Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 (DPM 2010) is an advanced backup-and-recovery solution designed by Microsoft to protect Windows servers, workstations, and occasionally-connected laptops. DPM 2010 allows continual, non-disruptive backup of physical and virtual computers to local or remote disks and also allows offline backup to tape. DPM 2010 also permits fast recovery of entire servers or individual files. DPM's disk support gives you the speed and reliability you need to preserve your critical business information without interrupting network operations, while DPM's tape support keeps long-term archiving costs low and simplifies compliance with contractual or regulatory data retention mandates. DPM's support for site-to-site backup makes it suitable for enterprise-class disaster recovery. Simplicity of operation and low cost of implementation makes DPM 2010 the preferred backup-and-restore solution for organizations of all sizes.
Microsoft designed Data Protection Manager with special attention to protecting and recovering SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, Microsoft virtual machines, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, as well as Windows file services. By supporting Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) and other key protection features built into Microsoft servers and applications, DPM 2010 can transparently backup and rapidly restore Microsoft-specific entities such as Exchange 2010 DAG groups, the distributed components of SharePoint farms, and Windows Hyper-V Clustered Shared Volumes. This allows administrators who are not experts in any or all of these technologies to recover data easily and accurately. DPM continuously protects the core Microsoft server workloads to a DPM server, which then allows disk-based recovery and tape-based, long-term archival storage for a complete backup and recovery solution. The scalability of DPM 2010 is excellent, with a single DPM server able to support up to 100 Windows servers, 1,000 Windows workstations or laptops, and 2,000 databases.
The Problem with Tape Technology
Experienced IT managers know that when it's time to go into disaster recovery mode, the tape backup system is often one of the biggest disasters. The traditional model of tape-based backup utilizing applications such as BackupExec and ARCserve is fraught with problems. Tape is slow, unreliable, and requires meticulous management. Microsoft's reported in-house operational experience indicates a 17% failure rate for its tape devices. Basically, for a tape-based restore procedure to be successful, too many things have to go right:
- IT managers need to have fast access to all the backup media required for a specific recovery
- All tapes must have no unreadable spots despite the fact that, in typical situations, they have been subject to physical wear by being rewritten many times
- Tapes must have been stored in the right environmental conditions to remain usable
- The software catalogs managing those tapes must not be corrupted
- Complex electromechanical tape drives must be available and working properly
The decisive disadvantage of tape as a backup-and-restore technology is that tape is slow. Tape backup typically calls for routinely scheduled system downtime, and tape-based recovery procedures can take intolerably long even when everything is working perfectly. Virtually all facets of contemporary businesses are becoming increasingly dependent on ready access to digital information, and the amount of data that companies generate to remain competitive is expanding dramatically. This growing reliance on networked data makes every minute of downtime more calamitous, while the ballooning volume of data being created adds steadily to the time required for tape-based backup and recovery.
Finally, tape-based backup and recovery regimes are logistically complex and demand substantial time and care to administer. Media has to be managed, cataloged, and stored in a way that allows for consistent backup and accurate recovery, but issues such as personnel changes, company relocations, the need to accommodate remote offices, maintaining tape-friendly temperature and humidity in the storage facility, and the hassle of validation testing all invite human error or omission and inflate IT budgets. In essence, while tape technology remains a reasonable means of long-term archiving, it is becoming continually less viable as a technology for primary backup.
Disk Drives to the Rescue
Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010 radically changes the reliability and usability aspects of backup and restore. The key differentiator is that DPM is primarily an intelligent disk-to-disk based backup solution.
The basic concept is simple. You configure a DPM server with enough disk storage to hold a complete replica of all the data you want to protect from your servers and workstations along with space for the historical changes you want to keep. For a 30-day history this may require somewhere in the range of 1.5 to two times the protected data space. The actual disk capacity needed is highly dependent on how often your data changes. Since disks are inexpensive and getting more affordable all the time, storage costs are relatively trivial for most IT organizations.
What is more significant is that a DPM server can be built with highly fault-tolerant components such as redundant power supplies and ample redundant cooling. By configuring RAID disk storage arrays, reliability is far higher than with tape-based systems.
Microsoft leveraged key Windows technologies to make Data Protection Manager the backup-and-restore solution of choice for Windows environments. The foundation of DPM is the use of Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) for creating and maintaining extremely compact differentials. It does this both on the protected server for efficiently replicating change differentials over the network to the DPM server, and also on the DPM server itself for efficiently storing the historical snapshots used to recover data.
