Instant recovery of Hyper-V virtual machines and other DPM data

Recently I found a very interesting soon to be released software program called dBeamer!DPM made by a company called  Instavia. The functionality and usage cases are very similar to the recently introduced vPower technologies of Veeam Backup & Replication version 5

dBeamer!DPM (the new name for DPMExplorer) allows IT administrators to achieve a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of near zero by an instantly recovery  from a Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) server. Normally, for example if one or more Hyper-V virtual harddisk (.vhd) files are lost (LUN corrupted or complete storage array lost) a recovery of the data needs to be performed. That means the data from the DPM server is copied back to it’s original location. Only when the data copy has been completed, the data is accesible for the application. For large files and slow DPM media, this process can take a long time to complete.

Here comes dBeamer!DPM for the rescue. What it does is enabling instant recovery. As soon as the recovery process has started, the to be recovered data is available for the application. This works for all DPM supported applications and servers (Exchange Server, SQL Server, Sharepoint, Hyper-V). dBeamer!DPM starts a process called BEAM. It creates the original file or files and the application can access it immediately. In the background a reference is created to the data residing on the DPM server.

Other usage cases for dBeamer!DPM are instant setup of a test environment. A production server can easily be cloned without the wait for the restore process to finish. Just start the restore using dBeamer!DPM and the testserver is ready to use. dBeamer!DPM allows you to start your testing instantly without having to spend days to construct a test environment. In effect, dBeamer!DPM simplifies the preparation of a test environment to only a few clicks, and shortens the process to just a few seconds.

A good overview of what the product does and a test can be read in an article titled A deeper look into dBeamer!DPM for DPM 2010

A video demo showing the recovery of a Hyper-V virtual machine can be seen here
A video demo showing the recovery of an Exchange Server datastore can be seen here