I’d not realised we had recently published a case study for Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM), it gives great insight into the product and how it can be used within an organisation.  IMO this is going to be a great product – there has been significant interest from customers I have spoken to recently. The public beta was announced on July 8th 2005 here.

Some highlights from the Microsoft case study that I pulled out are:

• Microsoft anticipates savings of at least U.S. $2.7 million in the first two years of its deployment by removing tape-based hardware and software, from branch offices
• This replication occurs at the block level. Instead of replicating an entire file when a change occurs, DPM only replicates the blocks within each file which actually change 
• Demonstrated that, DPM could protect a branch office site with 300 gigabytes (GB) of data with a single nightly replication session lasting only 10 minutes. This session replaced the 8 hour tape backup session which was previously required to protect the site
• The user can simply right click using the current shadowcopy interface and initiate the restore themselves

Happy reading...also check out the upcoming webcast for DPM