Ctrl P - The Data Protection Manager Blog! : Customer success stories

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

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.

TechNet Radio -- Total Wine success story with System Center

JasonBuffington — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 19:11:00 GMT

Earlier this week, I sat down with our friends at Total Wine to talk about how they are using System Center.

It's one of the first times that I've gotten to talk about technology and 'wine' instead of 'whine" - so check out the TechNet Radio interview where we covered:

SC Data Protection Manager - replacing previous backup solutions that were unreliable and making backups 'fun'

SC Virtual Machine Manager - as the Total Wine Hyper-V deployment continues rolling out

SC Operations Manager - as the nerve center of all of TW's Microsoft and in-house applications

SC Configuration Manager - for deploying everything from new applications to replacement servers in remote stores

The audio shows 1 hour, but only the first 22 minutes are System Center with Total Wine - the rest is a Microsoft TechNet October Security Bulletins.

WMA | MP3 High | MP3 Low
To save to your computer, right click and choose 'save target as…'.

If you'd like to lock in to the DPM portion of the case study, there is about 3 minutes of good introduction on Total Wine's business and infrastructure - and DPM 2007 is covered from around 3:30 until 9:30.

To learn more about DPM and the rest of System Center in use at Total Wine - check out the Microsoft case study.

Our sincere thanks to Todd Slan and Robert DeSantos at Total Wine for allowing Microsoft System Center to partner with them in helping them manage the Total Wine infrastructure.

-- Jason

New DPM Case Study -- Sporton

JasonBuffington — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:49:02 GMT

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000002020

“When Sporton discovered how completely Data Protection Manager met their criteria, and that it was significantly more cost efficient than other products they had been evaluating, including offerings from CommVault and Symantec, they knew they had found the ideal solution.”

Organization Profile

Headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, Sporton International Inc. (Sporton) is the largest electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) authentication, safety regulation detection, wireless network communication authentication, mobile phone authentication, and digital television authentication company in the market.

Business Situation

Sporton’s existing process for backing up and restoring data had become inefficient and unreliable. The company needed an easy-to-use solution that would reduce the time, resources, and budget required to manage their backup and recovery processes across for their corporate headquarters and their remote offices in Taiwan, China, and Korea.

Solution

By deploying a solution based on Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, Sporton was able to reduce their total IT backup and recovery overhead dramatically, with faster deployment, decreased time to back up and recover data, decreased staff overhead, and reduced need for support and maintenance.

Benefits

· 70% reduction in backup and recovery overhead

· 90% decrease in time to perform daily backups

· 70% reduction in time to troubleshoot back errors

· 90% decrease in file recovery time

· 70% savings in annual tape expenses

· 20% reduction in annual IT staff and maintenance

Vertical Industries
Telecommunications
Wireless Telecommunications Industry

Country/Region
Taiwan

For more DPM Case Studies -- click here

New DPM case study -- AutoNation

JasonBuffington — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:06:36 GMT

A new DPM 2007 case study recently published on a great success story from AutoNation.

With 25,000 employees and $19 Billion US in revenue, AutoNation had a lot of data. One quote from Ed Olson,
Lead Windows Infrastructure Engineer, AutoNation:

"We were trying to shoehorn 12 to 15 terabytes of data onto 15 tape drives each night, and it just wasn’t working."

The case study talks about protecting Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint data, along with disaster recovery capabilities - and ends with this conclusion:

Saving money was not an original impetus for moving to a new backup scheme, because the company had to make a change to accommodate rising data volumes. However, System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 cost one-third of what competitive products cost, and annual backup-related maintenance chores are today one-third of what they were.

AutoNation also expects to save $30,000 annually in offsite tape-storage fees once it sets up System Center Data Protection Manager to copy files to the company’s disaster-recovery site in Chicago. “The fact that Data Protection Manager has a built-in disaster recovery capability makes it an unbelievable value, considering that its closest competitor costs three times as much without this feature,” Olson says.

Click here to read the case study of AutoNation with DPM 2007.

-- jason