to-disk replication, and long-distance disaster recovery -- and how you can cut costs while gaining better backups and more reliable recoveries with System Center Data Protection Manager 2007.

Duration: 60 Minutes

Start Date: Thursday, July 16, 2009 8:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)

Presenter: Jason Buffington, Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation

Jason has been working in the networking industry since 1989, focusing mainly on data protection and storage technologies - including roles at Cheyenne/CA for ARCserve and NSI Double-Take. He is previously a Certified Business Continuity Planner, MCSE, MCT, and was awarded as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in storage technology. Jason has spoken around the world at numerous Microsoft events, and his work has been published in several industry journals. Jason studied computer science at Texas A&M University. He lives in Dallas Texas, telecommutes to Redmond, and blogs at JasonBuffington.com.

DPM v3 “First Look” – TechNet Webcast on May 5

JasonBuffington — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:51:46 GMT

On Tuesday, May 5th at 11 AM Pacific – we will be giving folks your “First Look” at DPM v3.

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032412466

This webcast will cover the big features and directions for the next generation of DPM, so you won’t want to miss it.

CLI Script: Script to generate DPM configuration report

dpm — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:54:00 GMT

The attached script generates a report of the mapping between each Exchange Server, the backup Protection Groups and its associated SGs.

Krishna Mangipudi

CLI Script: DPM status report

dpm — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:50:00 GMT

The following script generates a comprehensive report of failures and the storage utilization for each Exchange Server that is protected by DPM on a per SG basis.

CLI Script: To generate status reports

dpm — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:42:00 GMT

The attached script generates a comprehensive report of the status of all backups and the storage utilization for each Exchange Server that is protected by DPM on a per SG basis.

New SQL Server protection information for DPM 2007 SP1

JasonBuffington — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 02:46:19 GMT

Two new pieces of information to keep you informed on what is going on with SQL Server database protection and System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1.

As part of Service Pack 1 for DPM, we now have official support for SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3. This goes both for protected servers as well as the DPM server:

- Production Servers running SP3 for SQL 2005 are now "officially supported" (along with SQL 2008)

- You can patch your DPM Server's SQL Server 2005 database to SP3, as well

In addition, in order to help folks get more experience with protecting SQL Server with DPM 2007 SP1, we just released a TechNet vLab (Virtual Lab) which is the same VHD environment that we use for all of our hands-on labs (HOL's) at TechEd and that our field uses for demonstrations of DPM 2007. All it takes is a web browser and you can spin up the virtual lab and play with SQL 2005 and SQL 2008 protection -- including recovering SQL 2005 data onto a SQL 2008 box for a very cool migration and test scenario.

We hope everyone, but particularly SQL database administrators and database-integrating channel partners, will come check out how easy it is to use Microsoft's backup and recovery solution that was built for your Microsoft environment

To try out SQL Server database protection, go to How to Protect SQL Server with DPM 2007 SP1

And for more information on SQL protection with DPM in general, including a review by SQL Server Magazine, click here for all of our SQL protection resources by DPM 2007 SP1.

Webcast -- Iron Mountain CloudRecovery for DPM

JasonBuffington — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 23:38:36 GMT

Iron Mountain has recently announced the availability of CloudRecovery for Microsoft DPM. This new service provides offsite storage of DPM data to Iron Mountain's data centers - automatically, reliably and securely.

Iron Mountain will be hosting a webcast that will describe how CloudRecovery can reduce the costs and risks associated with downtime and data recovery while achieving regulatory compliance by automating the long term retention of data. This webcast will cover how organizations can:

Automatically backup DPM Server data without having to manage off-site storage
Leverage the most secure off-site vaulting facility available
Free up IT staff to focus on more critical projects by automating backup

The webcast took place on Wednesday, February 25 2009.

Click here to watch the webcast -- http://www.brainshark.com/ironmountain/vu?pi=182722523

Announcing Service Pack 1 for DPM 2007

JasonBuffington — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

My name is Bala Kasiviswanathan and I’m the Director of Storage Solutions Marketing in Redmond at Microsoft. I am very pleased to deliver the news that we recently made Service Pack 1 for System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 (DPM) available for download. This release delivers exciting enhancements to the Microsoft System Center portfolio of management products fulfilling the key backup and recovery role by providing data protection and disaster recovery for physical and virtual workloads. This in turn helps customers experience a higher level of business continuity and more optimized IT infrastructure.

