Microsoft Releases Beta of Backup Tool

At the Storage Networking World conference in Phoenix Wednesday, Microsoft announced the availability of a public beta release of its Data Protection Manager (DPM) software. DPM provides a near continuous disk-based backup and offers rapid recovery in the event of a failure - without relying on tape.

Microsoft has been beta testing DPM among its partners since last September, and boasts a resounding positive response for the product.

"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."

To ensure reliability, DPM uses byte-level replication and validates all data that is backed up. The software makes "shadow copies" that store only the changes made to a file, which requires less space when making incremental backups. Microsoft says DPM can store up to 30 days worth of shadow copies on disk.

To ease administration, Microsoft has created a plug-in to manage DPM using Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005. "From the MOM Operator console, the administrator can monitor DPM and network infrastructure simultaneously, analyzing data protection failures in the context of other network failures," Microsoft says.

General availability of Microsoft DPM is slated for the end of this year, but the public beta is available now for download. Future releases of DPM are expected to support the entire Windows Server System, including Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server and more.