System Center 2012 Technical Deep Dive, Part 2

Posted on

Continuing from last months technical deep dive into System Center 2012, this month I will expand upon the software packages in System Center 2012 and their particular uses in your organization.
First, I will cover Service Manager, which is a component of System Center 2012 that handles service requests and ticketing. Included with this software are the following features:

  • Service Requests
  • A Self-Service Portal for clients
  • Release Management
  • Data Warehousing, Reporting, and Dashboarding.

All of these features are designed to be easily accessible to users to help automate and resolve user level service quests and issues.

The second piece of software we will discuss is Data Protection Manager. DPM is designed as a unified data protection solution for Windows servers and clients. This includes supportable restores from disk, tape and cloud. Due to the highly integrated design of DPM granular application restores of Microsoft software including Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, Active Directory, are all actively supported. New features for DPM 2012 include: 

  • Centralized data backup management of servers
  • Role Based Administration for security
  • Item-level recovery for virtual machines

Just like all of the other tools in System Center, all of these features are heavily Windows integrated with familiar interfaces and tools.

The final piece of software I will cover in this series is Endpoint Protection. This software is designed as a security and anti-virus/malware suite designed to integrate into Operations Manager and Configuration Manager.
Some of its features include: 

  • Unified Infrastructure
  • Simplified Administration
  • Central Policy enforcement
  • CPU throttling during scans and faster scans through advanced caching
  • SQL Reporting Services-based reports of client activity and impacted users.
  • Integrated agent

As you have read over the past few articles, System Center 2012 is an advanced set of tools that can be leveraged within your organization to further enhance and expand upon your existing Microsoft and third party software investment.

Written by: Grant Becker, Systems Engineer