System Center Data Protection Manager offers enterprise grade backup and recovery of critical workloads. We are excited to announce the release of Update Rollup 2 for System Center 2019 Data Protection Manager. This update rollup includes new features, critical bugs fixes and removes deployment blockers. This blog will cover the new features that are part of this release.
Support for SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) using Cluster Shared Volume (CSV)
A lot of SQL server users are looking to deploy SQL Server on a Failover Cluster instead of using a traditional cluster storage. This is advantageous for a couple of reasons:
- Users don’t need to carve out separate LUNs for each SQL instance.
- CSV makes SQL nodes highly available, resilient and fault tolerant by automatically routing traffic in case of node failure.
Why backup is needed for SQL Server on CSV?
SQL Server on CSVs provides users with fault tolerance, high availability and resiliency, but it doesn’t guarantee that the data is safe in event of accidental deletion of data, data corruption, or ransomware attacks. In these scenarios, users would want a solution that they can use to restore their “clean” data from a previous point in time.
DPM 2019 UR2 version introduces the support for protecting and recovering SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances on Cluster Shared Volumes. If you were already using SQL Server on CSVs, you can go ahead and start protecting your SQL DBs with DPM 2019 UR2. Learn more.
Optimized Migration for Backed Up Workloads
DPM 2019 supports a key customer requirement–migration of backed up workload data. There are several reasons why backed up workload migration is needed:
- Backups take long time due to high fragmentation on current backup volume
- The current backup volume could have reached the limit of maximum allowed storage size
- The underlying storage box can have hardware issues and need to be retired
The visualization below explains how DPM currently implements backed up workload migration:
The above example represents a file which has 6 blocks of data - B1 to B6. The incremental recovery points store the changed blocks and metadata about unchanged blocks.
With this implementation of backed up workload migration, all the backup data (the full backup copy along with recovery points) is copied from the old backup volume to the new backup volume.
What’s new with DPM 2019 UR2 optimized migration?
DPM 2019 UR2 introduces the concept of optimized migration, which allows you to move protected workloads from an old volume to a new volume in a much faster way. The enhanced migration process migrates only active backup copy (Active Replica) to the new volume. All the new recovery points are created on the new volume while existing recovery points are maintained on the existing volume. This less data transfer compared to the full volume migration approach results in a faster data source migration.
The visualization below explains how DPM implements optimized migration:
With this implementation of optimized migration for backup workload data, only the full backup copy is copied from the old backup volume to the new backup volume. As the old recovery points are kept on the existing volume and only the full backup copy is migrated to the new volume, the migration process finishes fast. For more information on how to enable this feature in DPM 2019 UR2, please refer to the documentation here.
SQL Server 2019 support as DPM database
SQL Server 2019 is the latest version of SQL Server. Since a lot of SQL users have migrated to SQL 2019, DPM has also introduced support for SQL 2019 as its database starting DPM 2019 UR2 release.
Now you can install SQL Server 2019 on a remote server, or on the DPM server. The database must be installed and running before you install DPM. Learn more.
Offline Backup using Azure Data Box
With DPM 2019 UR1 we announced the preview of offline seeding using Azure Data Box integration and now with UR2, this feature is open for any DPM customer to try out.
With this integration, DPM customers can overcome the challenge of moving terabytes of backup data from on-premises to Azure storage. This also reduces the time a customer takes to onboard to Azure backup for long term retention of on-premises workload backups. This also reduces the time a customer takes to onboard to Azure backup for long-term retention of on-premises workload backups.
The below graphic illustrates how the offline seeding works for DPM customers looking to move terabytes of backup data to Azure storage. Learn More.
In addition, here is a link to the list of issues that have been fixed as part of the UR2 release for DPM.
We hope you are as excited about the release of Update Rollup 2 for DPM 2019 as we are. We will continue to work on more updates and new features, and we would love to hear your feedback in the comments section below!