System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1: A good backup choice?
1:48 pm in Uncategorized by mikeresseler
ith the release of SP1 2 months ago, Microsoft has created a product that can actually take a huge amount of this market. So if you ever think that this product suits your environment, here are a few pointers to help you sell it to the upper-management.
Ok, now about the product.
First, why would you not choose for this solution.
- If you only want one backup solution in your environment, and you’re not only running on windows, then stop thinking about this product.
- If you have servers in a DMZ zone (workgroup) or in a domain that has not a full trust, the story also ends, unless you want to install multiple SCDPM servers
Only two reasons and end of story… This product must be fantastic ;-). Unfortunately, there aren’t too many environments that don’t have a DMZ zone, or that are running full windows. So these two items are really a killer to defend this to the management…
How you can solve this will be explained later on. First, we’ll start with what is new to DPM 2007 Service Pack 1.
- Protection of Hyper-V machines, including 2008 Hyper-V and Hyper-V server. And since there is still the possibility to do a complete backup of Virtual Server 2005 R2 guests, the whole microsoft virtualization suite is covered. And we are really talking here about online backup of an entire guest! How cool is that…
- SQL server protection now protects SQL 2008, and it gives you added protection capabilities for mirrored databases
- Sharepoint Server 2007 and sharepoint services 3.0 receive index protection, catalog optimization and support for mirrored content databases.
- Exchange Server 2007 SCR protection
- Cross-forest Protection: It is possible to backup from other domains, but a forest level trust is necessary!
For more information about the product, make sure you check out the FAQ and the product page
If you want to use this product, you need to “sell” following advantages to your management:
- Lower cost on licenses. Make sure you check out the video on edge (edge.technet.com/media/DPM-2007-sp1-licensing). Second, if you already have SMSE licenses, or if you are thinking about buying those, this product is included!
- Fast restore. If you have enough storage (SAN, iSCSI…) you can create protection groups so that you can easily and quickly restore files, mailboxes, mails, databases, sharepoint items….)
- You can backup to storage online for various products and afterwards back-up to tape without interference with the infrastructure. This means that the “backup-window” disappears and that you can do your backups to tape whenever you want.
- Whether we like it or not, it is a Microsoft product, and the functionality for Exchange, SQL and Sharepoint are fantastic.
- As already said, full host server based backups for Virtual machines.
- Users can perform their own recoveries
- Possibility of having one DPM server protect another, making it possible to have a backup server in another location to get up and running again very fast after disaster
- Great reporting possibilities
I think these 8 lines are already a great start for building a business case towards the decision taker.
But now for the problems I mentioned in the beginning of this post.
DPM is not capable of backing up non-windows systems. So for that, you need another solution. Also a true san backup is also not possible. So what can we do about it?
In many cases, we implemented the following solution:
We implemented DPM to do backups on SAN space or iSCSI systems. After that, we used another solution (mostly HP Data Protector) to take a backup of that storage. The combination of both systems is perfectly possible as described on the following technet article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb795753.aspx
For the non-windows environments, the HP data protector is also a solution but you can of course go to Veritas or ArcServe or other solutions.
For the next release of DPM, I think Microsoft should think about the following features:
- San backup
- Backup of filesystems on non-windows environments (Hey, if they can monitor them through SCOM, why not backup them???)
- Possibility of protecting servers that are not in the same domain or are in a workgroup / forest without full trust
Cheers,
Mike