Introduction to Data Protection Manager.pdf

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Microsoft.ebook.0607
IT Pro SERIES
Data Protection
Manager
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An Introduction to
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i
Books
Contents
Chapter 1
DPM: Continuous Data Protection for File Servers
By Windows IT Pro
Chapter 2
What you need to know about Microsoft System Center
By Paul Thurrott
What It Does . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
What It Doesn’t Do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Sidebar: System Center Data Protection Manager 2006 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Assimilate IT Skills and Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Connecting IT with Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
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1
Chapter 1
for File Servers Expands to SQL Server
and Exchange
By Windows IT Pro
In March 2005, just as the first beta of Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) was
about to be released, Windows IT Pro magazine surveyed readers about the need for Microsoft to
provide a continuous data protection product (“What’s Data Protection Manager?” InstantDoc 45248).
The survey also asked what features and functionality customers would want. The results of that
survey were highly favorable towards the product and readers were eager to try the first version of
DPM, which focused on file server backup and recovery. The functionality readers requested most
was the ability to backup and restore SQL Server and Exchange, in addition to file servers, and
Microsoft promised to address that request in future versions.
Now that DPM has been in the market for nearly a year. Windows IT Pro decided to revisit the
product and check on progress on delivering the requested capabilities. We talked with Bill Shelton
(group product manager, System Center Data Protection Manager) to find out the latest on this
popular product.
Then and Now: DPM in the Real World
WITPro : I know that the DPM team was very proud that the product released last year precisely on
the schedule you had announced. Now that DPM has been available for nearly a year, how is the
product doing in the market?
Bill : The most important thing is that the product released on schedule last September. An important
momentum point is that we exceeded our customer-response expectations. We saw amazing numbers
of downloads—over 65,000 downloads of the eval even before DPM went RTM. Since then, we’ve
continued to see consistently high downloads. So we’ve had lots of customer interest in a volume
you don’t normally see for a backup product. It is very exciting.
WITPro : That’s not surprising in light of the results of the March 2005 Hey Microsoft! survey on DPM.
It showed readers were eager to get their hands on the product although it wasn’t even in beta when
the survey was fielded. Readers wanted a Microsoft backup and restore solution.
Bill : Yes, the demand for DPM echoed what we saw in the quantitative work you had done about
people really looking to supplement the [backup] solutions they have. Now we have a feedback loop
where we actually have customers out there that we can talk to.
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DPM: Continuous Data Protection
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2 An Introduction to Data Protection Manager
WITPro : What is that feedback telling you?
Bill : Centralized backup, which was one of the core solutions of the product, is one theme that is
really resonating. There are various drivers for interest in centralized backup. For example, sometimes
we talk to people, and the driver is compliance. Or another example—it seems like every day you
see a news story about lost tapes. Everyone who sees a story like that is going to be a fan of central-
ized backup. For others, it’s just not having to call remote people at every branch and work through
swapping another set of tapes or reloading last Tuesday’s tape so that someone can restore a file for
a user. One of the great validating points that we’ve seen is around centralized backup of branch
offices. Even for school systems and government agencies who really run with very little IT budget,
customers are seeing the immediate value and return on investment—and finally, centralized backup
of branches seems like something that is really achievable to the masses.
WITPro : What makes DPM’s centralized backup different from other implementations?
Bill : With existing solutions in the marketplace, say for example, I changed one file. Then that night,
I either do a full backup and bring all the files over so I can back up that one changed file, or I just
do an incremental backup and bring only that file over. DPM just moves the changed bytes over. It’s
much more efficient and opens up the possibility of doing things over a WAN line that you never
previously did. So it’s a whole new use case in contrast to a lot of vendors who will take their
existing technology and say it’s WAN-ready. The other key difference is that instead of protecting data
nightly, by tape or any other means, DPM protects up to hourly. So, not only are we sending only
the changes within the file, but we are trickling the data hourly—instead of nightly. This means that if
you lost a server near the end of the business day; you haven’t lost everything since last night’s tape.
You have the entire server’s data up to less than one hour ago. That’s huge.
WITPro : How is DPM optimized for WAN scenarios?
