Free ebook: Microsoft System Center Data Protection for the Hybrid Cloud

We’re happy to announce the release of our newest free ebook, Microsoft System Center Data Protection for the Hybrid Cloud (ISBN 9780735695832), by Shreesh Dubey, Vijay Tandra Sistla, Shivam Garg, and Aashish Ramdas; Mitch Tulloch, Series Editor.

August 30, 2016 update: Chapter 6 is now available here.

Below you’ll find a few helpful sections from the Introduction. Enjoy!

Introduction

If you are responsible for architecting and designing the backup strategy for your organization, especially if you're looking for ways to incorporate cloud backup into your business continuity scenarios, this book is for you. With the increasing trends in virtualization as well as the move to the pubic cloud, IT organizations are headed toward a world where data and applications run in on-premises private clouds as well as in the public cloud. This has key implications for data protection strategy, and it is important to choose the solution that provides the same level of data protection you have afforded so far while allowing you to harness the power of the public cloud.

We will cover how the Azure Backup service has evolved into a first-class platform-as-a-service (PaaS) service in Microsoft Azure that integrates with the on-premises enterprise class backup product, System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM), to provide a seamless hybrid cloud backup solution. Current backup products treat the cloud as a storage endpoint, which we see as a limited-use case for the public cloud. The approach we describe in this book allows you to exploit the full power of the public cloud and gives you the flexibility to manage your backups in a hybrid world.

We have made a steady set of investments in DPM over the last 18 months, and, as of this writing, we have released six update rollups, including customer hot fixes as well as new features in the areas of private cloud protection, storage optimization, and workload support. The last chapter focusses on the most recently released protection for infrastructure-as-a- service (IaaS) virtual machines, which went to preview release in March 2015 and is expected to be generally available by Q3 of calendar year 2015.

This book covers improvements added in DPM 2012 R2 as well as the integration with Microsoft Azure Backup service and assumes you have working knowledge of the DPM 2012 version. To get familiar with older versions of DPM, refer to the following:

• https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/7485.system-center-dataprotection-manager-2012.aspx
• https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/11867.system-center-2012-data-protection-manager-survival-guide.aspx
• https://blogs.technet.com/b/dpm/

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the following individuals for their help on this book project:

• The entire hybrid cloud backup engineering team, without whom the products this book talks about wouldn’t be possible
• John Loveall and the Windows Server Deduplication team for excellent collaboration to make de-duplication work for DPM
• Vijay Tewari, Jim Pinkerton, and other folks on the CPS team for making DPM the certified backup product for CPS
• Corey Sanders and Guy Bowerman from the IaaS VM team for collaborating on the IaaS VM backup feature
• Mitch Tulloch for being a great coach, for being patient about the numerous delays and schedule resets, and above all, for helping us build a book that we are really proud of and one we think will really help the community on backup

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2015
  Microsoft does it gain!

• Anonymous
  June 25, 2015
  Hi, The books says that "The DPM roadmap also includes support for host-level VMware VM backup, to have parity with the backup that is supported for Hyper-V VMs." When can we expect this feature?

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2015
  Peteris - we expect to release of this as part of UR8 (Preview only).

• Anonymous
  February 02, 2017
  Wonderful and educative information,big up Microsoft

• Anonymous
  March 25, 2017
  Sorry, I don't understand if you published again the book updated or the book that I download is the same and the chapter 6 is only online