SCDPM 2010 provides unified and vital data protection for Windows servers and clients in the form of backup and recovery. DPM 2010 provides strong protection and supportable restore scenarios from disk, tape and cloud in a scalable, reliable, manageable and cost-effective way.

The traditional backup medium is tape, but backing up to tape is very expensive. Backing up to disk is ultimately much cheaper than tape, and that’s what DPM provides, although DPM can also help archive rarely updated data to tape for record retention purposes. The newer backup method has distinct advantages cost-wise over how things have been done in the past.

DPM can back up and restore data via the agent from Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, Dynamics, Virtual Server, Hyper-V, File shares, The Active Directory system state and Windows OS clients

The backups can be configured to occur every 15 minutes, with data being transmitted via the agent directly to the DPM server machine. From there, the DPM server can archive up to 512 disk-based snapshots for fast recovery from problems, and also manage record retention on tape-based media through customizable policies.

 The latest DPM has the ability to replicate to other DPM servers for fault tolerance, and the availability of an online cloud backup service from Iron Mountain that can be closely integrated with DPM 2010.

 Microsoft has included a way for SQL Server administrators to retrieve previous versions of any SQL database and restore it to either the original SQL Server machine or an alternate without involving the DPM administrator.

DPM 2010 introduces protection for what it calls "roaming laptops," those machines that often go for days, weeks or even months without connecting to the corporate network. DPM 2010 allows these machines to be backed up at a very granular level, since the administrator — and, in some cases, the user — can define which parts of those machines should be backed up, eliminating the need to constantly back up the entire system, because it can be so easily restored.

In addition, the DPM agent integrates with the local shadow copies feature in Windows Vista and Windows 7. This allows the user to perform a restore himself from local copies if the machine is offline, or from DPM-based copies if the machine happens to be connected to the network. These policies can be centrally managed from the DPM 2010 administrative console.

In DPM 2010, Microsoft has a simple mechanism to configure fail-over and fail-back among DPM server machines, including supporting a DPM server off-site for improved fault tolerance.