Microsoft poised to unfurl DPM 2007 Beta 2

Microsoft’s forthcoming Data Protection Manager yields encryption, more snapshots, and support for Linux VMs

Microsoft is set to release beta 2 of DPM 2007 at the end of the month. An ambitious replacement for traditional tape-based backups, DPM (Data Protection Manager) has been baking in Redmond for quite some time.

DPM 2007 is expected to offer more powerful backup options and to support many more application environments and servers than its predecessor. As you may have noticed, DPM 2006 was essentially limited to disk-to-disk files protection, with no built-in smarts for database-handling and no direct support for tape devices.

The new version eliminates those significant impediments, offering agents that protect machines running Exchange, Sharepoint, and SQL Server. You also should be able to back up VM clients — even if running Linux (hear, hear!) — but Microsoft guest OSes can benefit from proprietary features, such as VSS, that are obviously missing in other systems.

One of the most significant improvements in the upcoming beta release is increased number of snapshots you can take, 512 per volume. Obviously, a higher number of snapshots makes possible more frequent data protection, hence a more granular recovery of your data if something goes wrong.

Also notable: the ability to create policies that automatically transfer protected data to tape, either making a second stop to disk or not.

In addition, the new version can recover a database up to the last completed transaction found in the log. That approach is likely less disruptive than restarting from the previous recovery point, which could be from a significantly earlier point in time.

One of the new features that should be worth evaluating is encryption. According to Microsoft, DPM support media encryption both via hardware and software, something that could make the solution more desirable for many customers.

DPM is still in beta, so I’ll refrain from a verdict from now. However, without discounting the numerous improvements it brings, one sorely missing feature is bare-metal recovery, which, ironically, becomes a bit more complicated when you add DPM to your data center.

If you decide to go on and test DPM next week, it would be a good idea to include using third-party tools for server recovery in your test plans.

If interested to try out the new beta version you should be able to download it from here next week. That page links also to a recent Webcast and other related info.