System Center Data Protection Manager (SC DPM) is an Enterprise backup solution, providing App Consistent backups to workloads as SQL, SharePoint, Exchange and File Servers, running in Physical or Virtualized Environments. In addition, you can also backup your Hyper-V and VMWare VMs (with SC 2012 R2 DPM UR11). These backups can be stored on disks for short term, and on Azure for long term retention and offsite copy compliance needs. To backup to Azure, all you need to do is to register on Azure Portal, and download the MARS agent and the vault credential file. You can set it up on DPM in five minutes.
Further, SC 2016 DPM, with Modern Backup Storage, gives you the freedom to store your high churn workload backups on faster storage as SAN, and low churn workloads on slower storage as JBODS. This considerably reduces your backup TCO with the 50% storage savings, and faster backups. These savings get compounded with the backups to Azure being compressed, achieving savings of about 30% on an average.
Key Features
Here are some key features in SC 2016 DPM UR2:
- Protect your 2016 Server Workloads: The much awaited features are now here. You can begin protecting your SQL 2016, SharePoint 2016, and Exchange 2016 workloads with SC 2016 DPM. Further, you can also have your SC 2016 DPM DB stored on SQL 2016. All you need to upgrade the SQL version of DPM DB is to follow the simple steps here, and you are good to go.
- Auto protection to cloud: If auto protection is enabled for a SQL instance, SC 2016 DPM UR2, and SC 2012 R2 DPM UR12 now auto-protect your SQL databases to Azure. This means that DPM detects and creates an offsite copy for any new SQL DBs on your protected server to meet the offsite copy and compliance needs .
- Security Features for your Backups: SC 2016 DPM UR2, and SC 2012 R2 DPM UR 12 announce enhanced security for your cloud backups. These features provide an additional layer of protection, and the ability to recover in case of attacks. These are built on three pillars of Security: Prevention, Alerting, and Recovery.
With this, SC DPM asks for a Security PIN whenever critical changes, as modification of the Passphrase is triggered. This prevents hackers to re-encrypt the data and backups. Only users with valid credentials can perform this operation, safeguarding your backups, and more importantly, your access to them. You are alerted when the operation is complete. In case your cloud backups are deleted, they are retained for a longer period and can be restored. Further, strict enforcement of a minimum retention range helps you in ensuring that you can always restore your data from multiple recovery points.
Related links and additional content
Get SC 2016 DPM up and running in 10 minutes using the Evaluation VHD and begin backing up to Azure using Free Azure Trial Subscription.
- Download SC 2016 DPM UR2and SC 2012 R2 DPM UR12
- Learn more about Azure Backup Security Features
- Browse documentation or reach out to SCDPM forum for support
- Follow us on Twitter @AzureBackup for latest news and updates