I don't know who invents these cumbersome product names at Microsoft ...but the product certainly is much better than the name suggests.

 

With the Service Pack 1 (SP1), which was released a couple of months ago, the product has been improved to a level that will make it very hard to ignore when it comes to backup needs for assets that are stored in SharePoint, SQL server, Exchange Server or any kind of Hyper-V virtual machines. See an overview of the latest improvements here.

 

From our perspective the product has numerous outstanding features. "Item-level" restore of SharePoint assets comes to mind first, but it is the deep integration with several of the major Microsoft server products - a strategy that Microsoft has played time and time again - which makes it increasingly harder for any competitor.

 

Also, the simple and elegant way of implementing a two-stage backup process (disk and - optionally - tape) is just great. So far only Iron Mountain is offering a hosted solution for tape-backup, which I believe is a very good way to implement this. So far they have been "hush hush" about the pricing on this solution, so I wonder if it's really available yet, but I guess it's just a matter of time for them, or their competitors, to make this available.

 

The DPM install process altogether is not too bad, but there are a few things that have to be configured manually. There are also still a few major issues to be aware of, when implementing the latest release, especially with the Hyper-V support. It might just take the "famous 3rd release" for DPM to gain mainstream acceptance, but I am sure it won't be long before this will be out.

 

Another potential issue is around Firewalls, as the solution requires the install of an "agent" on the managed servers. In our experience, disabling the local firewall, installing the agent, and then re-enabling the firewall worked fine, but there are reports from people that came across the need to do some more manual work to open up the specific ports, e.g. as mentioned here.

 

The one potential problem that did take us a good couple of hours to track down was not specific to DPM itself, but to our ISA server that provides a VPN tunnel/gateway: even though the respective ISA rule was set to "Allow all outbound trafffic" the RPC filter had to be disabled in the System Policy editor and the firewall rule.

 

 

To sum up, the current release is definitely great value, as it makes not just backup, but also restore, so simple. Do yourself a favor, especially if you have been backing up your SharePoint data with nothing but stsadm, look at least at this document to get yourself convinced about the great added value of SCDPM. Also, here's the overview page for the SharePoint&SCDPM integration.