Data Protection Manager 2010 RC available

Microsoft has issued the first major systems management release of the new year. The company made the release candidate...

of System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 available for public download this week.

The software marks the latest edition of Microsoft's backup and restore product for Windows environments. Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 features several changes from its predecessor, including added support for Exchange Server 2010, SharePoint 2010 and Hyper-V R2.

Looking for more info on DPM 2010? Check out this detailed rundown of the key new features.

New features include disaster recovery improvements and an item-level recovery capability where administrators can select specific files to recover rather than needing to restore an entire file server. DPM 2010 also adds improved protection for roaming laptops and enhanced scalability with support for up to 100 servers, 1,000 laptops and 2,000 databases per DPM server.

In a company blog post, Jason Buffington, senior technical product manager for Microsoft System Center, cited new self-healing functionality and auto-protection of SQL Server databases and SharePoint farm components as other highlights.

The release candidate can currently be downloaded from the Microsoft Connect website.