After a year of hype, Microsoft Corp. is finally shipping its disk-based backup product, Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2006, which analysts say is rudimentary at best, but will meet the needs of small Windows shops.
Unveiled at Storage Decisions today, DPM costs $950 per server, which includes agents for three file servers. Put simply, the product sits between the file servers being backed up and a traditional tape system. Once installed and configured, it can take up to eight snapshots per day of those file servers, enabling users to recover directly from disk instead of the tiresome process of recovering from tape.