I am experiencing email withdrawal today, and I am realizing the extent of addiction I actually have to my email. We are moving our corporate offices today, and so we have planned a day of downtime for our email servers. We’ve been planning this for months, so it’s not as though I wasn’t prepared, but still I am just cringing at the thought of not being able to get my email until maybe tomorrow. What makes my addiction even more apparent… I am on a cross country plane trip as I write this, so I couldn’t get my email anyway, but I am freaking out because I know when I land I won’t be able to turn on the blackberry and read my emails. What could I be missing??!! I need help.
And that leads me to think about how people react to the more critical issue of unplanned downtime for email. A server crash could be devastating to a business, and worse not being able to recover emails because the server wasn’t backed up appropriately could result in some serious meltdowns for those affected (I know I would probably need some type of therapy if it happened to us). But, of course we manage our backups with our own software, and therefore we know if we are at risk of not being able to recover our data seeing we are alerted to any failed backup activity. Now I of course recommend use of our software to everyone, but today I am going to talk about another vendor’s software, Microsoft’s Data Protection Manager.
An upcoming webinar we are doing with Microsoft on June 10th(How to Manage Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 in Large Enterprises,) reminded me that I have yet to talk about our partnership with Microsoft here, which is surprising as the product we have developed to manage their data protection offering was really the launch of our foray into active management (as opposed to strictly reporting). Our Centralized Manager for Microsoft DPM 2007 solution provides command and control functionality for multiple DPM servers (without our product a user would need to write scripts to manage the servers via SCOM…possible but not ideal).
Obviously when you think email, most of us think Exchange, and thus Microsoft. But not too many people automatically think “I should protect my Exchange environment with MSFT DPM”. My thought is maybe they should. I realize they got off to a bit of a rocky start with DPM, the initial version had no application integration, but bottom line is Microsoft is in the data protection space in order to be the best at protecting Microsoft applications. And they have a pretty interesting product that any MSFT shop should take a look at.
Bocada provides management and reporting for DPM 2007, and since we starting working with the product (in 2007) we have become extremely familiar with the different approach to data protection or more importantly recovery. First, setting up “data protection groups” (policies/schedules) is very easy particularly with our Centralized Manager if you have multiple servers. Just a few steps and the frequency of synchronizations (incrementals), fulls, and all retention rates both short term and long term are set up in a few quick steps. DPM is tightly integrated with MSFT applications, backing up only byte level changes and saving to disk or tape (for example, DPM synchronizes Exchange transaction logs and uses VSS to determine only those blocks that have changed). If users choose to do synchronizations every 15 min they obviously get granular recovery points, and DPM helps determine the “best” recovery point. End users can do their own recoveries (if you want to give them that control).
A senior architect at one of our customers (who used another vendors backup solutions) said “DPM is the first data protection solution that really allows the business owner to easily and effectively manage their data protection requirements- and that’s how I want to have our business managed.” Considering the price point is low, really low for MSFT customers with enterprise agreements, I can’t see why users wouldn’t at least take a look at DPM to see how they could be managing their environment with an application focus (instead of a “data” focus). And of course if you do take a look, check out our product that helps manage many servers in your environment- this has been a great partnership for us and hopefully would be for you too.
Sign up for the Microsoft Technet webinar June 10th: Managing DPM in Large Scale Deployments to learn more about Bocada Centralized Manager http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032412446&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US
