Microsoft Looks To DPM To Transcend TapeMicrosoft Looks To DPM To Transcend Tape

Microsoft released Wednesday a public beta version of its Data Protection Manager, software for near-continuous, disk-based backup and recovery.

Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) also includes Volume Shadow Copy Services Writer SDK 1.0, sample code that models backup and restore DPM replicas and configuration databases using VSS technology. This software developers kit is intended for use by Microsoft's storage partners to accelerate their development of VSS-based software that can be used to archive data from DPM.

The software maker is also including the Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM), which enables an administrator to centrally monitor multiple DPM computers. The MOM Operator console enables simultaneous monitoring of DPM and network infrastructure and analysis of data protection failures in the context of other network failures.

DPM's overall goal is to reduce the operational costs that IT incurs by having to manually recover lost data and manage cumbersome backup and recovery processes, according to Ben Matheson, group product manager for DPM at Microsoft.

The most common way to protect servers is to back up their data to removable tapes and store them offsite. But restoring data from tape can be expensive, unreliable or reuqire manual intervention, according to Ray Paquet of Gartner Inc. "Some organizations are finding that disk-based backup offers a much more rapid and reliable way to handle recoveries," he said in a statement.

"It's going to save a tremendous amount of staff time doing recovery," said Dan Warren, a network specialist for the Des Moines Public Schools in Iowa. The school district is testing DPM on a few servers. "My goal is to put all 60 of the district's schools on DPM," Warren said in a statement.

Microsoft is touting DPM's ease of use, noting that data recovery is just a matter of browsing a set of folders and copying them directly from the server running DPM to the production server. In contrast, recovering a file from a tape system typically takes a couple of hours, and recovering multiple files can even longer.

DPM also allows for IT to delegate recovery to end users, using the "Tools" menu within Microsoft Office 2003 or from directly within the Windows Explorer in Windows XP.

The first version of DPM only supports Windows file servers, but future releases will support Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server and others.