A lot of improvement is required in Dell's first level of support.

In the future, the product should be able to fit into a hybrid infrastructure. It should be more of a single solution to meet all your hybrid infrastructure needs rather than having different solutions.

Management is difficult and it is hard to determine when things aren't working properly.

The solution is not as intuitive as other products so it requires a certain expertise to keep things up and running. 

They should include a feature similar to S3 bucket. Presently, PPDM offers integration with data domain and power protection appliances. At times, customers demand a simple bucket instead of multiple integrations. In that case, we have to suggest other vendors like ECS to them. 

The interface can be improved in Dell PowerProtect Data Manager. The interface is too complex.

In the next release, I would like to see a better tutorial on how to use the software.

The Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager reports could improve. There should be different kinds of reports on failures, such as dashboards that we can submit to top management or auditors.

The parts of the solution that can be improved most seem to me to be the integration with the tape libraries. I know that is not common use because nowadays most companies want to give up on using tapes for what they think are other, better solutions. To them, tapes are not modern or fashionable or something. The integration with tape libraries is included in this new PowerProtect product, but you need an extra virtual machine — probably some extra server — next to this solution to manage the tape library. EMC had some idea before when they were distributing Avamar Software and Appliances that tapes were passee and they said to the market that no one should use tape anymore. With that, they eliminated the option from the product. Now we can see that in the market tape is still used. There are not any drawbacks to using tape because tape, even now, is the most versatile medium on which to store data.  

An enhancement I would like to see is in the configuration of the product. They have resources in this product that can be used in different ways to make the user experience better. It seems to me that if Dell EMC could combine this into one good product, then they should do it because then there is not any reason to develop more than one backup software product. It does not make sense to invest in the development of two or three. Because there are different purposes, they have chosen to create different backup software packages especially for endpoints and a separate one built for the data centers. Instead, it would be more powerful and efficient if they could combine the two solutions into one solution. For example, Commvault does something like this.  

If they combined the products, then you could have one pane-of-glass on a screen and you can manage the whole entire organization. In this PowerProtect, there is something like that, but you know and can tell that you have two distinct products. It is one graphical user interface, but below this, you are interacting with it as if there are two different products (Networker and Avamar) and they are quite different if you compared them one-to-one. I would recommend Dell EMC take the extra step to combine it into one product. It would be better for them and the users.  

Additional features might be something to add support for Docker/Linux Container systems. This would be something like having virtualization by container. Currently, the solution is not able to back up from Docker containers. I am not sure, but maybe it is possible to put some type of agent into the Docker container to make it possible to back up the whole machine from outside. This is a problem and they could improve it. Maybe I'm wrong, but I do have one customer who uses PowerProtect and they had a problem with this type of situation. It was an Oracle database and the databases were containerized. This is one thing that I know about right now that seems to me could be improved in the design and made smarter.  

There is always room for improvement. The compression ratio should be improved as well as the efficiency.

You need to use additional software to back up entire environments. It will be good if they could support entire tape libraries.

If the duplication feature is added to Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, it will be very useful for virtual environments.