I wanted to take a few minutes today to talk about what we have been hearing from our customers and provide some background on where we believe customers will see the greatest benefits of this new release. I won’t go into depth on the technical details of the offering here, but if you’d like to find more information on the features of Service Pack 1, please read Hari’s blog on the DPM Product Team blog, which also posted today.

Let’s face it - in today’s challenging economy, customers are working with constrained IT budgets to address their disaster recovery requirements. However, the catch 22 is that not investing in this area can be even more costly in the long run. DPM 2007’s ease of use, superior recoverability and affordable licensing can provide the high level of ROI that customers typically expect from a Microsoft Windows-based solution, regardless of whether it’s for the management of their physical or virtual IT assets.

When we talk with our customers, we regularly hear from them that they can deploy and manage their backups and recoveries with DPM for much less and with less complication than comparable backup and recovery product offerings.. Additionally, those that have invested in the complete System Center suite also find technology integration benefits, helping them to further extend the management capabilities along with the cost benefit of acquiring the entire suite through the SMSE licensing option.

One of the many DPM SP1 customers we’re already hearing from includes the Florida-based Integrated Community Oncology Network (ICON) blog post, an association of physicians dedicated to delivering an integrated approach to cancer treatment, research, education, and prevention. Today, a total of 40 ICON servers are backed up with DPM 2007, including 6 physical servers and an additional 34 running in a Hyper-V/Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 environment. The workloads DPM currently protects include Microsoft Certificate Services, System Center Operations Manager 2007, System Center Configuration Manager 2007, Windows file servers, SQL Server 2005 and Exchange Server 2007. ICON’s DPM 2007 Service Pack 1 deployment is ongoing, with plans to add Office SharePoint Server 2007, and to also support offsite replication of the DPM backup in the coming year.

Other customers, such as Convergent Computing and the Austrian Ministry of Interior, selected DPM for their backup and recovery needs, based upon the product’s ease of management, integration with the other Microsoft products in their environment, and the superior level of customer and technical support they had received from Microsoft in the past. More examples of real customer experiences can be found here -- DPM case studies.

In addition to the enhancements that we’ve made for protecting Hyper-V, SQL Server, Exchange, and SharePoint, we’ve also delivered other new features that are providing customers with powerful new capabilities including:

With SP1, we are pleased to provide a more cost-effective licensing option (Client Management License or Client ML) to protect desktops even more affordable.

We’ve also formed a strategic relationship with one of the most respected names in offsite data retention, Iron Mountain, so that DPM 2007 SP1 customers can protect their data with Microsoft’s solution on-site, and then replicate the DPM data to a secure Iron Mountain datacenter for off-site protection. This opens up some powerful retention and compliance scenarios, while still providing Microsoft customers with an integrated UI within DPM 2007. For more on the DPM CloudRecovery solution with Iron Mountain, check out the press release.

We also continue to innovate with our heterogeneous backup partners. Check out the new analyst study on this that was published earlier this month

If you are running one or more Windows servers with Microsoft applications like SQL Server, SharePoint Server or Exchange server on physical server or virtual servers using Hyper-V, please have a look at how DPM can benefit you Data Protection Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 or watch to the podcast series (http://edge.technet.com/tags/DPM). And feel free to download and evaluate DPM!

If you are already using DPM, please make sure to update to SP1 for even more great capabilities – and thank you for your trust as we back up your critical data.

We hope SP1 helps all of our customers and partners to have a very Happy New Year!

Bala

Service Pack 1 is for you

JasonBuffington — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:59:00 GMT

I’m Seetharaman (Hari) Harikrishnan, General Manager of engineering for Data Protection Manager, here at Microsoft in Redmond. I’m writing today to announce the exciting news that we’ve recently globally released (RTW’d) System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 (DPM) Service Pack 1. This is an important update to Microsoft’s System Center portfolio of offerings and an integral part of Microsoft’s Core Infrastructure Optimization Model, fulfilling the key backup and recovery role by providing data protection and disaster recovery for physical and virtual workloads.

