DPM at TechReady

At TechReady 5 this week...  Big highlight for me is the DPM stuff for Exchange.  Thought I'd share some of the features that Jason Buffington shared with us.

Manual first seed.   The first time you set up a protection for an Exchange Storage Group you can manually copy the database and transaction logs to your protection share - via usb hard disk for example.  This means that you don't need to have your entire exchange data go across the wire.  From then on only changes at the block level (every day for example) and transaction logs for the differentials (say every 30 minutes) will go across the network.

Follow node or role.   In a CCR configuration you can configure DPM to protect the node or the role.  So for example if you have a DPM server which is close to a particular node of a CCR cluster then you can configure DPM to always backup that node regardless of that means it is a backup of the active or the passive copy of the Exchange data. If you choose to follow the role then DPM will always backup the passive database from whichever node it is running on.  Great for companies using CCR between data centres.

Offload eseutil. By copying the appropriate eseutil files to the DPM server you can offload the backup consistency checking from the exchange server to the DPM server which means the I\O impact of running eseutil on the Exchange Server during the backup itself is eliminated.

I also like the idea that you can backup to tape from a particular point in time.  So for example if your customer has a project that completed at the end of a particular day a month or so ago then you can backup the data to tape up to that point in time.

The DPM blog has some great information on DPM and Exchange...  as does the Microsoft.com/dpm.