Datasheet

16
|
CHAPTER 1 What Kind of Protection do You need?
Similar to how built-in availability technologies address an appreciable part of what asynchro-
nous replication and failover were providing, Microsoft’s release of a full-fledged backup product
(in addition to the overhauled backup utility that is included with Windows Server) changes the
ecosystem dynamic regarding backup. Here are a few of the benefits that DPM delivers compared
to traditional nightly tape backup vendors:
A single and unified agent is installed on each production server, rather than requiring
•u
separate modules and licensing for each and every agent’s type, such as a SQL Server agent,
open file handler, or a tape library module.
Disk and tape are integrated within one solution, instead of a disk-to-disk replication from
•u
one vendor or technology patch together with a nightly tape backup solution built from a
different code base.
DPM 2010 is designed and optimized exclusively for Windows workloads, instead of a broad •u
set of applications and OSs to protect, using a generic architecture. This is aimed at deliver-
ing better backups and the most supportable and reliable restore scenarios available for those
Microsoft applications and servers.
The delivery by Microsoft of its own backup product and its discussion in this book is not to
suggest that DPM is absolutely and unequivocally the very best backup solution for every single
Windows customer in any scenario. DPM certainly has its strengths (and weaknesses) when com-
pared with alternative backup solutions for protecting Windows. But underlying DPM, within
the Windows operating system itself, are some internal and crucial mechanisms called Volume
Shadow Copy Services (VSS). VSS, which is also covered in Chapter 4, is genuine innovation by
Microsoft that can enable any backup vendor, DPM included, to do better backups by integrating
closer to the applications and workloads themselves. Putting this back within the context of our
data protection landscape: while we see more choices of protection and availability through third-
party replication and built-in availability solutions, we are also seeing a higher quality and flex-
ibility of backups and more reliability for restores through new mechanisms like VSS and DPM,
which we will cover in Chapters 3 and 4.
Summary
In this chapter, you saw the wide variety of data protection and availability choices, with synchro-
nous disk and nightly tape as the extremes and a great deal of innovation happening in between.
Moreover, what was once a void between synchronously mirrored disks and nightly tape has been
filled first by a combination of availability and protection suites of third-party products, and
is now being addressed within the applications and the OS platforms themselves. The spectrum
or landscape of data protection and availability technologies can be broken down into a range of
categories shown in Figure 1.2.
Figure 1.2
The landscape of
data protection and
availability
Availability
Application Availability
ClusteringSynchronous Disk
Protection
Disk-based
protection
Tape-based
protection
File Replication
572146c01.indd 16 6/23/10 5:42:21 PM