Over the last several months, we’ve been working with 66 customers who have participated in the DPM SP1 Technical Adoption Program (TAP), helping us refine and optimize this important update. These customers have been using many or all of the new and expanded capabilities in SP1, including:

Protection of Hyper-V™ virtualization platforms, including both Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and the Microsoft Hyper-V Server, has been added to the existing set of protected workloads, building on the virtualization protection originally delivered for Virtual Server 2005 R2.
Enhanced SQL Server 2008 protection, including the addition of new protection capabilities for mirrored databases, support for parallel backups of databases within a single instance, and the ability to move data from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 for migration scenarios.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 receive index protection, significant catalog optimization, and support for mirrored content databases.
Added protection for Exchange Server 2007 Standby Cluster Replication (SCR), enabling a complete disaster recovery solution that leverages SCR failover alongside DPM point-in-time restores.

Along with significantly enhancing the workloads that DPM 2007 already protected, we are very pleased to provide some new capabilities with Service Pack 1.

One of the most exciting, new features included with Service Pack 1 is backup to the Cloud using third-party solutions. Data Protection Manager 2007 (DPM) now provides an integrated approach for customers to backup their DPM protected data to the cloud. This new SaaS option is delivered through a relationship with Iron Mountain, providing a backup and recovery service in the cloud specifically designed to support DPM. With the interoperability of DPM and Iron Mountain CloudRecovery™ service, it is possible to select individual replicas on the DPM Server and back these up consistently to the cloud using the solution provider’s technology. Data can then be restored directly back to a location specified by the user at the same level of granularity provided by DPM. More information on the Iron Mountain service can be found here.

And we didn’t stop there. Service Pack 1 also introduces other new capabilities:

Local Data Source Protection enabling the DPM 2007 SP1 server to act as a branch office server offering self-protecting File Services and Virtualization hosting within one platform.
Cross-Forest Protection allowing large enterprise customers with multiple Active Directory® forests to now have even more flexibility in their DPM deployments.
Provision for a Client DPML answers customer demand for a more cost-effective way to protect Windows XP and Windows Vista clients using the same DPM 2007 infrastructure that protects their servers

All of this new functionality builds on the features released in the DPM 2007 ‘Rollup Update’ in June 2008, which provided protection of Windows Server 2008, including Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 core, Windows Server 2008 System State and BitLocker™ support – as well as new tape media capabilities around tape sharing and media library sharing.

Outside of the Service Pack itself, we have some new synergies that are being delivered alongside the other components of System Center.

Microsoft also recently released a Management Pack for DPM 2007 to enable System Center Operations Manager 2007 to monitor and manage DPM deployments, providing an enterprise view of all of the DPM servers and protected workloads, as well as knowledge-based troubleshooting and optimization guidance from a central console. As with most management packs, the instrumentation, knowledge of key metrics to be monitored, and collective wisdom for root cause analysis and alert rollup was developed by the DPM Product Group, the same folks who developed the product itself. This knowledge and expertise is then encapsulated into a redistributable software package for use within the enterprise console of Operations Manager, another member of the System Center family of management products.

Also, we have begun delivering guidance on new ‘Disaster Recovery’ scenarios that leverage several System Center technologies, along with Hyper-V, to bring business continuity and disaster recovery to many mainstream Windows environments that previously thought of disaster recovery as necessary, but cost-prohibitive. By leveraging Virtual Machine Manager’s P2V conversion capabilities, alongside of its Smart Placement, paired with DPM 2007 SP1 for data protection, and Operations Manager to monitor, manage and drive the entire scenario – Microsoft customers now have an efficient and cost-effective way to deploy disaster preparedness using management tools that many already own!! We’ll be delivering a TechNet webcast on this early this year as well.

As you can see, we have a lot to be excited about with the release of Service Pack 1 for DPM 2007. And our early customers have been excited, too. Check out Bala’s blog (LINK) on the initial customer feedback to Service Pack 1, as well as some blogs from our actual customers on their experience with it.

In fact, if you really want to “see” Service Pack 1, check out the series of podcasts (LINK http://edge.technet.com/tags/DPM) that we’ve done on several of the SP1 features and topics. As you are looking at deploying your new SharePoint farm, your Hyper-V platforms, or your new SQL Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 environment, know that the Microsoft platforms that you are deploying are ready to be backed up by Microsoft as well.

