• In case you didn’t already know this, Microsoft is really committed to the cloud. A large part of the Tuesday morning keynote was dedicated to how customers can (and will be able to) use System Center products to monitor and manage their cloud environments. In fact, System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 already has cloud monitoring support built-in, and there is a lot more to come.

  Most of the attendees I spoke with found the cloud talk to be extremely interesting, even if they are a ways away from actually implementing it themselves. One developer I spoke with who has played around with Windows Azure seemed especially pleased with the path Microsoft was on with System Center, saying “Azure is cool, but it’s really just a technology. It’s how you manage it – that’s where the really good stuff is.”

• Just to reemphasize, everyone I talked to found the cloud chatter to be mostly fascinating (rather than annoying), but hardly anyone seems to be close to actually doing it. One reason behind the reluctance was just a general lack of understanding from people about how to make the cloud work for them. As one attendee put it, “Going up and showing a demo or slides is all well and good, but how do I adapt it to my organization? How much does it cost to implement?”

• The one attendee I spoke with who actually was looking into a cloud strategy was a fellow named Aaron Cooper, a systems management solutions architect at the Royal Bank of Canada. He said his organization is in the process of a data center move, and the cloud could very well play a role for them. He said the main challenges he sees involve finding the time to plan things out and developing an implementation strategy with zero downtime.

  Cooper said the key to really reaping the cost benefits of cloud computing requires a great amount of vision. He added that anyone considering a move to the cloud should actually have a “visoneering team” on hand to plan things out, stay on top of the latest technologies and figure out how they will work best for the organization. “Visioneering is kind of my word, so make sure you credit me for that,” he said with a smile. No problem Mr. Cooper, consider yourself credited!

• Another topic that turned some heads during the Tuesday keynote was the concept of long-distance live migration. This was sort of buried under all the cloud talk, but it basically involves traditional live migration, only applying it offsite from data center to data center (with zero downtime). Microsoft president of server and tools business Bob Muglia said the company is providing this capability through a partnership with Hewlett-Packard.

• I didn’t speak with a lot of vendors at the show, but I did talk a little with the folks at Veeam. They just announced an update for their nworks product which basically helps users monitor and manage VMware machines using System Center Operations Manager 2007 and Virtual Machine Manager 2008 in the same way they would with machines running on Microsoft Hyper-V. Another win for heterogeneity.

• Finally, lots of RTM announcements went down last week as well. In case you missed it, System Center Data Protection Manager 2010, System Center Essentials, and (finally) Service Manager 2010 were released to manufacturing. The beta for Configuration Manager 2007 R3 was also made available.

  I sat down with Robert Reynolds, Microsoft director of product planning for System Center, to get the details on what’s new with all these releases and more (including VMM 2008 R2 and how the Opalis acquisition fits into everything). He also talks a good deal about Microsoft’s overall cloud strategy, echoing much of what Muglia talked about during his keynote.

For more information on Microsoft System Center and other systems management products, visit SearchWindowsServer.com.

Jason Buffington, senior technical product manager for Microsoft System Center, described DPM 2010 as “the best solution for file and application protection from Microsoft.” He noted that the company focused heavily on protection for Windows-based clients and virtual environments, as well as enhanced scalability and reliability features.

So what’s new with Data Protection Manager 2010? Here are some of the key points I gathered:

• The RC is in its final testing stages and should be available within a few weeks.

• The fundamental model of DPM – which allows customers to use one technology to protect data on multiple production servers from a single interface – remains more or less intact.

• Like DPM 2007, the new version is designed primarily for Windows-based environments, which Buffington said is the best way to allow for DPM 2010 to take advantage of key Microsoft OS and app features (like the Volume Shadow Copy Service). In other words, Data Protection Manager 2010 will leverage the way Microsoft apps want to do things. He noted that the company created partnerships for protection of heterogeneous environments.

• DPM 2010 will support the same OS and app versions as DPM 2007. Microsoft has also added support for Exchange and SharePoint 2010, along with SAP running on SQL Server.

• System state and bare-metal recovery are both included, and can be managed centrally.

• On the virtualization front, the big change from DPM 2007 is added support for Hyper-V R2. This includes Clustered Shared Volume support, which wasn’t previously available.

• Buffington highlighted a feature called “item-level recovery”, which basically is the ability to browse file systems to select individual items to recover, rather than restoring the entire file server.

• A new feature that wasn’t included with the September beta is the ability to protect workgroups and non-trusted domains. Buffington demoed how to set these up, and they can be managed in the exact same way as other protection groups.

• He noted a few “favorite new checkboxes” for creating a protection group. One allows DPM 2010 to automatically grow allocated volumes when more disk space is required, while another offers automatic consistency checks that can be scheduled (rather than notifying an administrator to do one). There is also a new “collocate” feature, which allows Data Protection Manager to protect a higher number of data sources per replica volume.

• DPM 2010 includes enhanced protection for traveling/roaming laptops, which is good. However, it sounds like there are still some bugs to work out when it comes to protecting laptops using DirectAccess instead of a standard VPN.

• Buffington said that scalability was a big focus, noting that a single Data Protection Manager 2010 server will be able to support up to 100 servers, 1,000 laptops and 2,000 databases.

There was plenty more to report, including disaster recovery improvements, enhanced tape support and new automatic “self-healing” functionality for improved reliability. You can actually check out the full webcast yourself for more info. An On Demand version should be available soon (if it’s not already).

For more info on Data Protection Manager and other System Center products, visit SearchWindowsServer.com.