The 10-person IT staff at the New York City Department of Sanitation's (DSNY) Bureau of Motor Equipment plays a key role in the smooth running of the nearly 6,000 collection trucks, mechanical street sweepers, passenger cars, salt spreaders and other vehicles that make up the department's fleet.

A loss of critical data at the bureau can have fast and far-reaching implications. "There are a variety of data that we have to maintain constantly in case of snow emergency," says Marc Williams, the bureau's supervisor of network operations. "If there's a snow emergency and a collection truck with a plow attached or a salt spreader breaks down, it's over -- the mayor doesn't want to know that."

To more efficiently protect against data loss, DSNY's Bureau of Motor Equipment in 2004 became one of 30 early-adopter organizations to implement a private beta of Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) -- created by Microsoft to provide a low-cost, near-continuous, disk-based backup and recovery solution for the Microsoft Windows Server System. [The product was initially introduced in September 2004 under the codename Microsoft Data Protection Server.] Today, Microsoft's foray into the disk-based backup and recovery industry reached another milestone with the release of the DPM public beta.

"Our whole goal with DPM is to shrink the operational costs associated with IT professionals having to manually recover lost data and manage cumbersome backup and recovery processes," says Ben Matheson, group product manager for DPM at Microsoft. "From what our early-adopter customers are telling us, DPM is doing that very effectively."

The announcement of the DPM public beta coincides with the Storage Networking World conference -- a leading conference for IT managers, storage architects and infrastructure professionals -- taking place in Phoenix, Ariz., April 12--15. The public beta will be accompanied by two related releases -- a software developer kit (SDK) to help Microsoft's storage partners develop software that can be used to archive data from DPM; and a Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM) pack designed to facilitate DPM management. General availability of DPM is slated for late 2005.