For most companies, data backup and recovery is a significantly more pressing issue now than it was just a few years ago. A challenging economic climate, new regulatory mandates, and a greater concern about risks from major disasters, among other factors, are fueling this concern. Fortunately, rapidly declining disk prices are allowing enterprises to augment their data-protection strategies using disk-based backup and recovery technologies, which enable a faster, more manageable and more reliable solution than traditional tape-backup technology. But most of the current disk-based solutions on the market are still cost-prohibitive for many companies, especially small and medium-sized businesses.

To address the growing need for businesses of all sizes to reduce the time it takes to back up and recover their data, Microsoft today announced Data Protection Server, a low-cost, continuous disk-based data-protection solution for the Microsoft Windows Server System. Representing Microsoft's entrance into the disk-based backup and recovery space, Data Protection Server (DPS) is a standalone server designed to automate the backup and recovery process. In conjunction with today's announcement, over 20 storage industry partners also announced their support for DPS and their intent to work with Microsoft to provide customers with a broad choice of Microsoft Windows-based storage solutions. DPS is expected to be available in the second half of 2005.

PressPass spoke with Yuval Neeman, corporate vice president of the Storage and Platform Solutions group at Microsoft, to learn more about what's driving the move to disk-based storage and what Microsoft Data Protection Server and Microsoft storage partners will bring to the table.