I attended an overview review of the Data Protection Manager product to get a better idea of what the future of the product contains and how it fits into an overall enterprise backup strategy.  I had reviewed past versions of the product and was interested to see if it had reached a level of maturity that would allow it to fit the customers we work with.  In particular, I was interested to see how the DPM product fit into a Hyper-V virtualization strategy.

Data Protection Manager's Intended Function

The Data Protection Manager product is a Volume Shadow Copy powered backup product intended to backup the configuration of Microsoft application environments.  The backup capabilities include:

• Active Directory
• Exchange Server
• Sharepoint Server
• Hyper-V (DPM 2007 SP1)
• Virtual Server (DPM 2007)
• Windows XP / Windows Vista
• Windows Server 2003
• Windows Server 2008

The Data Protection Product is the combination of continuous data protection, disk backup, and tape backup written specifically for the Microsoft application platform.  It does not support non-Microsoft application backup.

The Data Protection Manager backup support the following backup strategies:

• Agent => Disk => Tape
• Agent => Disk
• Agent => Tape

A primary strength of Data Protection Manager is its continuous protection of Microsoft applications to disk.  The product is capable of protecting data throughout the day at a granular level, in increments of the administrator's choosing.  This enables the administrator to choose to perform recovery of applications like SQL or Exchange in small time increments.  Furthermore, because of the way the backup is performed, in many cases the product can recover the files and allow the SQL administrator to "play back" the log files to a specific transaction.  These scenarios represent a significant improvement over a typical "nightly backup".

The product utilizes disk in a block fashion in the following structures: 

• DPM Replica

This copy is the most recent "copy" of the data from the production system.  It is made up of the original backup + the block level changes copied over time.

• DPM Recovery Point Area

These copies are "displaced blocks" from the original data, able to be recovered through the retained DPM replica.  This enables older data to be recovered without requiring several copies of the same data on disk.

Virtual Server Backup

The active backup of Virtual Servers is a stellar component of DPM.  The capability to backup an entire guest operating system in a virtualized environment to tape is a huge value proposition.  Just being able to recover yesterday's VHD from tape to another virtual machine after a parent system hardware failure is awesome.

Client Installation

The client installation process can be accomplished through a remote install tool in DPM, group policy, SCCM, or manually.  The installation process through DPM will allow you to choose remote hosts and perform an install.  The installation does require reboot.

Licensing

The license types includes the "Standard DPML File License" and the "Enterprise DPML License", served by the singular agent type.  The Standard DPML license is used to protect file servers.  The Enterprise DPML license is used to protect applications, such as SQL, Exchange, or Sharepoint.