Microsoft Releases Data Backup Solution

Microsoft announced earlier this week that it had released a public beta version of Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager, a near-continuous, disk-based backup and recovery solution for the Microsoft Windows Server System. DPM will be accompanied by two related releases - a software developer kit that helps Microsoft's storage partners develop software for archiving data from DPM, and a Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 pack that facilitates DPM management. Microsoft says DPM delivers faster backup speeds, made possible by near-continuous protection that backs up incremental changes to documents rather than the entire document as a whole. This enables IT managers to protect file servers many times throughout the day, limiting the amount of data a business may lose. DPM also features expanded and faster recovery options and a lower total cost of ownership. "Our whole goal with DPM is to shrink the operational costs associated with IT professionals having to manually recover lost data and manage cumbersome backup and recovery processes," says Ben Matheson, group product manager for DPM at Microsoft. "From what our early-adopter customers are telling us, DPM is doing that very effectively." DPM works exclusively with Microsoft file servers. Future releases of DPM will support the entire Windows Server system, including Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server and others. General availability of DPM is slated for later this year.