Chapter 7. Backing Up Critical Applications

Every business has critical applications that the business and its users depend on from day to day. These applications need to stay up and keep running and if they go down the time to get them back up has to be fast. These are beyond just file shares and user data. These applications are things like e-mail, customer data, financial data, virtualized servers, inventory systems, websites, and more. Some specific applications are Exchange, CRM, SharePoint, PBX phone systems, and ERP systems such as Dynamics AX 2009 and SAP (if it is running on SQL Server). Many of these applications store their data in databases on Microsoft SQL Server. DPM has the power to back these up and does a really good job of this. Out of the box with an enterprise license, DPM can back up Microsoft SQL databases, Hyper-V virtual machines, Exchange, and SharePoint. Since these applications were developed by Microsoft and DPM was developed by Microsoft, it offers the best integration and backup for them. DPM can back up applications like Microsoft CRM, ISA, PBX, and more. You need to know these applications and which components need to be backed up. For example, to back up CRM you simply need to make sure DPM is backing up the SQL database. If the SQL server that is hosting the CRM database fails you can restore it from DPM to another SQL server and re-point CRM to it in order to get this up and running.

In this chapter, we are going to cover common Microsoft applications that many businesses use today in their environments. The topics include: