features, such as expanded capabilities for SQL Server,
SharePoint, and Hyper-V protection, in addition to
already existing capabilities for other key Microsoft
products.
This latest announcement by Microsoft and Iron
Mountain consists of DPM 2007 cloud back-up powered by the Iron Mountain’s CloudRecovery™ solution.
Previously, DPM customers had two narrow choices
for backup and recovery — onsite to disk and/or tape.
Now they have a third option: offsite backup and
restore to an Iron Mountain mirrored PCI-Compliant
data center site using the CloudRecovery solution.
However, customers still have to use DPM locally to
create the primary copy of data. They cannot use the
off-premises Iron Mountain site as their primary
storage site. In essence, the new offering allows
businesses to use the Iron Mountain cloud as a
disaster recovery site for data storage.
This solution is what Microsoft defines as
an “attached solution.” Iron Mountain places an
agent on a local DPM server. A user can then
see the Iron Mountain solution as a separate
data source (i.e., a place from which data can be
recovered after it has been backed up) through
the DPM user interface (UI). The solution is
attached because it appears to be an integral
part of DPM, meaning that it is designed
to be easy to use. This is in contrast with what
Microsoft calls a “pure play” solution where a user
would simply place a separate agent or program on a
server and backup directly to the cloud, limiting or
eliminating the need for onsite storage.
Now, in developing new offerings, Microsoft has
an advantage that many companies would kill for; it
can always get more than enough potential users to
test its proposed products and give feedback. Some
45 early adopters of SP1 (consisting largely of midsize
and large companies) were asked to give feedback on
both options and by general consensus favored the
attached solution. This is entirely understandable. In
contrast, most really small companies and individuals
prefer a pure play solution as a remote backup over
the Internet as it saves them the trouble of managing
a local backup system yet still gives them a reliable
and overall professional solution.
However, midsize and large companies already had
local solutions in place (otherwise they wouldn’t be
using DPM in the first place) and likely didn’t feel
comfortable giving up their existing disk/tape backup
solutions. But they seemed to welcome using cloud
computing for disaster recovery, which is also understandable. Cloud computing offers an economical and
easy way of storing backup data for disaster recovery
purposes. However, recovering data from a local copy
