Microsoft announced yesterday that next year the company will add a new product to its stable of server-based offerings--a backup-and-recovery system called Microsoft Data Protection Server (DPS). The product, which Microsoft announced at the Storage Decisions 2004 conference in Chicago, is available only in a limited beta version.
"Customers are telling us that backing up and recovering their data is labor-intensive and complex," Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Windows Server Division, said. "Exponential growth of business-critical data and new government regulations are increasing the cost and complexity of backup and recovery, forcing companies to rethink their data protection planning. DPS has garnered broad industry support because it will help customers of all sizes shrink their recovery time from hours to minutes and drive down the cost of maintaining storage infrastructures."
DPS is a low-cost, disk-based backup-and-recovery solution that works with Windows Server 2003 and gives customers fast recovery features, low-level backups that don't affect performance and save disk space, and a Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)-based backup interface that works with tape-based solutions. Microsoft reports that more than 20 storage-industry partners are supporting DPS.
DPS will ship in the first half of 2005. At the same time, Microsoft will ship a Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 feature pack that administrators can use to more easily manage and configure DPS functionality.
