Microsoft uses disk in beta way to backup
Microsoft uses disk in beta way to backup
Apr 14, 2005: A new beta of disk-data protection software has been released by Microsoft to offer, according to the software giant, a faster and more reliable alternative to tape based backup.
The Microsoft System Centre Data Protection Manager offers a near-continuous, disk-based backup and recovery solution for the Microsoft Windows Server System.
It will be accompanied with a software developer kit to help Microsoft's storage partners develop software that can be used to archive data from DPM; and a Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM) pack designed to facilitate DPM management.
Ben Matheson, the group product manager for DPM at Microsoft, said: "Our whole goal with DPM is to shrink the operational costs associated with IT professionals having to manually recover lost data and manage cumbersome backup and recovery processes.
"From what our early-adopter customers are telling us, DPM is doing that very effectively."
Ray Paquet, from Gartner also talked about the drawbacks of using tape as backup for data loss, which usually involves manually transporting the tapes to an offsite storage facility.
"Restoring data from tape can be expensive, unreliable and time consuming, often involving manual intervention by IT staff. Some organisations are finding that disk-based backup offers a much more rapid and reliable way to handle recoveries."
According to Microsoft, DPM offers faster backup speed because it moves only the byte-level changes of the files on production servers instead of doing a full backup of any file that is changed.
For instance, if one slide is changed inside a 10MB Microsoft PowerPoint file, the tape backup software backs up the whole file, instead of just the key changes.
The near-continuous data protection provided by DPM allows IT managers to protect data hourly, instead of just once a day.
Although DPM is only available with the Windows Server System family of products at the moment, Matheson says that in the future, Microsoft hopes it will also support Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server and others too.
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