What's the point of this 'd' nonsense?

So the 'd' in 10d, is supposed to represent 'disk', as in you can now backup to disk, rather than tape, but hang on... we've had disk-based backups since v8.6, so what's the beef?

Well aparantly the emphasis is more on the 'staging' side of things, ie you can backup disk-to-disk-to-tape. Brilliant I thought, that's just what we need. We can do the first backup to disk, which is nice and fast, then we can put that media set onto tape and store it offsite, presumably using the new 'duplicate' feature. That way, we've got the data onsite in case we need a quick restore and a duplicate copy offsite for disaster recover - what more could we want? Even better, it'll all be really easy to do now, because we have 'Policies', 'Selection Lists' and 'Templates' to save time.

NO, NO, NO! What was I thinking?! Did I actually expect the new features to work, as PROMISED? Silly me. That was HOPING for too much. Skip forward to REALITY, which actually means 'disks' are treated exactly the same as tapes. Why? How much more effort would it have been to expect that a 'd' product would have at least some slight comprehension of disk-based media? I'm sorry, but I'd expect a little more intelligence, such as being able to quote the maximum disk size, so that I could actually allocate a quota for a particular device I was backing up. Too much to ask obviously.

And another thing... Am I the only person that thought that this new 'duplicate' media set feature would work between different Managed Media Servers? After all, they're connected via a LAN and they have the ability to share Files and Folders via normal, everyday UNC shares. You can even create a 'duplicate' job and set the source and target devices from different Media Servers - they're all there in the list, but when you try to submit it, it says no. Now that's something that would've been bloody useful. Imagine, you have a Managed Media Server on another site, via a VPN link and being able to automatically duplicate your Media Set to it, so you can relax in the comfort of knowing that you always have an offsite backup? How much more effort would that have been?

Obviously Symantec are very good at painting pictures, but not so good when it comes to implementation. Maybe they should get out of this software game and get into bull**** marketing instead.