It’s been interesting to see how much traction Data Protection Manager 2010 has been getting over the last year. It seems like I’m having far more conversations around the capabilities and functions of DPM recently. From a capability standpoint, it’s an absolutely solid product for backing up Windows-based workloads. On top of that, creating a solid backup, replication, and DR strategy with DPM is incredibly easy.
Now, we have more reasons to be excited. The Beta version of DPM 2012 has been released today and adds a whole slew of capabilities. Here are the highlights from the DPM Team Blog:
Provides centralized management
- Centralized monitoring
- Centralized troubleshooting
- Push to resume backups
- Manage DPM 2010 and DPM 2012 from the same console
- Media co-location
Fits existing environment
- Integration into existing ticketing systems, workflows and team structures.
- Enterprise scale, Fault tolerance & Reliability.
- Generic data source protection
- All common Operations Manager 2007 R2 deployment configurations supported
Helps reduce management costs
- Remote administration, corrective actions and recovery
- Certificate based protection
- Prioritize issues with SLA based Alerting, consolidation of alerts and alert categorization
- Role based administration
- Support for item level recovery, even when DPM is in a VM
That last bullet point is especially cool. DPM originally required it’s own physical server (with the Hyper-V role enabled) in order to do ILR of VMs. Now, with that requirement gone, you can take one (or more) physical server(s) out of your environment and still get the goodness out of DPM. Centralized management has also been a big improvement with the new version. Now you have the ability to monitor and manage multiple DPM installations from your Operations Manager console.
It will be interesting to see the new product in action once I get my demo lab up and running (more on that later).
You can download the beta from here.