You can gain almost continuous data protection by replicating data from your protected servers as often as every 15 minutes. This means that if you have a failure on your server, in the worst case you can restore it to the last 15 minutes. This is far beyond the practical capability of tape-based backup systems. Basically, the DPM server always has a complete and up-to-date replica of all protected data. DPM takes further advantage of disk technology by storing the data in a Windows format file system that you can directly navigate with Windows Explorer. DPM actually creates separate disk volumes for each protected server.
Thanks to support for disk-to-disk restoration, DPM can reduce network recovery time from hours to minutes and make administrative tasks far more intuitive than with tape-based solutions.
The New Standard in Fault-tolerant Data Backup and Restore
DPM offers significantly more granular control over your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) than tape-based systems. On the DPM server, you can take snapshots for historical restorations based on a schedule that matches a variety of protection requirements. For example, you can schedule daily, twice a day, three times a day, hourly, or 15 minute snapshots, and you can define a separate snapshot schedule for each protected server or share. Your accounting server, for instance, may require frequent snapshots so you can recover to a specific moment in the day, while other servers may be fine with daily snapshots. The bottom line is that Microsoft's Data Protection Manager is flexible enough to handle almost any environment.
The obvious question with disk-to-disk backup is what happens if a natural disaster or other catastrophic event such as fire or theft wipes out all your local servers including your DPM server? One way to prepare for this is to back up your DPM server to a separate DPM server at a collocation site. Collocation facilities are affordable, offer geographic dispersion, and provide high levels of redundancy for power, Internet connectivity, and environmental controls.
One important feature of DPM that supports off-site backup is the ability to perform highly efficient over-the-wire compression for all transferred data. This can easily result in about a 5-1 compression ratio and theoretically can go as high as 10-1. Once the initial replica is established, backups are further streamlined by the fact that DPM sends only differentials and utilizes inherently fast hard disk technology. As a result, DPM-based backup works well with the WAN bandwidth typically utilized by any business. With Data Protection Manager, there is no reason to rely on an expensive third-party Internet-based backup solution.
For your original data replica, which can't take advantage of differentials, a time-saving technique for small businesses is to create the replica manually. For example, in the case that you add a new large server to be protected and your DPM server is in a collocation facility, you can simply copy all the data from the new server to a USB hard drive, bring the hard drive to the collocation facility, and upload the data directly. You can then perform a consistency check that will quickly and intelligently update anything that has changed with the data set since you made the manual copy. From that point, you are backed up and ready for any emergency.
Data Protection Manager also supports bandwidth throttling so you can keep bandwidth use low during the business day and crank it up to use all the available bandwidth in the middle of the night. DPM has the speed and versatility to match your performance needs and to adapt easily as your business evolves.
Tape-based archiving is efficiently supported by DPM. There is an option for performing tape backups via the DPM server for off-site tape protection, which may be required for regulatory or compliance. Another powerful feature of DPM is that tape backups copy the replica data set residing on the DPM server and therefore don’t needlessly consume WAN bandwidth. DPM also gives you the option to have a second DPM server configured to back up the primary DPM server’s data so you can have a local DPM server as well as an off-site backup DPM server in order to improve fault tolerance and optimize recovery speed.
Using Data Protection Manager with Microsoft SQL Server
DPM 2010 can protect Microsoft SQL Server 2000 through SQL Server 2008, including SAP workloads, and handles advanced SQL cluster configurations. As evidence of DPM's capability, Microsoft protects their own enterprise SQL Servers with Data Protection Manager. Enhancements to the 2010 version of DPM include the ability to protect an entire instance of SQL Server so all new databases are protected automatically, expanded capacity to handle up to 2,000 databases, a self-service restore capability that allows administrators to restore their own databases, and the ability to restore SQL 2005 databases to a SQL 2008 server for test migrations.
DPM can backup regular data files as well as the system state of a server, and it also works efficiently with servers that maintain databases/transactional log files. DPM is especially efficient as a backup and restore mechanism for Microsoft SQL Server because it intelligently integrates with the SQL Server VSS writers. Since DPM uses core VSS services, it will backup all files, open or not, to at least a snapshot recovery level. As a result, you never have to worry about open file issues.