To the DPM engineering and business groups, Congratulations on a great release!

To our customers and partners, thank you on behalf of DPM for your interest and partnership.

Service Pack 1 is for you!

Hari

Customer Blog Post on DPM 2007 SP1 -- ICON

JasonBuffington — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:58:00 GMT

Hi, I’m Dan Taylor, a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to IT for ICON.

At my previous employer, I implemented a small VMware infrastructure and learned the value of virtualization quickly. When I came to ICON, they had a small VM deployment with Virtual Server 2005 and instead of trying to push VMware on them, I just went with it. We moved forward with virtualization on Virtual Server, but only for non mission critical needs, such as running our helpdesk software, our Blackberry server and our internet reporting server.

When Virtual Machine Manager 2007 came out, I started playing with P2V. Needless to say, it was so simple that we got carried away with it. We started virtualizing more important roles, such as our Pharmacy server, an interface server and our certificate server. All of these were light-load servers, but had business-critical status assigned to them. We realized that we needed to re-think what we were doing. Should we VM just because we can? How do we protect these servers? We also wanted to ensure a very high level of business continuity so that we have little, and if possible, no downtime for our operations. And of course, cost was a factor.

That is where DPM 2007 came in.

Its release could not have been timed better for us. It offered the capability to backup VM’s, and we definitely needed it at this point. We pushed to get it approved and implemented right away. Setup was very simple, but learning how to get reliable backups was not as easy. We found that our VM’s were not getting protected as we had expected. Come to find out, it is not a good practice to make one protection group for all of our VM’s. Through trial and error, we learned that multiple protection groups with four to five VM’s per group yielded very successful results, and we were off to the races!

It’s one thing to know you are backing something up, but what about the day when something goes wrong? We’ve had VM’s crash, and DPM has been very reliable for us at restoring those VM’s, and very quick, as well. I’ve never had to second guess whether I would be able to recover a VM with DPM.

When it came to Hyper-V, it had some of the features we needed, but I wanted to wait until it RTM’d to start putting servers into production. Then, again, came the question of building VM’s. Should we do it just because we can? I was fortunate enough to have met a couple of the product managers at Storage Networking World in 2008 and they invited me onto the TAP of DPM. They informed me that SP1 was to add protection of Hyper-V. As soon as the early bits to DPM SP1 became available, we jumped into Hyper-V in a big way, including our Exchange 07 servers.

Our experience has been quite a positive one. We found DPM’s ability to backup and restore Hyper-V VM’s more reliable than Virtual Server was when we first started testing the waters of DPM07. This year I also upgraded our Exchange Server from 2000 to 2007 and we created protection groups in DPM to do incremental backups of mailboxes throughout the day. This setup was seamless and we prefer it to Backup Exec’s support of Exchange07. We have plans for the 2009 budget to implement a second DPM server and do site-to-site replication of data for offsite storage. And in the end, all of this has helped us also realize a 10% increase in the time our IT staff has for strategic projects, so we can advance the value we’re delivering to the business, not just maintain our operations.

We are looking forward to the future capabilities of DPM!

Customer Blog Post on DPM 2007 SP1 -- Convergent Computing

JasonBuffington — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:57:00 GMT

With the release of DPM SP1 and having an opportunity to be on the beta of the update, thought I'd share my experiences...

For those who have worked with Data Protection Mgr in the past, you probably have already experienced the concept of ongoing incremental digital backups of your servers that DPM provides.

Those new to DPM and who have relied on 'tape' for years to backup your information, DPM is a departure from fragile 50 yr old magnetic tape concepts and replaces tape with extreme high performance and flexibility provided by digital copies of data on hard drive media.

In the network environment at my organization, we have a pretty typical Microsoft Exchange, fileservers, domain controllers, SQL, and SharePoint environment as most, a total of 60 servers and 1.5TB that we backup every night. But instead of kicking off a backup to tape of all of our application servers every night (hoping that the backup finishes by the morning, and even more so hoping the 'tape' is good when we really need to recover something off of tape in the event of a disaster), we setup DPM 2007 to snapshot over 3TB of information many months ago, and now every 15 minutes, incremental updates are added to our DPM backup servers pretty much immediately. At any point, we can restore a backup that is less than 15-minutes old, or even recover a portion of a server such as a specific file, file folder, volume, or other data increment that meets our needs. And all from high speed digital indexes of the information, no need to stream a tape or build an index off tape. Data in DPM is automatically updated for us.

