Microsoft News Tracker

As revealed today in a rather cryptic announcement, Microsoft has released System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 to manufacturing. This is version 2 of DPM which has been in beta for over a year and it has variety of new features according to Bala Kasiviswanathan, Microsoft’s director of branch and storage solutions.

The new offering also includes application-level de-duplication, or single-instance storage. It offers document-level recovery to the same server, a different server or tape, said Kasiviswanathan.

“This is robust, enterprise-class data protection,” he said.

The near-CDP product also includes better integration with SQL Server, Exchange Server and SharePoint Portal Server, among other applications and platforms.

The joy of Data Protection Manager 2007 is the tight integration with the big Microsoft server products, but it isn’t truly continuous data protection (CDP) despite some Microsoft literature that fuzzes the concept. The best description is that it is continuous granular backup with the granularity in DPM 2007 being 15 minutes instead of the one hour of the first version. The flip side, of course, is that DPM isn’t as expensive as a true CDP system.