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DPM 2007 melds traditional nightly tape backup with continuous data protection, which backs up data every 15 minutes to enable users to recover deleted, corrupted or modified files.

In the continuous data protection market, there are vendors pushing solutions that can back up data on the fly in real time, but these are too expensive for small and medium sized companies, said Jason Buffington, senior technical product manager for Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager group.

Microsoft's approach with DPM 2007 is to offer companies in this segment a lower cost alternative that backs up data at 15 minute intervals. Although Microsoft has been criticized over DPM's lack of real time backup, Buffington said the 15 minute interval meets the needs of most organizations.

"The vast majority of our customers say the 15 minute delay is acceptable when they're looking at paying $400 per server and $7,000 per server," Buffington said.

"DPM 2007 brings a continuous level of data protection to the mainstream market. Instead of being an enterprise only capability, small and medium businesses can also take advantage of the technology," said Buffington.

Bare metal recovery, which enables quick disk-based recovery for operating systems and data in case of a complete system failure, is also wrapped into DPM 2007 as a free add-on, according to Buffington. Earlier versions of DPM required the reinstallation of a clean copy of the operating system before recovering the data after a system failure.

The final version of Data Protection Manager 2007 will be available in November.