First published on TECHNET on Jan 13, 2009
My name is Bala Kasiviswanathan and I’m the Director of Storage Solutions Marketing in Redmond at Microsoft. I am very pleased to deliver the news that we recently made Service Pack 1 for System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 (DPM) available for download. This release delivers exciting enhancements to the Microsoft System Center portfolio of management products fulfilling the key backup and recovery role by providing data protection and disaster recovery for physical and virtual workloads. This in turn helps customers experience a higher level of business continuity and more optimized IT infrastructure.
I wanted to take a few minutes today to talk about what we have been hearing from our customers and provide some background on where we believe customers will see the greatest benefits of this new release. I won’t go into depth on the technical details of the offering here, but if you’d like to find more information on the features of Service Pack 1, please read
Hari’s blog on the DPM Product Team blog
, which also posted today.
Let’s face it - in today’s challenging economy, customers are working with constrained IT budgets to address their disaster recovery requirements. However, the catch 22 is that not investing in this area can be even more costly in the long run. DPM 2007’s ease of use, superior recoverability and affordable licensing can provide the high level of ROI that customers typically expect from a Microsoft Windows-based solution, regardless of whether it’s for the management of their physical or virtual IT assets.
When we talk with our customers, we regularly hear from them that they can deploy and manage their backups and recoveries with DPM for much less and with less complication than comparable backup and recovery product offerings.. Additionally, those that have invested in the complete System Center suite also find technology integration benefits, helping them to further extend the management capabilities along with the cost benefit of acquiring the entire suite through the
SMSE licensing option
.
One of the many DPM SP1 customers we’re already hearing from includes the Florida-based
Integrated Community Oncology Network (ICON) blog post
, an association of physicians dedicated to delivering an integrated approach to cancer treatment, research, education, and prevention. Today, a total of 40 ICON servers are backed up with DPM 2007, including 6 physical servers and an additional 34 running in a Hyper-V/Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 environment. The workloads DPM currently protects include Microsoft Certificate Services, System Center Operations Manager 2007, System Center Configuration Manager 2007, Windows file servers, SQL Server 2005 and Exchange Server 2007. ICON’s DPM 2007 Service Pack 1 deployment is ongoing, with plans to add Office SharePoint Server 2007, and to also support offsite replication of the DPM backup in the coming year.
Other customers, such as
Convergent Computing
and the
Austrian Ministry of Interior
, selected DPM for their backup and recovery needs, based upon the product’s ease of management, integration with the other Microsoft products in their environment, and the superior level of customer and technical support they had received from Microsoft in the past. More examples of real customer experiences can be found here --
DPM case studies
.
In addition to the enhancements that we’ve made for protecting Hyper-V, SQL Server, Exchange, and SharePoint, we’ve also delivered other new features that are providing customers with powerful new capabilities including:
With SP1, we are pleased to provide a more cost-effective licensing option (Client Management License or Client
ML
) to protect desktops even more affordable.
We’ve also formed a strategic relationship with one of the most respected names in offsite data retention,
Iron Mountain
, so that DPM 2007 SP1 customers can protect their data with Microsoft’s solution on-site, and then replicate the DPM data to a secure Iron Mountain datacenter for off-site protection. This opens up some powerful retention and compliance scenarios, while still providing Microsoft customers with an integrated UI within DPM 2007. For more on the DPM CloudRecovery solution with Iron Mountain, check out the
press release.
We also continue to innovate with our heterogeneous backup partners. Check out the
new analyst study
on this that was published earlier this month
If you are running one or more Windows servers with Microsoft applications like SQL Server, SharePoint Server or Exchange server on physical server or virtual servers using Hyper-V, please have a look at how DPM can benefit you
Data Protection Manager 2007 Service Pack 1
or watch to the podcast series (
http://edge.technet.com/tags/DPM
). And feel free to
download and evaluate DPM
!
If you are already using DPM, please make sure to update to SP1 for even more great capabilities – and thank you for your trust as we back up your critical data.
We hope SP1 helps all of our customers and partners to have a very Happy New Year!
Bala
