Microsoft moved out of backing up the mom-and-pop pizza shop last week with the introduction of the second version of its System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007. 

That’s not really a fair assessment of Microsoft data protection product, but until now DPM has been limited in its capabilities. The new version’s support for Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint and Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005 R2 makes it an enterprise candidate for backup.

Scheduled to be available in the fourth quarter, DPM can now be used to backup Exchange or SQL Server farms, thus moving it from small and midsize business use into the enterprise-sized business.

The new release also includes file-level de-duplication and support for recovering individual e-mails and folders. Microsoft has also added tape management capability to the software. It also is capable of creating as many as 512 Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) – one snapshot every 15 minutes.

The company claims that more than 70,000 people participated in the public beta of DPM over the last year. The product was released to manufacturing last week.

DPM can support as many as 300 clients. The product costs $573 for a DPM server license. Each application server agent is $426 and each file server agent is $155.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.