Bill : We don’t assume that the line is always there. We have all kinds of tolerance mechanisms in
case the line goes down. We assume that on a WAN, there are service interruptions and have state-
based monitoring to deal with that. You’re familiar with MOM and its idea of displaying red, green,
yellow status on services. We’ve applied that paradigm to backup. We haven’t seen that elsewhere in
the backup community. We also provide a very straightforward wizard for bandwidth throttling. It’s a
pull down list of every major topology from 64kbps to Gigabit. Pick your link speed and then tell us
what percentage of that wire that you want us to use. We take care of it from there. We also added
compression to even be more efficient. Put it all together and we are sending only partial file writes
in hourly small streams, with compression and throttling – that’s a great recipe synchronizing remote
office data – which makes DPM perfect and affordable for multi-site backup solutions.
WITPro : What made you decide to do state-based monitoring?
Bill : I did an ergonomic study once and spent a summer as an intern with the backup crew at
Microsoft IT. I was blown away by what I saw. You spend 3 hours every morning just trying to
answer one question: Am I backed up? When we took this theme out and tested with our customers,
they said, “Yeah! If you could just tell me in the morning if I’m backed up, you’d be a big hero.” We
thought, gosh, management software has really solved this with state-based monitoring.
So DPM has a mechanism where we understand all the data that’s been moved over, and we
snapshot it. In the morning when you come in, you can see if your backup status is red, green, or
yellow, based on how your data protection lines up with your business policies.
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Chapter 1 DPM: Continuous Data Protection for File Servers Expands to SQL Server and Exchange 3
WITPro : How does that work?
Bill : Suppose you’re going to replicate every hour. All of a sudden the line’s down because
someone’s servicing a new hub somewhere in the middle. (And they’re never going to tell the
backup guy, so the line is just going to be down.) DPM will note that the connection is down, but it
won’t start an event storm or something like this. DPM will come back in an hour and retry. Still
down? DPM will change the state to yellow. In the background, we’re building a buffer on that
source machine, so we’re not compromising your data protection at any point. The third hour, we
come back. Oh! The hub’s up again. We can move all the data over. The end-all protection goal’s
been met. The status is reset to green when you arrive in the morning. Yes, if you’re interested in the
minutia of this transient event, you could go find it in some deep task trails, but the point is that
when you show up, the status is green. You’re protected and can get on with value-add business ser-
vices. That’s an example where, with a standard solution in the marketplace, you’d have to arrive at
work and sift through a whole event log to figure out if you’re protected. DPM just deals with that.
WITPro : What other DPM themes are customers responding well to?
Bill : Centralized backup is one big theme that we really seem to have timed quite well in the
product. Another one is the recovery-centric focus of the product. The way we designed the product
is very much about recovery. I don’t recall who said it, but the phrase “Backup is the tax that you
pay, in order to be able to restore” is a great synopsis of DPM. DPM is built for rapid and reliable
recovery. Rapid recovery because it is coming from disk, instead of waiting on tapes and humans;
and reliable, again because you have no media to mount or indexes to rebuild. Pair that with the
end-user enabled recovery feature, where non-technical users can restore their own files directly from
Windows Explorer or Microsoft Office—and the IT Pro’s job just got a lot easier. No more help desk
tickets to go restore a single file. The user just right-clicks and has it back within seconds. Those are
the main two these that we are seeing resonance around – centralized backup of branches and
empowering the end-users to restore their own data. Even if you don’t enable end-user restore,
coming from reliable disk, the IT restore job is still a minimal task that dramatically improves the IT
professional’s quality of life. If I had to offer any other customer themes that are well received, it’s
that no one wants to sign up for up to a day of data loss, which is what you get with tape. Hourly
protection with multiple easy roll-back points per day is protecting productivity, not just files.
WITPro : Is DPM’s emphasis on easy recovery based on customer feedback?
Bill : Yes. In fact, here’s an interesting customer anecdote: Early in development for the product, we
were out talking to customers about what we had built. I remember someone saying, “Everyone can
back up. That’s easy. Recovery is the defining moment where some people lose their jobs and some
people cement their jobs.” So we said, boy, let’s take that to heart and let’s actually design the
product from the recovery experience backwards. If we look at the product now, that approach has
resonated well.
WITPro : Does company size have any bearing on the popularity of DPM’s recovery capabilities?
Bill : We have various case studies, which you’ll find on our DPM Web site
(www.microsoft.com/DPM), that describe a big span of companies, large and small. But there are a
few common themes. Many of them simply are tired of swapping tapes at remote sites. Centralized
backup is a well understood problem that many of our customers have tried and failed with in the
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