Datasheet

overvieW of Protection MechanisMs

Asking yourself these kinds of questions can help steer you toward whether your recovery

goals are better met with disk-based or tape-based technologies. Disk is not always better. Tape

is not dead. There is not an all-purpose and undeniably best choice for data protection any more

than there is an all-purpose and undeniably best choice for which operating system you should

run on your desktop. In the latter example, factors such as which applications you will run on

it, what peripherals you will attach to it, and what your peers use might come into play. For our

purposes, data granularity, maximum age, and size of restoration are equally valid determinants.

We will cover those considerations and other speciﬁcs related to disk versus tape versus cloud

in Chapter 3, but for now the key takeaway is to plan how you want to recover, not how you want to be

protected.

As an example, think about how you travel. When you decide to go on a trip, you likely decide

where you want to go before you decide how to get there.

If how you will recover your data is based on how you back up, it is like deciding that you’ll

vacation based on where the road ends — literally, jumping in the car and seeing where the road

takes you. Maybe that approach is ﬁne for a free-spirited vacationer, but not for an IT strategy.

For me, I am not extremely free spirited by nature, so this does not sound wise for a vacation —

and it sounds even worse as a plan for recovering corporate data after crisis. In my family, we

choose what kind of vacation we want and then we decide how to get there. That is how your

data protection and availability should be determined.

Instead of planning what kinds of recoveries you will do because of how you back up to

nightly tape, turn that thinking around. Plan what kinds of recoveries you want to do (activities)

and how often you want to do them (scheduling). This strategy is kind of like planning a vaca-

tion. Once you know what you want to accomplish, it is much easier to do what you will need to

do so that you can do what you want to do.

Recovery is the goal. Backup is just the tax in advance that you pay so that you can recover the

way that you want to. Once you have that in mind, you will likely ﬁnd that tape-based backup

alone is not good enough. It’s why disk-based protection often makes sense — and almost always

should be considered in addition to tape, not instead of tape.

Microsoft Improvements for Windows Backups

When looking at traditional tape backup, it is fair to say that the need was typically ﬁlled by

third-party backup software. We discussed the inherent need for this throughout the chapter,

and Windows Server has always included some level of a built-in utility to provide single-server

and often ad hoc backups. From the beginning of Windows NT through Windows Server 2003

R2, Microsoft was essentially operating under an unspoken mantra of “If we build it, someone

else will back it up.” But for reasons that we will discuss in Chapter 4, that wasn’t good enough

for many environments. Instead, another layer of protection was needed to ﬁll the gap between

asynchronous replication and nightly tape backup.

In 2007, Microsoft released System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007. Eighteen

months earlier, DPM 2006 had been released to address centralized backup of branch ofﬁce data

in a disk-to-disk manner prior to third-party tape backup. DPM 2007 delivered disk-to-disk rep-

lication, as well as tape backup, for most of the core Windows applications, including Windows

Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint, and Microsoft virtualization hosts. The third

generation of Microsoft’s backup solution (DPM 2010) was released at about the same time as the

printing of this book. DPM will be covered in Chapter 4.

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