In between express full copy captures, the standard SQL Server transaction logging mechanism is used to offer up-to-the-minute protection. The log files themselves are replicated by DPM. In case a recovery is required, the most recent DPM differential backup can be combined with the most recent set of transaction logs to provide rapid restoration.
For information about Progent's Microsoft-certified support services for SQL Server, refer to Microsoft SQL Server Consulting.
Using Data Protection Manager with Microsoft Exchange Server
DPM 2010 supports Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, 2007, and 2010, and can now protect Exchange 2010 database availability groups (DAGs). Data Protection Manager 2010 includes the ability to provide tailored, application-aware protection for Exchange Server and addresses a granularity problem that has historically been a major headache for Exchange administrators. Exchange backup APIs are designed to back up entire databases. However, if you want to restore an individual mailbox or public folder, you have in the past had two choices: either restore the entire database or switch to third-party mailbox-level backup tools. DPM allows you to protect one or more storage groups as a whole, while still giving you the ability to restore individual mailboxes.
DPM takes advantage of Exchange Server 2007 features associated with high-availability and disaster recovery. For example, DPM can work alongside the new Exchange local continuous replication (LCR) and cluster continuous replication (CCR) modes. You can use DPM to protect data by copying it from the passive node in a CCR cluster, providing protection without placing an additional load on the active CCR node.
DPM also offers “lossless recovery” of Exchange Server data. This means that after DPM has restored your email databases to the latest recovery point, and updated all of the synchronized transaction logs, DPM can automatically reapply the surviving Exchange transaction logs from the production server to the very last committed email message, bringing the Exchange server completely forward.
Data Protection Manager improves the performance of your Exchange Server by offloading the typical ESEUTIL operations that most backup applications impose on the production server. The DPM server takes car of this on the redundant data, conserving the bandwidth on the production Exchange Server.
To learn more about Progent's support for Microsoft Exchange Server, see Microsoft Exchange Server Consulting.
Using Data Protection Manager with Virtual Servers
The 2010 version of DPM offers continuous protection for virtual machines powered by Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and can provide consistent protection even during a Hyper-V Live Migration process. For users of Microsoft Virtual Server or VMware, a way to reduce disaster recovery time drastically is to build a DPM server with enough CPU and RAM resources to create a system that allows you quick recovery from a failed virtual machine host server. Since the DPM server always has an exact replica of all the virtual machine guest files, in the event the virtual machine host fails, and by having a virtual server installed on the DPM server, you can choose to boot those replica images as running machines and take your time in restoring the original failed virtual machine host server. This means you could be up in minutes with all your virtual machine guests even with a complete failure of the original virtual machine host. Adding to the time savings, the entire operation can be accomplished remotely.
How Progent Can Help You Benefit from Microsoft Data Protection Manager
Progent's Microsoft-certified Data Protection Manager consultants can help you create practical recovery plans, design an affordable fault-tolerant network infrastructure, deploy a DPM-based backup and restore solution, thoroughly test your system, show your IT staff or local consultants how to manage Microsoft DPM, or handle complete IT outsourcing services including off-site hosting of virtual or physical DPM servers in Progent's data center.
Progent's consultants can use industry best practices to help you:
Define your recovery goals and establish a protection policy to meet them
Design an efficient multi-site network topology for DPM
Configure Windows Server 2008, SQL Server, Exchange, and SharePoint to run with DPM
Configure Protection Groups and Storage Pools
Calculate and allocate disk space for backup
Define custom volumes
Plan tape library rotation and management
Install Protection Agents on computers inside and outside your firewall
Optimize backup and recovery performance
Progent's security specialists have earned prestigious certifications from global organizations such as CISA, CISM, CISSP, GIAC, and ISSAP. To be awarded credentials from these organizations, security consultants must have both proven experience and demonstrated knowledge of industry best practices for business continuity planning and disaster recovery. For more information about Progent's security engineers and their services, visit Network Security Services.
Other High Availability Solutions Provided by Progent's Experts
Progent's Microsoft and Cisco-certified consulting experts can assist your company build an affordable, fault-tolerant IT architecture that addresses critical challenges covering a broad array of networking solutions and operations such as:
Workplace Recovery Planning
Progent's business continuity engineers can show you how to create a workplace recovery strategy so you can restore IT functionality in the event of an IT system disaster. Progent can assist you to define a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy that incorporates scheduled disaster recovery evaluations and testing. Progent's Microsoft and Cisco-certified professionals can also help you create an affordable, zero-downtime network solution that takes into account availability issues involving a broad array of infrastructure technologies and processes. To read more, see Disaster Recovery Consulting Services.
