Something that has been bugging me for years is that fact that you cannot installed the DPM console on a separate computer; eg, the admin workstation. It would be great if they also converted to the new Outlook-style console.There is also room for improvement on reporting.

-- Maarten

- Ability for an agent to dump a local cached copy of the backup to a large external USB drive at the remote site.

We wanted to use DPM for backing up our remote branch offices, but we needed to keep a copy of the data locally at that site as well as at our HQ. It's just not practical to restore a large SQL database across a WAN from HQ, whereas if it had kept a cache on a local drive at the site it'd restore from it in minutes. Unfortunately, we had to opt for another solution.

Some non-Windows data can be backed up using DPM.  You can use Quest Software QMX architecture to extract the cisco configs and pull them down for backup in a DPM protected folder.  That ones easy. For *nix devices you could do a mount from/to a *nix box and have that dpm protected, but your probably going to hit some snags with large data sizes, so a 5TB presented lun may not be the direction you want to go.  If your looking to backup some small stuff , configs, critical files, etc.. its all good.  You could back up the mount as is or use it as a bin for backups of specific files and/or app/db backups (like rman) to be pulled into dpm.  You can use QMX open architecture to automate command calls, file moves, copies and routine backup tasks for these purposes as well on the *nix boxes to augment the solution and populate this dpm protected location.  Not superbly elegant a backup solution as direct dpm protected *nix location relative to how *nix based backup agents work, but a solution for use of DPM nonetheless if you've committed.

I wish I could easily schedule SQL and Exchange restores to disk, so I could pick these up with an existing backup solution in heterogeneous environments. Allowing this would eliminate the need for separate tape backup hardware and paying extra for separate tape rortation and archival...Nice manageability and TCO / ROI benefits.

It would be nice to get SCDPM in the door for Windows backups in situations where coexistence with existing backup solutions is necessary.

1) Administrator console should be reachable from a remote computer
2) Security so that different persons can view different protection groups, do different actions etc...
3) Possibility of protection different "folders" that reside on the same volume in different PG's
4) More Application support:  I think it would be a commercial smart move to start protection other products of Microsoft that include the database, configuration files... (for example SCCM, SCOM ;-))
5) Possibility of backing up servers in another domain or workgroup (through Certificates)

That would already be great ;-)

Cheers,

Mike