I haven’t reviewed a book from a long time but last month I noticed a new book for System Center component being published. This book is about System Center Data Protection Manager and as this component is not my strongest side I was particularly interested to read it and review it. The book is authored by four fellow MVPs – Steve Buchanan, Islam Gomaa, Robert Hedblom and Flemming Riis.
The book contains 12 chapters from which you can learn everything you need to start with DPM. The first two chapters introduce DPM as component and how DPM features fit in backup strategies. Next two chapters deal with the management of DPM where you will find information such as installation, calculating storage, reporting, managing disks, backup bandwidth management, self-service, event logging, monitoring and central console for managing multiple DPM servers. Chapters 5,6 and 7 are devoted to how to backup out of the box DPM supported workloads (AD, SQL, SharePoint, Exchange, Hyper-V and clusters) as well as DPM non-aware workloads (Dynamics CRM, Dynamics GP, TMG, Lync, Oracle and Linux). Next 3 chapters are going deeper in DPM by covering scenarios for managing tapes, backing up clients and backing up server in workgroups and untrusted domains. The last two chapters provide guidance on Disaster recovery strategies and automation of DPM.
As a summary I can say the book will be very useful for engineers who are looking for a way to start with DPM especially if most of the backups they will do are for Microsoft workloads. It can be useful also for the owners of workloads which are backed up by DPM in order to understand better how their workloads are backed up and how can be restored. The only thing I think this book is missing a chapter on backing up and restoring all System Center components as they are essential part in many environments.
If you like the book you can find it here:
Cloud Administrator in Azure World 