Fault Tolerant Internet Connectivity
Progent's Cisco-authorized IT professionals can help you design an economical, fault tolerant Internet connection architecture that can achieve 24x7 Internet access via a broad array of fault tolerant Internet access technologies including fault tolerant BGP, automatic fail-over, and redundant Internet Service Providers. Progent can provide CCIE professionals to help you apply the most advanced technology for fault tolerant Internet connectivity to build an economical, completely redundant Internet interface with automatic failover and other features to deliver non-stop Internet availability. To read more, see Non-stop Internet Access Architecture.
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Failover Clusters
The clustering technology incorporated into the high-end editions of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 is dramatically redesigned to simplify the installation, setup, and management of server clusters that provide greater levels of network dependability, protection, performance, and versatility. New or enhanced features include automated cluster verification, revamped configuration and deployment, improved cluster management, new cluster architecture for increased availability, better security and quorum structure, elimination of failure points, more disk and RAM capacity, and enhancements for geographically dispersed clusters. To read more, go to Windows Failover Clustering Support.
Microsoft 2003 Clusters
Progent offers Windows Cluster Server assistance to help your company deploy non-stop clustered servers designed to provide 24x7 uptime. Clustered Windows servers for zero-downtime systems include Windows 2003 Cluster Server, Microsoft SQL Server Cluster, and Microsoft Exchange Cluster. By helping you design non-stop server clustering environments based on Microsoft Windows Server Cluster 2003, Progent’s certified Windows professionals ensure that your zero-downtime clustered servers are set up to maximize the business advantage of your information network. To read more, visit Microsoft Server Cluster Expertise.
High Availability Load Balancing
Progent offers high availability load balancing support covering system load balancing, load balanced applications, LAN/WAN infrastructure routing, and content delivery technology including F5 Networks 3DNS. Fault tolerant load balancing products for which Progent can provide consulting expertise include Windows 2003 and 2008 Server Network Load Balancing Manager, Citrix Metaframe and Presentation Server, Cisco CSS, Cisco Distributed Director and ACNS, and F5 Networks BIG-IP. To learn more, see High Availability Load Balancing.
Zero Downtime Data Centers
Progent's Data Center engineers can help you identify fault-tolerant data centers that match the particular needs of your company. High availability colocation sites are especially attractive to small companies because of their low cost and convenience compared to pursuing a do-it-yourself approach. Trying to create an on-site data center with even a basic degree of fault tolerance is financially prohibitive for typical small companies. Progent can show you how to get all the benefits of high-availability Internet data centers by offering a complete range of consulting and maintenance services. For more information, go to Non-stop Data Centers Consulting.
Fault Tolerant Branch Office Connectivity
Progent’s interoffice network infrastructure consultants can help small businesses achieve fault tolerant interoffice connectivity through fully redundant system architectures featuring automatic failover. Progent’s Cisco-certified CCIE network engineers can design and deploy ultra-reliable Inter-office connections based on zero-downtime EIGRP routers or zero-downtime OSPF configurations of Cisco routers. Progent can show you how multi-path connections and transparent fail-over can provide economical 24x7 interoffice networking. To find out more, see Fault Tolerant Interoffice Connectivity.
Why Choose Progent for Disaster Recovery Planning and Fault-tolerant Networking Consulting?
Because Progent is a Microsoft Gold Partner and offers high-level application support for a wide range of small business software programs, Progent can help clients to arrive at efficient information technology solutions that optimize the business value of your network. As a Registered Partner with Cisco Systems, Progent offers the support of qualified consultants and specialists with expertise in architecting, configuring and maintaining networking solutions based on Cisco Systems technology. The breadth of Progent's IT experience and Progent's familiarity with the needs of small companies make Progent a great partner for creating and running a cost-effective, high-availability information system.
How You Can Access Progent's Engineers for Non-stop Network Services
In order to ask Progent about engineering support for high availability LAN design, phone 1-800-993-9400 or email fault-tolerant-help@progent.com.