This is a welcome evolution in IT processes, instead of doing the same thing (tape backups) like we've done for years, to actually adopt a process that provides multi-step recovery from incremental digital copies of data. A pretty slick process that has completely changed our internal perspective on disaster recovery away from a single product like a 'tape backup' to an entire end to end strategy on disaster recovery all based on "out of the box" technologies from Microsoft.

We're using Microsoft's Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR) on Exchange so that effectively we have 2 copies of our Exchange databases from Exchange with one in our primary site, and another copy in our offsite datacenter. We're using DPM to backup our 2nd (passive) copy of Exchange data so we have this 3rd copy of data on DPM. And while we were doing a tape backup of our DPM server and storing the data offsite, we just started using the Iron Mountain’s service as part of DPM SP1 where their servers do a cloud-based backup of our DPM server, so effectively our DPM server is being backed up over the Internet with data vaulted offsite with NO use of tapes anymore. This same primary/secondary data store process is being done with SharePoint and our SQL applications using SQL Mirroring, and file servers using Windows Distributed File System Replication (DFS-R).

Now, at any point, we can recover our primary server with our secondary CCR server, we can recover our primary and secondary Exchange, SharePoint, file servers, or global catalog servers from DPM, and if we lose the entire environment (both our primary and offsite datacenters), we can recover everything from the "cloud" to any datacenter anywhere.

All of our servers are running on Hyper-V for virtualization (something that the new DPM 2007 SP1 has added backup support of Hyper-V servers and running guest images), so a complete end to end disaster recovery solution from Microsoft that is the backbone of our internal IT operations.

As we have proven this works internally for our own IT operations, over the past year, we've been implementing this exact same scenario for the clients we provide consulting services for. Anything from small 50-person law firms through large Fortune 50 enterprise organizations. We've ripped out dozens of 3rd party DR products that provide small bits and pieces to their backup and recovery processes with a complete, lower cost solution based on out of the box features from Microsoft that organizations have for the most part already owned much of the licenses as part of their enterprise agreements.

In a time when organizations are looking to simplify IT, lower costs by decreasing redundant licenses and products, minimize finger pointing between competing products and technologies, and having a solution that works in this manner has been very successful at helping us and our clients to meet their business cost cutting and IT simplification initiatives.

*********

Rand Morimoto has been in the IT industry for over 30-yrs and has written dozens of bestselling books on information technologies including Windows 2008 Unleashed, Exchange 2007 Unleashed, Microsoft Hyper-V Unleashed, Network Security for IT Professionals, and the like. Rand works with technologies 2-3 years before their release and works with organizations throughout the San Francisco Bay Area in planning, implementing, and leveraging technologies to simplify IT operations.

Service Pack 1 for DPM 2007 is now available

JasonBuffington — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 23:16:55 GMT

The DPM team is very excited to announce the release of Service Pack 1 for DPM 2007.

What is new in Service Pack 1	http://www.microsoft.com/SystemCenter/DataProtectionManager/en/us/WHATs-NEW.aspx

DPM 2007 SP1 x86	http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=125991
DPM 2007 SP1 x64	http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=125992

SP1 videos on TechNet Edge	http://edge.technet.com/tags/DPM

Upcoming Webcast on SP1 on January 8, 2009	http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032399151

Service Pack 1 for Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007 provides continuous data protection for Windows application and file servers using seamlessly integrated disk and tape media and includes the following expanded capabilities:

Protection of Hyper-V™ virtualization platforms, including both Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and the Microsoft Hyper-V Server, has been added to the existing set of protected workloads, building on the virtualization protection originally delivered for Virtual Server 2005.
Enhanced SQL Server 2008 protection, including the addition of new protection capabilities for mirrored databases, support for parallel backups of databases within a single instance, and the ability to move data from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 for migration scenarios.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 receive index protection, significant catalog optimization, and support for mirrored content databases.
Added protection for Exchange Server 2007 Standby Cluster Replication (SCR), enabling a complete disaster recovery solution that leverages SCR failover alongside DPM point-in-time restores.

