Microsoft DPM Reviews

I found Microsoft DPM pretty useful. It satisfied most of my requirements. We have a local tape drive as well, so we do an online backup of the exchange onto hard discs which later gets transferred to the tape drive. It seems to be fulfilling all the requirements, except I would say it's not very user-friendly.

One of its most valuable features is its capability to give a BMR for all the workstations that I want to connect to or to the servers, as well as the fact that it could do an online backup off the exchange.

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.

I have been familiar with this solution for about six years.

I had no problem with the stability - I could easily schedule it for the times I wanted the backups to take place.

I didn't have any issues with the scalability.

I only contacted customer support once. It's a brilliant product. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It took about an hour. I did it myself.

We bought the system center and we bought the DPM, as well, so I didn't need to upgrade the product at a later stage. I bought the SA for one year so it didn't cost much. I can't remember what I paid for the total licensing cost of that. Then, after one or two years we bought it on a three-year fee scenario and since then I have not had the need to buy any more SA solutions.

I would rate Microsoft DPM an eight on a scale from1-10.

On-premises

I primarily use the solution for my documentation projects.

The user interface is very good. The reporting and monitoring features are also good.

The data tagging feature needs improvement. The solution could be a bit more intuitive in certain aspects. 

I've been using the solution for three years.

The solution is stable. We've never had any issues.

Technical support is good. We're satisfied with the level of support we get.

The initial setup is very easy. Deployment takes less than an hour.

We did use consultants to assist with some features.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

Overall, I really like the product. There's not really any feature that is missing.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. it's very user-friendly, and I can do everything I need to do. It's very simple for me to use.

Ease of D2D and D2T backups.

Fast restores

In the areas of disaster recovery.

2.5 years.

Recent minor upgrade required a reboot of all of my protected 2008 servers. This I considered unacceptable as I had to reschedule an outage window to reboot 100+ servers. 

Yes, occasionally protection will stop working say for a simple system state backup.  

Microsoft support for this product is very good. Open a web ticket and they will call you and still maintain the ticket as a web ticket

Organization used BUExec but migrated to DPM because of Microsoft licensing and cost to maintain BUExec.

Straightforward.

In-house implementation.

Not given opportunity by management to evaluate additional products.

Very good for Microsoft workloads. 

Recovery.

Yes: failure of primary; agent resource use.

I'm afraid I fail to see how the CEO of a 500+ employee company can be a "real user" in any relevant sense. The real hands-on experience with DPM is that it's difficult to set up unless you get it right first time, the agent processes gobble CPU and i/o, and if you're unfortunate enough for your DPM primary to go awol, you're faced with building a complete DPM network again because the secondary/ies will refuse full backups if the primary isn't there.

• Data Protection Manager enables fabric administrators to exercise flexibility and freedom in carrying out live migrations of VMs. As an administrator, it is easier now to handle migration of VMs from standalone to cluster, move them within standalones as well as within and across the cluster. • Offers a perfect solution to redundant data. Data Protection Manager assigns a link to the actual file that connects it to the common area where duplicated cold data is stored. I have found this to be a great saving on file system as file contents are maintained in common chunks.

• Optimization of fabric administrator cause management problem to arise in backup administrator as it leads to the backup software failure in a manner that cannot be foreseen or anticipated finding backup administrators unawares. • In trying to solve the backup issue, Data Protection Manager involves complex connection of DPMs and VMM serves which may pose a challenge to beginners.

Data Protection Manager provides data protection to your business system which covers every challenge posed by VMs migration. Through efficient use of DPMs or leveraging the situation by applying recovery techniques such as Item Level Recovery, data protection and recovery can be highly boasted. Leaning and understanding the file will enable one to master recovery techniques such as capability to recover directories and small file rather than the whole volume. This make the experience with Data Protection Manager a delight.