Introduction

Within a modern data center there are new and interesting challenges that the IT department needs to address to adapt to the new way of thinking regarding building services instead of focusing on an explicit product. The most important fact is that there will never be a product in the market that will cover or solve all the needs of a company or organization. Today's IT department must change the way it looks at solutions; a single product will never be the answer but combining different technologies and building up services will provide a much higher value for the organization or company regarding both time consumption and cost.

The modern data center is all about building services that empower the possibilities the different products bring to the table. By combining your backup software with the monitoring software and using the concepts of automation, you can create something that will develop with time. There is no whitepaper that you can simply download that will let you in on all the secrets to build a flawless Backup as a Service (BaaS), Restore as a Service (RaaS) or Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution.

System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 R2 (DPM) is the latest release and with it comes a new product group team in India. The team has in the few past months provided high scale development and improvements to the product and they will strive even harder to optimize DPM and also bring new features and supported scenarios to the table.

In this chapter, we will cover the pre-installation tasks for DPM 2012 R2. We also will provide you with the information you need to understand how DPM 2012 R2 works and get started with a well-planned implementation of your backup, restore, and disaster recovery scenarios.