Data Protection Central 18.1

In the huge round of updates in June/July, one of the products you should be using more frequently, Data Protection Central (DPC), also got a new version, with tighter integration.

01 DPC 18.1 Login

DPC 18.1 continues the move towards a crisp, clean HTML5 interface across the product set, something you’ll continue to see more of. Once you’ve logged in, you’ll get your dashboard views – in my case because I’m running it in a lab environment, there’s a few failures, so please don’t think I’ve been neglecting my backup environment:

02 DPC 18.1 Detailed Dashboard
02 DPC 18.1 Detailed Dashboard

Sometimes it seems that half of what I do in a lab environment is to trigger a failure and see what happens, so my backup success rates in the lab are a lot lower than customers would typically see in their environments. (Excellent replication though – I don’t test failures there very much.)

DPC still has the same sorts of breakdown of information as before, with some slight enhancements to introduce newer features.

03 DPC 18.1 System View
03 DPC 18.1 System View

Of course, in a lab environment I get alerts on a bunch of systems (in this case, one DD and one Avamar server) with health warnings – effectively, that they can’t email home. Which is fine in my lab.

The element launcher has been redefined (it’s the 3 vertical dots next to a system), not only in appearance but also in terms of what it offers to launch – for instance:

04 DPC 18.1 Launch Elements
04 DPC 18.1 Launch Elements

For an Avamar 18.1 server, it offers to push me across to the administrative interface generally, into restore, proxy deployment, policy management, etc. If I click restore, thanks to integrating SSO, I literally jump straight to the restore section of the Avamar 18.1 HTML5 interface:

05 DPC 18.1 Launch into Avamar Restore
05 DPC 18.1 Launch into Avamar Restore

By the way, how awesome is the new Avamar HTML5 interface? I’ll explore more of that in another blog article.

Similarly, DPC 18.1 can also do a SSO launch into NMC or the new NetWorker UI (currently for VMware, expanding):

06 Launch NetWorker UI
06 Launch NetWorker UI

Clicking the “NetWorker UI” there takes you straight to the recovery option within the new 18.1 NetWorker HTML5 UI as well:

07 NetWorker Restore from SSO
07 NetWorker Restore from SSO

Don’t forget, DPC is free. You can download, deploy and go, and use it to keep an eye on your Data Domain systems, Avamar 7.5+ and NetWorker 9.2+ systems. It’s product support page (where you can get access to the manuals and deployment software) is here. What’s more, if you’ve got Data Protection Advisor (DPA) or Data Protection Search, DPC can be used to integrate into those.

If you’ve seen any presentations about the Integrated Data Protection Appliance family (IDPA) from Dell EMC, you’ll probably recognise DPC as one of the central management components of IDPA, so the great thing about getting familiar with IDPA is that it doesn’t just prepare you for the HTML5 future of managing NetWorker and Avamar, you also get to see a glimpse of working with converged and hyperconverged backup appliances.

Make sure you check it out – DPC is designed to let you get access to the information you need to monitor and manage your data protection environment faster and more conveniently, and I’d certainly recommend it any day of the week over trawling through backup emails each morning in terms of giving you an instant view of how your environment has worked overnight.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.