Lately I've been working with System Center - Data Protection Manager from Microsoft and I have to say that while it's a nice product, there are some areas that need improvement. One of the things I've been wanting to do is talk about some of the issues I've had and open up a forum to discuss those issues. To start this off, I'm taking some of the problems that I've had with DPM's tape handling.
Note: I don't want it to look like I'm just bashing DPM. I DO like parts of it. If you know of ways to resolve these issues, PLEASE let me know. I'll post those fixes as updates.
Tape Issue El Five:
Inconsistency in tracking tape movement. When I use the tape device to remove a tape or multiple tapes (since this is the only manner to eject or load tapes), DPM does not see that I’ve done anything; it never actually talks to the tape library. When I try to resync, the progress bar completes but no updated information is produced. If I re-run a Detailed Inventory, it then finds out what tape slots are actually occupied. This seems like a lot of tape movement just for DPM to see that a tape has been removed.
Tape Issue Number VI:
The whole OMID and barcode thing. I know there has been talk about getting this fixed, but it is a big stopper when I can’t erase the tapes or generate an OMID on my own to pop in there. Until this gets resolved, I’ve just turned off the barcode reader in the tape library.
Tape Issue Number 7:
I can’t figure out how to allow multiple protection groups to get written to a single tape. This may just be me missing something pretty obvious, but I would like to be able to put multiple, smaller protection groups all on one tape so that I don’t have the huge number of extra media just to back up a bunch of 600MB – 20GB protection groups.
Yes, Number 4 is missing. When I was writing this, originally, I was doing it in the heat of irritation. That leads to many things like snarky humor and missed counts.