Microsoft Wednesday announced at the Storage Networking World conference that it has started shipping its System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 software.

The DPM backup software is a component of Microsoft's System Center family of management products, providing recovery from disk and archive to tape in Microsoft environments.

Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of Microsoft's data and storage platform division, told a keynote audience that the new version improves support for Microsoft's Exchange messaging software, SQL Server database, and the Sharepoint Portal Sever collaboration and content management technology.

Kummert also noted that the product can also perform continuous data-protection snapshots of Microsoft applications and file servers integrated with tape and disk media.

A complete breakdown of new DPM 2007 features is listed on a blog post by Jason Buffington, a senior product manager at Microsoft. Two weeks ago, Buffington had used his blog to announce that the updated version of DPM 2007 was available for evaluation by end users.

Kummert told his audience that Microsoft expects future versions of the data protection manager software to be able to interact with the software vendor's stable of data life-cycle management applications. He offered no further details on the matter.

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