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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

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)

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.

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 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

How to protect SharePoint with DPM 2007 -- streaming video

JasonBuffington — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:20:00 GMT

Here is a new streaming video (20 minutes) which demonstrates protection and recovery of SharePoint 2007 with DPM 2007.

It also talks about the specifics of how DPM protects SharePoint and its distributed architecture.

Click here to watch streaming video - How does DPM 2007 protect SharePoint

Please let us know what topics that you would like to hear more about regarding Data Protection Manager.

-- Jason Buffington