Data Protection
Protecting your organization's data is the system administration chore that everyone loves to hate. Like it or not, data protection is critical to the well-being of every organization. Ensuring that your organization's data, and by extension its IT infrastructure, is well-protected is critical to business efficiency and continuity.
Protecting data is not just about backup and recovery, although those elements are key to ensuring that information survives potentially disastrous scenarios. Protecting data starts by designing hardware and software redundancy, continues with ensuring that information is kept secure, and is supported throughout the data life cycle by ensuring that the most up-to-date data is protected and easily restored in the event of a system failure or site disaster.
On This Page
 | Support for Hardware and Software Redundancy |
| Keeping Data Secure |
| Ensuring High Fidelity Backups and Restores |
| Disk-Based Backup with the Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager |
Support for Hardware and Software Redundancy
Windows Server 2003 and Window Storage Server 2003 support redundant hardware components, from memory chips to power supplies. Hardware redundancy is the framework upon which all other data protection efforts rest, the first step in helping to keep data and applications accessible.
| • | Multipathing Windows Server 2003 also provides support for multipathing solutions (delivered by storage hardware partners), that help to keep storage available through an alternate path even if one path between the server and storage device goes down. |
| • | RAID To help protect against loss of data from disk failure, Windows Server 2003 supports all levels of redundant array of independent disks (RAID), offering your organization the flexibility to create data redundancy and disk performance solutions that best suit your needs. |
| • | Clustering To keep applications highly available, Windows Server 2003 supports up to eight-node clustering. Clustering offers the added advantages of server workload balancing and improved network performance. |
Keeping Data Secure
Windows Server 2003 includes several features to help organizations protect, encrypt, and control access to mission critical data.
| • | Encrypting File System Encrypting File System (EFS) prevents unauthorized access to data by encrypting data as it is stored to disk. Both server and client data are protected, whether they are stored on mobile or desktop systems. |
| • | My Documents Redirect By redirecting end users to their My Documents folder stored on the file server, administrators can back up user data, while maintaining policies and quotas, without users losing access to data. |
| • | Single Sign-On and Active Directory-based Group PolicyGroup policies, quotas, and access control can all be enforced through seamless integration with Active Directory directory service. |
Ensuring High Fidelity Backups and Restores
Time-consuming or incomplete backups as well as lengthy restores have long been a challenge to businesses demanding highly available data. With Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), Windows Server 2003 and Windows Storage Server 2003 can provide high fidelity point-in-time shadow copies of data even while users are working with open files.
In addition, with the new Shadow Copies of Shared Folders feature, administrators can enable automatic shadow copy creation, allowing users, not system administrators, to restore their own accidentally deleted or overwritten files without incurring additional costs.
Disk-Based Backup with the Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager
Data Protection Manager (DPM) V2 is Microsoft’s next-generation data protection product, and is the backup/restore tool that administrators of Microsoft networks have been asking for. DPM v2 is application ready, delivering centralized backup of branch offices and better backups within the data center, it allows for rapid and reliable recovery, as well as providing operational simplicity and end-user restore capability. Get the beta now!.