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(For more resources on this subject, see here.)
DPM has a robust set of features and capabilities. The following are some of the most valuable ones:
- Disk-based data protection and recovery
- Continuous back up
- Tape-based archiving and back up
- Built in monitoring
- Cloud-based back up and recovery
- Built-in reports and notifications
- Integration with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager
- Windows PowerShell integration for scripting
- Remote administration
- Tight integration with other Microsoft products
- Protection of clustered servers
- Protection of application-specific servers
- Backing up the system state
- Backing up client computers
New features of DPM 2010
Microsoft has done a great job of updating Data Protection Manager 2010 with great new features and some much needed features. There were some issues with Data Protection Manager 2007 that would cause an Administrator to perform routine maintenance on it. Most of these issues have been resolved with Data Protection Manager 2010. The following are the most exciting new features to DPM:
- DPM 2007 to DPM 2010 in-place upgrade
- Auto-Rerun and Auto-CC (Consistency Check) automatically fixes Replica Inconsistent errors
- Auto-Grow will automatically grow volumes as needed
- It allows you to shrink volumes as needed
- Bare metal restore
- A Back up SLA report that can be configured and e-mailed to you daily
- Self-restore service for SQL Database Administrators of SQL back ups
- When backing up SharePoint 2010, no recovery farm is required for item level recoveries for example: recover SharePoint list items, and recovery of items in SharePoint farm using host-headers. This is an improvement to SharePoint that DPM takes advantage of
- Better back up for mobile or disconnected employees (This requires VPN or Direct Access)
- End users of protected clients are able to recover their data. The end users can do this without an Administrator doing anything.
- DPM is Live Migration aware. We already know DPM can protect VMs on Hyper-V. Now DPM will automatically continue protection of a VM even after it has been migrated to a different Hyper-V server. The Hyper-V server has to be a Windows Server 2008 R2 clustered server.
- DPM2DPM4DR (DPM to DPM for Disaster Recovery) allows you to back up your DPM to a second DPM. This feature was available in 2007 and it can now be set up via the GUI. You can also perform chained DPM back up so you could have DPM A, DPM B, and DPM C. Before you could only have a secondary DPM server backing up a primary DPM server.
- With the 2010 release, a single DPM server’s scalability has been increased over its previous 2007 release:
- DPM can handle 80 TB per server
- DPM can back up up to 100 servers
- DPM can back up up to 1000 clients
- DPM can back up up to 2000 SQL databases
As you can see from the previous list there are many enhancements to DPM 2010 that will benefit Administrators as well as end users.
Summary
In this article we took a look at the existing as well as new features of DPM.
Further resources on this subject:
- Installing Data Protection Manager 2010 [article]
- Overview of Data Protection Manager 2010 [article]
- Debatching Bulk Data on Microsoft Platform [article]
