The stability of the solution needs improvement for stand alone users.

It is difficult to manage the solution with the available tools. You need to know exactly what are you are doing. In some cases, we needed to contact Dell to solve some problems.

There is a steep learning curve to use the interface and to create new reports, this could be made easier. If the solution could provide more drag and drop functionality to build more advanced reports that would be very helpful.

In an upcoming release, there could be more analytics for our data giving us more detail. The types of information I would like to see from the backups would be, for example, how many files are old, what are the large file sizes, or unstructured or structured data. Additionally,
many other solutions today are able to tell you a lot of additional information, such as how much space is used in your backups or other information if you change your policies. It can also give you advice on how to optimize your environment for the backups to allow cost savings. DPA should follow suit to stay competitive and it would provide a great benefit to users.

Dell Data Protection Advisor's feature for data domain protection needs enhancement.

There's always room for improvement. EMC, Dell as of late has dragged behind in their Java protocol, keeping up with Java and security vulnerabilities. They should empower their customers with the ability to upgrade this solution as long as it's in the same major release or in another way that allows those security vulnerabilities to be addressed quicker.

I'd like to see better hooks into other analytic applications, like Splunk. That's really a partnership relationship versus EMC Dell control.

The functionality of the Data Protection Advisor is limited and is something that is lacking in this solution. Other solutions like CloudIQ and DDMC provide a much better outlook on how data protection should be done. DDMC provides a single pane of glass overview of our PowerProtect systems and CloudIQ can predict future issues based on current trends. DPA, contrary to it's name, provides no ability to advise. It only runs simple reports based on imported data.

We have encountered issues where we were unable to pull data from the database server. It should also improve the backward compatibility. 

The solution requires more integration with our other solutions. I know that they have full integration with VMware because it is also from EMC. However, we have to have better integration with Microsoft and Nutanix as well.

It's a bit difficult for first-time users. It could be easier to use, overall. For example, when searching for one specific feature, you need to go through many tabs, which can be confusing if you don't know what you're doing. If this process was simplified, it would be very time-efficient. 

Customization of reports or creating new reports can be difficult. Users need to have a deep knowledge of SQL. 70-80% of customers can't seem to understand how to do it. They don't know how to address reporting. If Dell EMC could simplify it, it would benefit the end-user.

Currently, you have the option to put the solution in a Windows server, but by putting your general reporting on the Windows server you have the potential to lose everything one day. It's better to be able to deploy it on a VM.