Does your company rely on Microsoft Exchange Server to manage and deliver information? Who will you trust to maximize its protection and recovery?
Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) is designed for mail administrators or IT generalists and uses wizards and workflows to help ensure that you can protect your data — without requiring an advanced degree, training, or certification in storage and backup technologies.
DPM protects Exchange Server databases every 15 minutes, but based on the “lossless restore” feature, Exchange administrators can recover to within one committed transaction following a hardware outage.
DPM protects Exchange data at a storage group level, but enables direct recoveries at a storage group or database level, as well as granular recoveries of mailboxes and messages using supported Exchange methods. For information on support issues with non-DPM alternatives, see KB 904845 (third-party backup) and KB 895847 (multi-site replication).
How Does DPM 2007 Really Work?
How DPM Protects and Restores Exchange Data
DPM uses a combination of transaction log replication and block-level synchronization in conjunction with the Exchange Server VSS Writer to help ensure your ability to recover Exchange data. After the initial baseline copy of data, two parallel processes enable continuous data protection with integrity:
Transaction logs are continuously synchronized to the DPM server, as often as every 15 minutes.
An “express full” uses the Exchange Server VSS Writer to identify which blocks have changed in the entire production mail database, and sends just the updated blocks or fragments. This provides a complete and consistent image of the data files on the DPM server or appliance. DPM maintains up to 512 shadow copies of the Exchange Server database(s) by storing only the differences between any two images.
DPM 2007 offers integrated support for Exchange Servers 2003 and 2007, including SCC, LCR, CCR, and SCR configurations.
DPM 2010 (Beta) will add support for Exchange 2010, including advanced scenarios like DAG.
To learn more about DPM 2010 Beta or download it yourself, see the DPM 2010 Beta Overview page.
