This Computerworld story (and the related MS press release) announce the arrival of a new Windows product: the Data Protection Server (DPS). DPS is basically a distributed tool that puts agents on the file servers you want to protect; the agents then run scheduled disk-to-disk backups. Depending on how this is implemented, this might be a significant improvement over the kind of ad-hoc disk-to-disk backup schemes most small and medium organizations use. DPS combines replication and point-in-time copies, which places it squarely into competition with products from Legato and Veritas (among others).
It’s pretty clear that MS is firing a shot across the bows of other software replication providers; it’s also clear that given their market presence, and the list of partners signed up for DPS, that they’ll probably get replication into a lot of shops that have resisted it so far. What’s not so clear is what this means for the enterprise, and what it means for Exchange. This Q&A with Yuval Neeman says that future versions of DPS will protect SQL and Exchange, but that’s awfully generic. (I wonder if you could take a VSS snap of an Exchange volume using a VSS-aware backup tool and then use DPS to replicate it? Hmmm….)
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