Microsoft announced the immediate general availability of Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM), the next step forward in the company’s Universal Distributed Storage strategy. 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. The release of DPM is a step closer toward the realization of Microsoft’s vision for Universal Distributed Storage, aimed at delivering distributed storage solutions built on industry standard hardware.
On a personal note, this is a REALLY FRICKIN’ COOL product. In a nutshell, it allows:
– People to backup their files on an hourly basis, and have those backups go back as far as 22 versions
– Have the backups be incremental, meaning only byte-level changes are backed up saving network bandwidth and storage costs
– Allow people to restore files for end-users in less than 2 clicks and do it as fast as a file copy would take instead of having to take the hours of laborious time to recover from tape
– Allow end users to recover their own files through Windows Server 2003 Previous Versions technology. (The end user can restore the file directly from their desktop and the file server passes through the restore command to the DPM server to execute the recovery back to the WinSvr2003 file server
– Allow people to coexist with existing Veritas Backup solutions to ensure that files are in fact backed up to tape for archival reasons on a normal basis
For more information see http://www.microsoft.com/dpm and the following guides:
– Data Protection Manager Planning & Deployment guide
– Data Protection Manager Operations Guide
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