RSSMicrosoft Releases Beta of Backup Tool
By Nate Mook | Published April 13, 2005, 2:02 PM
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.
I was to be one of the public testers on this and I had to drop it. DPM is way over sized and and has really to little that is does. I feel that it is doomed to fail so I dropped it.
Score: 0
|When Windows 95 achieved significant popularity, it became evident that there were no backup solutions, the way there were in the DOS world. (Yes, I know Win95 had a backup program, but no, it never worked. I couldn't get it, in numerous tries, to back up a even a directory to the harddrive and reliably restore it).
Anyhow, the built-in backup provided by MS was always extremely minimal. I just hope that people don't, once again, unfairly criticize them for adding functionality to their OS. Just because Netscape couldn't compete on merit doesn't mean MS shouldn't put anything they want into their OS.
Of course, strong-arming OEM's and all the other shady practices they've frequently done should still be persued (yeah, right, that'll happen).
Anyhow, assuming this is a good tool, it will be very useful for Windows user. I know it could come in real handy for the company I work for.
I wonder who they acquired this tool from...
Score: 0
|Hm, I don't think you've understood what this product is. First of all, relating it to Win95 is meaningless, this is a serverside product.
Secondly, this isn't "adding functionality to the OS" in the free bundling type of way you seem to be referring to, this is a new commercial product, that will be licensed separately as a commercial product and as such will compete in the space of behemoths such as BackupExec.
Score: 0
|There is a possibility that they developed this off their OWN technology instead of buying it. Server 2k3 uses shadow volumes and shadow copies quite a bit for this same type of thing, this could be just a device to move it onto a different drive and condense it.
And where is all this windows 95 experiance comming from? I rarely see 98 anymore, although i know many home users still use it, but the XP backup has always been great for me at home, never had issues with it scheduled to back up at regular times it works great. you can't burn directly to a cd, but if you map a drive to another computer, you CAN dump your backup on that drive.
Score: 0
|This is why I wanted to delete the message. After I read more about the tool, I realized I misunderstood what it's about.
What I find amazing is that the download is 700MB! That's more than the installation for the OS? What could possibly make it so big?!
Score: 0
|DPM's reporting features require SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services. The public download of DPM is meant to be usable as an all-inclusive trial/demo/preview/pilot, therefore it includes an evaluation copy of SQL Server 2000 along with Service Pack 3a for SQL Server 2000, Reporting Services for SQL Server 2000, and a post-SP3a hotfix which is a pre-requisite for Reporting Services. The public download extracts to 4 CDs worth, but DPM is only the first CD. If you sign up for the technical beta, you can gain access to a non-public download format which is unbundled.
Score: 0
|You're right that this is MS internally-developed technology which builds upon "volume shadow snapshot" and "volume shadow copy" technology. The biggest difference is that Microsoft has further optimized the technology so that it can be realistically used for "continuous" backup. This is what makes it much different from the scenario of dumping your ntbackup *.bkf file to a share. Rather than running a point-in-time backup operation, your file servers continuously pass shadow-copied sectors to a DPM server where they are stored on disk first, then optionally migrated to tape (or other removable media) asynchronously.
In order to make this possible, shadow copy technology has been made more granular. Also, Microsoft has implemented network interfaces which do not exist in the current XP/WS2003 VSS API. (Competitors like Backup Exec who offer a "remote agent" are using their own proprietary "open file option" which works similar to shadow copy but does not actually use Microsoft's API.)
Speaking of remote agent, you need to be aware that DPM will NOT provide direct backup of client machines' hard disks. In the first release, DPM will backup file servers. Later, Microsoft will cover Exchange & SQL Servers. There will be a new Shadow Copy Client which you can install on client machines, but it is solely to provide a user interface for accessing shadow copies of a file server which are physically located on a DPM server. (The current Shadow Copy Client can only access shadow copies of a file server which are physically located on the file server.)
Score: 0
|