In addition to enhancing the protection of each of the core Microsoft application workloads, additional capabilities have also been introduced with the release of DPM 2007 SP1, such as:

Local Data Source Protection enabling the DPM 2007 SP1 server to act as a branch office server offering self-protecting File Services and Virtualization hosting within one platform.
Cross-Forest Protection allowing large enterprise customers with multiple Active Directory® forests to now have even more flexibility in their DPM deployments.
Provision for a Client DPML answers customer demand for a more cost-effective way to protect Windows XP and Windows Vista clients using the same DPM 2007 infrastructure that protects their servers
Disaster Recovery capabilities within DPM 2007 SP1 now include the ability to leverage a third-party vaulting partner via the cloud (SaaS)

Between ‘Rollup Update’ and Service Pack 1, most of the core features of DPM 2007 have seen incremental capabilities or workload advancements which promises to keep Data Protection Manager on a trajectory toward improving how Microsoft customers protect and recover their Windows application and file servers with the Microsoft backup and recovery solution.

-- jason

New Sales Promotion -- get DPM Server licenses when you purchase System Center SMSE's

JasonBuffington — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:37:40 GMT

For those that are unfamiliar with DPM 2007 licensing, we just released a licensing podcast on Edge.Technet.com

In that DPM podcast on Edge, after we talk about the DPM licenses themselves, we talk about some cool benefits of acquiring your DPML's within the SMSE, instead of as 'standalone' licenses. And now, it gets even better !

With the acquisition of 200 or more System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise (SMSE) licenses between December 1st 2008 and June 30th 2009, a Select, Select Plus or Enterprise Agreement customer will be deemed to have:

5 System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 server licenses
1 System Center Configuration Manager 2007 server license
1 System Center Operations Manager 2007 server license

Use of the above software licenses will be governed by the terms and conditions of the customer’s license agreement and the product use rights for the above products.

The customer’s right to use the above referenced products under this offering is evidenced by their license agreement, evidence of their qualifying SMSE licenses, and this product condition note. The right to use the above referenced server licenses expires upon expiration or termination of the qualifying SMSE licenses.

The customer has the option to acquire Software Assurance for the server licenses granted under this offering. That coverage must be acquired by no later than June 30th, 2009. Customers without media for any of the above products should contact their reseller for media fulfillment options. Media fulfillment charges may apply.

So, as you are looking at acquiring DPM 2007 (with SP1 eminently), if you are also looking at other management technologies from Microsoft, the SMSE is the right way to go -- and make sure you take advantage of this offer, if you can!

Now available for download - Infrastructure Planning & Design (IPD) guide for DPM 2007 SP1

JasonBuffington — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:38:00 GMT

We are just a few days away from releasing Service Pack 1 for DPM 2007, and part of the release is updating our existing content and adding new materials.

The DPM Team has been working with the Microsoft Solution Accelerators group to develop this IPD, which goes into beta this week - so please tell us what you think !!

Open Beta for IPD Guide-Now Available for Download -- Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1

This guide leads the reader through the process of planning a Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007 SP1 infrastructure. Work through the infrastructure design process in a logical, sequential order. This IPD guide enables the reader to quickly identify what types of data will be protected, what the recovery goals are, and the protection strategy to achieve those goals. Other benefits of using this guide include best practice design guidance from the product group and an optimized infrastructure to best meet the business requirements.

Please tell us what you think! Download the beta guide and send us your honest feedback. We appreciate your input and will work to make each guide as helpful and useful as possible.

Infrastructure Planning and Design streamlines the planning process by:

Defining the technical decision flow through the planning process.
Listing the decisions to be made and the commonly available options and considerations.
Relating the decisions and options to the business in terms of cost, complexity, and other characteristics.
Framing decisions in terms of additional questions to the business to ensure a comprehensive alignment with the appropriate business landscape.

Get the beta IPD by visiting the Connect Web site at https://connect.microsoft.com/InvitationUse.aspx?ProgramID=1587&InvitationID=TPMB-Q7QK-HF4H&SiteID=14.