I’ve been using DPM 2012 R2 for a few months now, having replaced Symantec Backup Exec 2010 due to growing data sizes and increased struggles with tape rotations.
However I’ve found a number of deficiencies with DPM that make me wish we were able to implement something like Veeam instead.
Here’s a short summary of what I need DPM to do better:
- No deduplication support!
- Disk volume based system leaves ‘islands of storage’ unusable and inefficient
- Prevents disk from being shared for other backup purposes such as Hyper-V replication
- Lack of long-term disk backups
- Our TechNet reading has shown that since DPM uses VSS it can only take a maximum of 64 snapshots for a protected resource. We’re currently unsure if this applies to VMs as a protected resource
- Poor visibility into DPM running operations
- No clarity on what the data transfer represents
- No information on compression ratios
- No transfer speed indicators
- No easy way to see status of data across all protected sources
- No dashboards or easy summaries.
- Many clicks to drill down into each protection group
- Poor configurability on logging
- Email notifications are very chatty, or non-existent without much middle ground.
- No escalation methods or schedules
- No automated test restore capabilities or scheduling
- Limited Reporting
- Only 6 reports out of the box, and must use SQL Reporting Services to build anything new (which I am adept with, but that’s besides the point)
- Tape Library support seems cumbersome, compression isn’t work despite it reporting as running
- No built in VM replication technology for Disaster Recovery scenarios
- Very low community knowledge or support
- For example, trying to find information on tape compression is impossible; no one online is talking about DPM and how it’s used.
- No central console for viewing multiple backup source/destination pairs
