Microsoft launches System Center Data Protection Manager

Microsoft Corp. has officially launched Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM). Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the company’s Windows Server Division, made the announcement during his keynote address at the Storage Decisions conference yesterday evening (27th September). Data Protection Manager promises to ‘lower the total cost of ownership for backup and recovery while enabling entirely new customer scenarios around rapid and reliable recovery and near-continuous protection’.

"Backup has been the bane of IT professionals for decades," Muglia said. "Disk-based data protection provides a revolution in providing continuous backup and fast recovery of data. Data Protection Manager will help usher in this new era of disk-based data protection."

Microsoft says that the release of DPM is a step closer toward the realisation of Microsoft's vision for Universal Distributed Storage, aimed at delivering distributed storage solutions built on industry standard hardware. Microsoft will work with industry partners ‘to bring high-end functionality to a range of devices, PCs and servers at a low total cost of ownership’.

Microsoft's long term goal is for ‘Windows to manage storage more cost-effectively than other platforms, centralised on a Storage Area Network (SAN) or on a remote worker's desktop.’

Microsoft takes on the tape industry
Microsoft has also published the findings from a report it commissioned from VeriTest, the independent testing division of Lionbridge Technologies Inc. The VeriTest report concluded that Data Protection Manager provided significant, tangible benefits over the tape-based backup solutions that were tested in the study. In the VeriTest benchmark tests, DPM, a disk-based backup product, provided the following benefits relative to tape backup products:

- DPM provided 11.6x faster file recovery with disc than equivalent file recovery from tape backup using Veritas Backup Exec 10 software.*

- DPM completed an incremental backup job 3.7x faster with disc than equivalent incremental tape backup using Veritas Backup Exec 10 software.*

Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager will retail at around $950 (US), which includes one server license and the management licenses to protect three file servers.

A white paper which provides a comprehensive introduction to Data Protection Manager can be downloaded from here.

*The complete test report will be posted on http://www.veritest.com/

•Date: 28th September 2005 • Region: US/World • Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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