Microsoft Plots Backup Assault

"I can't be real worried about something that's not going to ship for quite a while," says Andrew Peters, president of Peters and Associates, which was named Microsoft's 2004 VAR Partner of the Year for the Central Region.

Rest assured, Microsoft's entre will give Peters, and VARs like him, plenty to think about during the coming year. According to Gartner, in a recent research note to clients, DPS could "seriously hurt" vendors in the Windows backup market, like Computer Associates, CommVault and Veritas. "As they add more functionality to the product, slowly over time it will become more of a competitive threat," adds Yankee group analyst Stephanie Balaouras.

But to Peters' point, there's no need to head for the hills. For example, he says, Citrix has done quite well since Microsoft added and continued to bolster the Windows Terminal Server function. As with all of Microsoft's products, the first release of any software is basic in function; Microsoft's DPS will apply only to backup and recovery of Windows-only files, meaning other vendors will still be able to serve enterprises with Linux, Unix and various host platforms.

Of course, for those VARs targeting SMBs, the Windows-only market spells a huge opportunity. After all, the lower end of that group, where there are fewer than 100 servers, is typically dominated by Windows. And 80 percent of SMB customers surveyed by the Yankee Group say spending on backup and recovery solutions will be a key part of their IT spending plans in the next year.

DPS also validates the growing market of disk-to-disk backup and recovery, says IDC analyst Bill North. "It's an acknowledgement that most of the current offerings that make use of disk make use of disk by writing a tape format out to a direct-access device, which isn't the best use of disk storage," he says. "Odds are better than 50-50 that it will help grow the market, and Microsoft will take a chunk of that growth, as will the others. But it won't take a significant dent out of anyone's helmet."

Solution providers will be able to install DPS on a customer's file server running Windows 2000/2003 Server or Microsoft Storage Server 2003. The current plan is for DPS to run on a multiterabyte ATA or SATA-based storage device or an independent storage server. Using the DPS Management Console, administrators can install agents on production servers and provide policy-based replication of files. DPS will use Microsoft's Active Directory to discover the file servers, deploy the agents on the file servers (continuously monitoring and logging changes) and replicate them back to DPS. Instead of sending an entire file, it will only replicate changes within the file. So if a 20-MB file has deltas of less than 1 MB, only those changes will be transmitted, notes Microsoft senior director Jeff Price. "That puts less load on the production server and allows you to do it more frequently," he says.

Although it can be used in enterprises of any size, Microsoft says DPS is best-suited in SMBs or departments of larger organizations with five to 49 file servers or those currently finding they have little time to conduct backups, have frequent file recoveries from tape or need recoveries within an hour.

As long as storage vendors stay ahead of the curve, DPS could be a boon—think Citrix. But in a market where consolidation is inevitable, never underestimate Microsoft's impact.