Special Achievement
Microsoft
System Center
Data Protection Manager 2007
Microsoft
www.microsoft.com
With Microsoft System Center
Data Protection Manager
(DPM) 2007, SQL Server
data protection takes a great
leap forward. Because DPM
2007 is integrated with SQL
Server, DBAs can use a native Microsoft product to
perform database backup and restore and protect a
range of server systems under a common framework.
Administrators no longer need to turn to one solution
for long-term archiving, another for rapid recovery,
and a third for offsite backup and restore.
Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s
Data Storage and Protection Platform Division,
notes that Microsoft “added enterprise-class capabilities
such as recovery from disk and archive
to tape. With DPM 2007 we also went one
step further to design the protection from
the inside out, so it would appeal to administrators
of specific workloads.”
In “How DPM 2007 Fits into Your
Data Protection Landscape” (www.sqlmag.com, InstantDoc ID 97347), Brian Moran
notes that “Historically, most enterprise
and midmarket customers have had to rely on several
third-party offerings to manage their SQL Server
backup infrastructure. [B]ackup hasn’t really been
seen as the cool and sexy part of database
management…. Don’t tell my wife,
but DPM 2007 seems pretty
hot to me.”
—Sheila Molnar
See associated figure
Security, Auditing,
and Compliance Winners
Gold:
SecureSphere Database Security Gateway
Imperva • www.imperva.com
Why it won: SecureSphere Database Security Gateway
gives you complete visibility and control over
your database applications by providing automated
database activity monitoring, auditing, and compliance
capabilities.
Over the past few years, attacks on information systems
have shifted from broad attacks on entire IT systems to
more targeted attacks on business-critical data. Consequently,
you need to know at all times who is accessing
your organization’s data and how it’s being used.
This year’s security, auditing, and compliance Editors’
Best award winner, Imperva’s SecureSphere Database
Security Gateway, addresses database security threats
by providing visibility and control over all businesscritical
data in your organization.
According to Mark Kraynak, senior director of
marketing at Imperva, “Database Security Gateway
includes the visibility for database activity and application
activity and can match those things up. So we
can say, for a given transaction, this is the user, this is
what they did in the application (asked for a change
to data), and this is the change that got made.”
SecureSphere Database Security Gateway monitors
database activity and uses Imperva’s Dynamic
Profiling technology to automatically create user profiles
and security policies according to user behavior.
Integrated auditing and reporting capabilities also
make it easy to prove compliance with government
regulations. “It’s got a lot of nice automated features,
it was very easy to get up and running, and it’s very
simple to maintain,” said Kevin Alwood, a systems
manager at Intuition Systems.
—Megan Bearly
See associated figure
Silver:
SQLsecure
Idera • www.idera.com
Why it won: SQLsecure provides a complete
view of the security of your SQL
Server instances and lets you easily analyze user and
group permissions and create custom policies to
monitor compliance with security standards.
Bronze:
ApexSQL Log
ApexSQL • www.apexsql.com
Why it won: In addition to letting you easily
audit SQL Server database and transaction
log files for changes, ApexSQL Log can recover
lost and modified data.
Backup and Recover Winners
Gold:
SQL Backup
Red Gate Software
www.redgate.com
Why it won: SQL Backup delivers
market-leading compression, encryption,
and monitoring of SQL Server
backups, making them fast, simple, and secure.
SQL Backup 5 continues to give DBAs a robust
backup tool, with wizards that make the GUI easy
to use. Administrators can use Timeline Monitoring
from the GUI to visualize and change the properties
of activities. According to Colin Millerchip, Red
Gate Software’s head of product management, “SQL
Backup 5 is a result of Red Gate’s attention to our
customers’ needs. Discussions with DBAs revealed
the need for a view of backup activity across the entire
enterprise; this resulted in the Timeline Monitoring
capability which was part of our V5 release.”
One feature that John Daniels, DBA for RBC
Ministries, likes about version 5 is “the ability to upgrade
all of my servers from my workstation. The
process has been flawless.”
Alan Greenstein, CIO of Hoss Equipment Company,
appreciates the fact that his team can “take
snapshots throughout the day in about half the time
of a Microsoft native backup, while reducing
the impact on our users.” He
notes that “our development staff have
benefited by being able to quickly restore
a database from production into a test
environment. It is now possible for us to
transmit one of our larger database backups
to an offsite facility every night.”
—Sheila Moln
See associated figure
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