Core i|o Tour '06 - Interesting Q&A

The Core i|o Tour '06 has come to an end.  Rick took the tour East visiting Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa, Halifax while I took it West (along with Bruce) to Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver (Rick was here too) and Winnipeg before we met again for the tour wrap-up in Toronto.  Along the way we heard a lot of common questions, a lot of really good questions, and even some questions we couldn't answer.  Some of those have been compiled here so for those that missed it you can get the answers here.

Where can I get the PowerPoint slides, view the streaming video, download the BOIS document and get more technical resources?

You can get all that information at the thank you page located at https://www.microsoft.ca/technet/iotour06/thanks  Note the lauch URLs are incorrect on our PPT slides, you can get the correct URLs here!

Where can I buy AntiGen ?

This was a popular question that stumped us.  Rick and I are not in sales so when sales questions come up we are often stumped.  You can get a full trial of AntiGen here and find out more about how to buy AntiGen here.

Does DPM 2006 support 64 bit systems?

DPMv2 is fully supported when running natively on 64 bit operating systems. Protection of native 64 bit systems is also supported. However, this support is limited to x64 systems. DPMv2 will not run on or protect IA64 systems.

Can Data Protection Manager 2006 be used to backup Exchange, SQL, and/or SharePoint?

This was probably the most common question I heard so I blogged about it here the other day.  Data Protection Manager 2006 v2, which is currently in beta, will offer that capability and more.  Check out this blog post for more information and login to connect.microsoft.com and register for the beta.

Can I use USB/Firewire hard drives with Data Protection Manager 2006?

Wow!  Did we hear this question a lot and answering it was confusing but I've nailed it down.  To begin there are two scenarios you will encounter using USB/Firewire hard drives with DPM, the first is adding USB/Firewire drives to the DPM disk pool.  This is NOT a supported scenario.  When you remove the drive from the system DPM will drop it from its drive pool.  The next time you plug it in you will have to re-add it to the disk pool which will format the drive and you loose any data on that drive.  One other thing that can happen when you reboot your DPM server is that the device ID can change.  When this happens DPM sees the old ID and missing and removes it and you have to add the drive again, which will format it.

The other scenario is backing up your DPM server to a USB/Firewire drive.  You can use a USB/Firewire hard drive to back up the DPM server for off-site and/or archival purposes in the same manner as you might do so with tape.

Can I use add a NAS device to the disk pool in DPM 2006?

No you cannot use a NAS device as part of the disk pool in DPM.  DPM can use Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Storage Area Networks (SAN) and iSCSI storage devices.  DPM supports IDE, SCSI, SAS and GPT drives.

How far can DPM 2006 scale?

A great question was posed in Toronto by a gentleman who was currently backing up Petabytes of data at the television station he works at.  There is a great case study on DPM and its ability to scale that answers that question.

Can DFSR be used to replicate Exchange, SQL and/or SharePoint data?

No.  You cannot use DFSR to replicate your Exchange, SQL, SPS, Access, etc... databases or any other dynamic content.

Where can I get the Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 Beta 2?

You can get your hands on the beta bits at connect.microsoft.com but just be aware that it is listed as Beta 1.  Sign up for this one and you will get the beta 2 bits.