<p>When Microsoft jumped into the data protection market back in 2005 with the release of its System Center Data Protection Manager, most providers of backup and recovery and replication software shrugged their shoulders. It was easy to point out that it only supported Windows environments and was not very robust.</p><p>Now, the latest DPM release can backup and recover Linux virtual machines, enables deployment in virtual environments by configuring storage as VHD pool disks shared in a System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) library and supports SQL Server clusters, as well as provide Windows Azure backup. DPM has come a long way since its release eight-plus years ago. Yet despite the improvements, most third-party suppliers of data protection software don't see it as a competitive threat.</p><p>I spoke with quite a few players over the past week and some argue they aren't seeing DPM used at all and others see DPM running alongside their solutions. Take Simpana from CommVault. Randy DeMeno, chief technologist for the company's Microsoft partnership, says some of his customers use DPM and Simpana runs alongside it. "When you get into long-term storage, e-discovery, heterogeneous virtual environments, heavy e-discovery, search, Exchange, SharePoint, [IBM Lotus] Domino [and] various heterogeneous files, that's where CommVault comes into play," DeMeno says.</p><p>"We really do high-speed recovery," says Mike Resseler, the Microsoft evangelist at Veeam Software. "We still don't look at DPM as competition but both can work better together. The reason is Veeam Backup and Replication is on the virtualization layer, DPM on Hyper-V. We support VMware as well. We connect the two and can give an effective and cheap solution to do disaster recovery."</p><p><a href="http://redmondmag.com/blogs/the-schwartz-report/2014/02/dpm-worthy-data-protection.aspx">Keep reading...</a></p>