DPM 2010 Beta Get Released!

The hidden jewel of the Microsoft System  Management product line is System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM). The product backs up physical and virtual instances of Windows as well as any Windows role or Microsoft application (Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, etc.) that is running on that system without additional specialized clients (or costs). This makes for a very attractive solution as most Irish organizations run their business on Microsoft based technologies……but wait it gets better…given the fact it uses the Volume Shadow Copy Service for these backups, you can take a backups up to every 15 minutes. Got you interested? Well it is getting even better with the 2010 release. Here is a quick overview of the changes and improvement coming.

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.

cheers

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