Data Pump provides these features:
Better performance and more manageability than the old export/import
It is a server side tool
Resume / suspend control
Network Mode
Restartable
Fine grained object Selection
Provides a Metadata API
Oracle Data Pump is a facility available since Oracle 10g Release 1. It first appeared back in 2003. It enables high speed data and metadata transfers. It is an efficient, manageable, adaptive tool that can be used in more than one mode; namely, the regular command line interface, the suspended mode, the network mode, and the PL/SQL API mode. Besides the CLI interface, it is used by Enterprise Manager, SQL*Loader (by means of the external data pump table driver), the PL/SQL API, and other clients.
Data Pump is a productive tool designed to make the DBA's life easier. It can be easily set to a suspended mode and brought back to work wherever it was stopped. A session does not need an interactive connection to perform data management, so it can leave an unattended job and it can be resumed any time. This tool doesn't need to generate a file to transfer data in a database-to-database mode; it is the so called network mode, which is very useful when a single load is performed. When this data transfer mode is used, data does not have to be erased afterwards as there is no intermediate file created to move the data. The network mode is similar to the conventional named pipes which are used to perform data transfers on the fly; however, this traditional approach is not available on all Operating Systems(OSes) (Windows does not support named pipes). If a task is launched, even if a degree of parallelism hasn't been specified, it can be modified at run time, so resource consumption can be increased or decreased at will.
Data Pump allows high speed data movement from one database to another. The expdp command exports data and metadata to a set of OS files known as a dump file set. Compared with the traditional export/import tool set, Data Pump allows a DBA to easily clone accounts, move objects between tablespaces and change other object features at load time without being required to generate an SQL script to have the object modified, rebuilt and loaded. This kind of on-the-fly object redefinition is known as the remap feature. Data Pump performance is significantly better than that of the old export/import tools.