News

Data Protection Manager 2010 Beta Released

The beta includes a number of improvements over the previous release, according to Microsoft.

• By Kurt Mackie
• October 23, 2009

Microsoft moved toward the general availability of System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 with the release of a public beta last month.

The release follows a community technology preview for more than 50 Microsoft customers, according to Anand Kamat, group product manager for the DPM team, in a blog post. DPM 2010 is a backup and data-recovery tool formerly known as "Zinger" or "DPM version 3," and is part of the System Center management product line.

DPM provides continuous data protection of Windows application and file servers to disk, tape or the cloud, and also protects Windows clients.

DPM 2010 will eventually succeed Microsoft's DPM 2007 Service Pack 1 product, which was released in January. According to a Microsoft spokesperson, "the next version" of DPM 2010 will be available in the first half of 2010.

The beta includes a number of improvements over the previous release, according to Microsoft. The DPM 2010 beta can protect virtual machines moved across cluster shared volumes on Windows Server 2008 R2 using Microsoft's live migration feature. This feature also extends to Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V servers.

The DPM 2010 beta also provides centralized client protection for Windows-based PCs, from Windows XP to Windows 7 versions. With this release, the backup protection for laptop clients was "completely built from scratch," according to Kamat. Backups can be set to take place while laptops are online or offline, according to Microsoft's description of the beta.

The beta has an auto-grow feature that can "extend the replica volume as the production data grows," according to the blog. It also includes automatic error fixing of the replica volume via the auto-rerun or auto-cc functions.

A single DPM 2010 server can support up to 100 servers, 1,000 laptops, or 2,000 databases, according to Microsoft documentation. The beta extends protection to SQL Server 2008 and other Microsoft server products, as well as to the upcoming Exchange 2010 and SharePoint 2010 servers.

In the current generation, DPM costs $579 for the server license, while management licenses cost $431 for enterprise data protection covering application servers, $157 for standard data protection covering file servers and $27 for client data protection. Microsoft usually updates prices when a product reaches the release to manufacturing milestone.