Microsoft Specialist at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Real User
Top 20
2023-08-22T14:06:00Z
Aug 22, 2023
To evaluate the solution's abilities and its performance under demanding conditions, it is recommended to carry out a stress test. It would ensure that the current version of the solution can accept a lot of requests at the same time coherently.
It would be better if it integrated seamlessly with open source and competitor products. In the next release, I would like to see some data governance frameworks. It should have support features for data integration and data replication like Veeam. Right now, we are also using Veeam for certain scenarios.
System Administrator at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 5
2023-02-13T20:28:00Z
Feb 13, 2023
The problem lies with the 2019 version; it's the file system they're using. I used DPM in 2012 at CFMWS, and then we moved to the 2019 version. We integrated it with Backup Exec because DPM didn't offer features like sharing to back up files on the NetApp.
Senior Consultant at a marketing services firm with 11-50 employees
Real User
2021-12-20T19:46:00Z
Dec 20, 2021
The issue with the solution is if you have some problems, it's difficult to find the reason for the problem and to troubleshoot the problems with the solution. There are so many different things to configure. It can really mess with the settings. In general, more settings need to be possible. You have only a few settings and if you change them for some special configurations, it's very difficult. It's not so stable from time to time. You have problems occasionally. Sometimes the Microsoft patches for the operating systems might cause issues. However, with this product, the root cause can be tough to find. It's not that easy to install. You can manage this DPM or you can monitor this DPM with Microsoft Operations Manager and so on.
System Administrator at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
2021-03-17T07:29:34Z
Mar 17, 2021
It needs portability for other vendors. It is good for backing up Microsoft servers, but it doesn't support third-party solutions such as Oracle Database. It depends on Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy, especially for Hyper-V, which has a lot of problems. They should enhance the Volume Shadow Copy functionality. Its reporting should also be better. Reporting is too weak in DPM.
The user interface can be improved quite a bit. Overall, I wouldn't describe the solution as user-friendly. It's not very intuitive. The issue is that for users who are not interacting with the product regularly, it becomes difficult to trace the various functionality available. The product version that we have does not have
They could improve the compatibility and integration with other products and the ability to do file-to file backups of other products. I also find the hard disk aligning quite complicated and that should be simplified.
DBA, Developer at a government with 201-500 employees
Real User
2020-06-28T08:51:00Z
Jun 28, 2020
There is a very poor online user community in terms of people blogging about their experiences with DPM. I'm on Google all the time, resolving issues. All I ever find is the official Microsoft documentation. While that can be helpful, and that is in many cases, authoritative, it's not the same as having an independent user community who's writing about it. I have to wonder about the product when I don't see a vital external user community in existence. Every day I have to log in and look at agent alerts and failures that I have to resolve. There are so many different types of agent failures that I have to diagnose pretty much every day due to the fact that the replicas are out of sync with the current state of a file or the VM or something. I'm constantly involved in a lot of hands-on maintenance. They need to change that and potentially make some sort of automated solution to this problem so the workload isn't so heavy for those maintaining the solution. It's not a set it and forget it kind of solution. Not that anything is. However, it's a lot of labor involved in just keeping the replicas in sync. One of the things I think would like to be able to use is their cloud storage at the block level so that it's cheaper for a government entity. We want to have replicas in the cloud, however, it's very expensive. They're using the most expensive tier of Azure storage. We would rather just be able to specify that our cloud backups go to Blob based storage for budgetary purposes. I don't believe that's available, but then again, I can't really find that out online due to a lack of a user community. I would like to maybe have Office 365 backups. I know other vendors offer that however, I don't believe that's available within this solution.
I would say the user-friendliness could be improved because I have found that my colleagues are not finding it very easy to use. I have used it quite well. I was able to do a lot of features within it, but for a frustrated user, it becomes a little user-unfriendly. Also, one issue was if I wanted to restore mail - it's not feasible here.
The DPM is pretty good, but when it comes to external devices, you can't back up to the external device. It's a huge drawback because once everything goes down, it goes down fully. We can't take a snapshot and take it outside, which is a problem. Also, when it comes to recovery, the recovery process doesn't work properly. It doesn't recover. One of our drives failed and when we wanted to recover it from the other drive, it never worked. So, we couldn't recover the data. Recovery of data if the server goes down, is not very good. The DPM is good apart from the support services. We were told that the support was no longer in existence, which is why we are looking for another provider. In the next release, I would like to see backup to external devices, so it can always restore the backup and we can take it externally and store it somewhere that it is off-site and archived. Currently, it does not allow us to do that because it is required to be in one location.
System Analyst at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
2019-12-05T21:23:00Z
Dec 5, 2019
Additional Hyper-V knowledge would be great. There are some articles online detailing the interaction with hypervisors. Using the built-in tools would speed up some of the normal routine procedures.
Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) is an enterprise backup system that can be used to back up data from a source location to a target secondary location. Microsoft DPM allows you to back up application data from Microsoft servers and workloads, and file data from servers and client computers. You can create full backups, incremental backups, differential backups, and bare-metal backups to completely restore a system. Microsoft DPM can store backup data to disks for short-term storage,...
To evaluate the solution's abilities and its performance under demanding conditions, it is recommended to carry out a stress test. It would ensure that the current version of the solution can accept a lot of requests at the same time coherently.
It would be better if it integrated seamlessly with open source and competitor products. In the next release, I would like to see some data governance frameworks. It should have support features for data integration and data replication like Veeam. Right now, we are also using Veeam for certain scenarios.
The problem lies with the 2019 version; it's the file system they're using. I used DPM in 2012 at CFMWS, and then we moved to the 2019 version. We integrated it with Backup Exec because DPM didn't offer features like sharing to back up files on the NetApp.
Microsoft DPM could improve if it was available in a public or private cloud.
The issue with the solution is if you have some problems, it's difficult to find the reason for the problem and to troubleshoot the problems with the solution. There are so many different things to configure. It can really mess with the settings. In general, more settings need to be possible. You have only a few settings and if you change them for some special configurations, it's very difficult. It's not so stable from time to time. You have problems occasionally. Sometimes the Microsoft patches for the operating systems might cause issues. However, with this product, the root cause can be tough to find. It's not that easy to install. You can manage this DPM or you can monitor this DPM with Microsoft Operations Manager and so on.
It needs portability for other vendors. It is good for backing up Microsoft servers, but it doesn't support third-party solutions such as Oracle Database. It depends on Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy, especially for Hyper-V, which has a lot of problems. They should enhance the Volume Shadow Copy functionality. Its reporting should also be better. Reporting is too weak in DPM.
Management reporting could be improved.
The user interface can be improved quite a bit. Overall, I wouldn't describe the solution as user-friendly. It's not very intuitive. The issue is that for users who are not interacting with the product regularly, it becomes difficult to trace the various functionality available. The product version that we have does not have
They could improve the compatibility and integration with other products and the ability to do file-to file backups of other products. I also find the hard disk aligning quite complicated and that should be simplified.
There is a very poor online user community in terms of people blogging about their experiences with DPM. I'm on Google all the time, resolving issues. All I ever find is the official Microsoft documentation. While that can be helpful, and that is in many cases, authoritative, it's not the same as having an independent user community who's writing about it. I have to wonder about the product when I don't see a vital external user community in existence. Every day I have to log in and look at agent alerts and failures that I have to resolve. There are so many different types of agent failures that I have to diagnose pretty much every day due to the fact that the replicas are out of sync with the current state of a file or the VM or something. I'm constantly involved in a lot of hands-on maintenance. They need to change that and potentially make some sort of automated solution to this problem so the workload isn't so heavy for those maintaining the solution. It's not a set it and forget it kind of solution. Not that anything is. However, it's a lot of labor involved in just keeping the replicas in sync. One of the things I think would like to be able to use is their cloud storage at the block level so that it's cheaper for a government entity. We want to have replicas in the cloud, however, it's very expensive. They're using the most expensive tier of Azure storage. We would rather just be able to specify that our cloud backups go to Blob based storage for budgetary purposes. I don't believe that's available, but then again, I can't really find that out online due to a lack of a user community. I would like to maybe have Office 365 backups. I know other vendors offer that however, I don't believe that's available within this solution.
I would say the user-friendliness could be improved because I have found that my colleagues are not finding it very easy to use. I have used it quite well. I was able to do a lot of features within it, but for a frustrated user, it becomes a little user-unfriendly. Also, one issue was if I wanted to restore mail - it's not feasible here.
The DPM is pretty good, but when it comes to external devices, you can't back up to the external device. It's a huge drawback because once everything goes down, it goes down fully. We can't take a snapshot and take it outside, which is a problem. Also, when it comes to recovery, the recovery process doesn't work properly. It doesn't recover. One of our drives failed and when we wanted to recover it from the other drive, it never worked. So, we couldn't recover the data. Recovery of data if the server goes down, is not very good. The DPM is good apart from the support services. We were told that the support was no longer in existence, which is why we are looking for another provider. In the next release, I would like to see backup to external devices, so it can always restore the backup and we can take it externally and store it somewhere that it is off-site and archived. Currently, it does not allow us to do that because it is required to be in one location.
Additional Hyper-V knowledge would be great. There are some articles online detailing the interaction with hypervisors. Using the built-in tools would speed up some of the normal routine procedures.
The data tagging feature needs improvement. The solution could be a bit more intuitive in certain aspects.