Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2007 - some gold dust feedback

I cannot tell you how much this made my day!

Tony, IT Manager from Bott Ltd, sent this to me out of the blue last week having read a TechNet Magazine article about DPM 2007.

I have actually cut and pasted it straight from the email as it reads perfectly. I know there are many things that frustrate you and I am always here to help where I can, but it is always appreciated when I get something like this to balance it up!

Its a warts and all review, with a hint of "about time too" but the product delivers what was expected. Enjoy............

Just received the May edition of TechNet magazine - and I was particularly interested in the article on using Data Protection Manager.

Originally, the company looked at an offering from HP last year, but there were serious technical issues and we dropped the project after trying to get it working for over 8 months. Then a few months ago, I was speaking to Dell and they persuaded me (a bit against my better judgement) to give it another go using their PowerVault product with DPM Server 2007. We have been running it now for about 2 months.

There have been a few minor issues with configuration, which I've managed to overcome after some testing - the end result is that we are now backing up all of our servers, including SAP, SharePoint and Exchange to a single device. This includes 2 remote sites, one in the Midlands and one in Scotland (we are in Cornwall) working across a VPN connection through a 2 MB leased line connection. There is also a possibility that we will also be providing backup services to a new site in France!

The total data protected at the moment is around 400 GB, but this is expected to increase by about 50% this year and a further 50% next year as more items are added to the protection groups. We are also hoping to be able to use it to provide protection to some large industrial machinery that have PCs attached as controllers.

The next step for us is to set-up an auto-loader device to try the "disk to tape" function. We are also looking at getting another DPM unit - we want to move some servers and want to set-up a "cross-over" protection scheme where the DPM servers are protecting data at the other location for increased protection.

As you can probably tell, my staff and I are really impressed with the DPM product. This has been an area that I feel has been rather neglected, and there is no doubt in my mind that this product is something that I would seriously recommend to anyone involved in data management and protection. I think that more articles on this would be very welcome.

Thank you Tony!!

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 21, 2008
  I’ve been using DPM2007 for couple of months now as well, generally been very good. I moved from a old version of BackupExec for the main feature of having a short term recovery zone on a separate physical machine. So I now have a Network servers to local disk, then disk to tape for off site, which worked really nicely. Integration with other Microsoft server technologies, such as Exchange, SharePoint etc is seamless. The only thing I have found irritating is the backup schedule for long-term, I can specify Frequency as daily, but not say specific days, just working days or exclude days due to holidays etc.