Microsoft moves into digital data protection
Microsoft moves into digital data protection
Whether it be due to hardware failure, natural disaster or 'oops! wrong button' syndrome, company data is valuable and often needs rapid replacement when the unforeseeable happens. Tape has long been the primary choice for backing up company data due to its relative inexpensiveness and reliability, however backup and restore times can be long.
Yesterday Microsoft took a step up to challenge the tape world with the launch of its System Centre Data Protection Manager (DPM). As it is designed entirely around disk-based backup, data can be recovered in minutes instead of hours. This reduction in backup times is due to DPM only transferring bytes of data that have changed rather than the whole file.
"When you consider that even mid-size companies may do 20 or more recoveries per month, DPM can enable a significant time and labor savings on recoveries alone." said Bob Muglia, senior vice president, Windows Server.
Independent benchmarks by Veritest sees incremental data backup transpiring 3.7 times faster on DPM than leading tape backup systems. Some customers have even reported backup times dropping from 48 hours to just 10 minutes.
As for recovery times, DPM enables backup recovery of files up to 11.6 times faster than leading tape based solutions according to Veritest. And that doesn't including actually finding and loading the tape in the first place.
Ridiculous amounts of saved time aside, the cost savings DPM provides over tape based systems are also significant. "A disk-based backup product from a proprietary vendor with a proprietary operating system and backup software costs as much as $50,000 for 1 TB of storage and associated software." said Bob Muglia, senior vice president, Windows Server. "By working with great hardware partners like HP, Quantum, Dell and Fujitsu Siemans, we can provide the same 1 TB solution for $6,000 or less, based on a DPM and Windows Storage Server Products."
Interest in the storage market has been growing of late, with Sun Microsystems talking of a possible purchase of StorageTek, and security software firm Symantec saying it intends to buy storage specialist Veritas Software. Microsoft also see storage as a growth market, and are moving further into it with DPM and an update to Windows Storage Server which enters testing at the end of the year.
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