System Center Guide

Microsoft has announced the Release Candidate for #DPM2010 is now available. Read Jason Buffingtons blog for details or just go get it!

I just heard from Jason Buffington, the System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) Sr. Technical Product Manager at Microsoft, that the release candidate for DPM 2010 is “baked” and should be available for download in the next couple of days. Who knows, maybe we’ll see a couple new products RTM at MMS this year.

In today’s economy, more than ever, IT Pro’s are looking for ways to reduce costs while still improving existing processes or fixing things that aren’t meeting expectations – including backup.  In this session, Jason Buffington, Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation, will discuss legacy protection solutions for backup, disk-to-disk replication, and long-distance disaster recovery  — and how you can cut costs while gaining better backups and more reliable recoveries with System Center Data Protection Manager 2007.

Register from the link below:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032412440

Sorry I haven’t been very active with blogging in the past couple of weeks but I’ve been busy getting ready for my System Center presentation the Microsoft Launch event being held tomorrow at the Tripod, Harcourt Street, in Dublin. There’s three 2-hour sessions beginning at 12PM and then repeating at 3PM and 6PM. So, if you’re an Irish reader, come on by and check out what’s coming from Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. Plus, if you pop into my session, you’ll get a sneak peek at the latest member of the System Center product family – due to go to beta very soon!

Founded in 2004, Joyent developed an innovative platform that enables teams to effectively communicate and collaborate with email, calendaring, contacts, file sharing, and other shared applications.

However, on 12 January the company’s success took a sharp noise dive as both its Bingodisk and Strongspace data storage solutions failed – and failed miserably indeed. The services were offline for the better part of 10 days. Joyeur customers couldn’t even access their accounts, no less the files that were contained on the backend Sun x4500s.

The company has since ceased taking on new customers for Bingodisk and Strongspace. But, the more alarming message from this is contained within the company’s explanation of what happened, as posted to the blog:

Was there a backup?

Yes, and no. In the traditional sense of us writing the data from Bingodisk and Strongspace to tape or some other Thumper, no, there was no backup. Data redundancy is built into the ZFS/Thumper software/hardware combination. The Thumper is both server, and backup. Moreover, it’s hard to see how a backup of 18TB of data to another physical device would work, in practice. Moving Bingodisk to another Thumper during this crisis took 30 hours (3TB of data). A large, multi-tenant service such as Bingodisk or Strongspace with the amount of data they manage makes it practically impossible to do a meaningful backup. A single backup would take over a week. The backup process would kill end-user performance. A service like Strongspace, which people use to rsync their own backups, means the data turns over rapidly and an incremental backup would not make sense.

While that seems to be a perfectly acceptable explanation given the environment these services are running within, it gave me a sense of satisfaction knowing that when I discuss System Center Data Protection Manager with customers and how it can be used to perform live backups of Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server and SharePoint Server instances, that the underlying technologies overcome the challenges that are being blamed for the Joyeur system outage. The case is made even stronger when you incorporate System Center Operations Manager 2007 for monitoring and alerting and System Center Configuration Manager 2007 for patching, updating and general systems management.

I know that we’re not comparing apples to apples here. A Microsoft-centric environment is completely different from what the folks at Joyent were using to host their services. But, in theory, could a DPM-like solution provided the company the necessary backup solution that now and in the weeks to come will have seemed worthwhile?

More importantly, what is your organisation doing to ensure that the same catastrophic failure doesn’t occur on your mission critical systems?

Microsoft is poised to become VMware Inc.’s No. 1 competitor in the vitalisation space in 2008, according to a judge for the Data Protection category. Although Microsoft does not currently have the best data protection product on the market, SearchServerVirtualization.com judges selected Data Protection Manager 2007 for the Gold award in this category because it offers a vertical, end-to-end, managed solution for vitalisation deployments and because it’s the easiest to manage and integrate with existing data centre software.

Read more

This email is to notify you that an updated version of the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for beta1 is now available for viewing on the Microsoft Connect site.

The new content explains how to continue to use DPM V2 Beta1 after the evaluation edition of SQL Server 2005 expires, and has been added under ‘known issues” to the bottom of the web page.

To view, please follow this link:

https://connect.microsoft.com/content/content.aspx?ContentID=3467&SiteID=205

Thanks,
The DPM v2 Beta Team.

Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2006 combines many of these options into one affordable, easy to use package. EqualLogic also provides a next generation approach towards storage management with a more scalable, simpler, and more affordable storage networking solution. The synergy between these two products is why customers are deploying them together as a solution.

Read the full briefing:

http://www.equallogic.com/uploadedFiles/Resources/Tech_Partner_Solution_Briefs/SB112_Microsoft_DPM.pdf

Microsoft has posted a new KB article on job status failure messages.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;928840

Thanks to Jeanie Decker for the following:

The error code catalog for DPM 2006 has been updated to include SP1 error codes. If you downloaded it before, you’ll want to refresh your local copy:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b6e67ed1-63f3-4666-bf01-96b46f804912&DisplayLang=en