Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) Reviews

I'm an architect, so I only use Data Domain to design solutions for clients right now. I'm not using it so much as for management or administration. My clients all like it, and It's an effective storage system.

Data Domain is an excellent repository that's compatible with a lot of different solutions. Even Veeam Backup recommends sending backup to Data Domain. Space optimization is great. Currently, it guarantees 50-to-1 compression of the application in the same device. In all these years, I never had a client who was unsatisfied with Data Domain. It is a solid appliance with VMware integration, instant access to restore and search, and analytics.

Data Domain lacks compatibility with fiber channels and tapes. We can't use it with a tape library. That's an issue in Latin America sometimes because a lot of clients still use tapes for budget reasons. Maybe they have a lot of archives. In North America and Europe, they do a lot of archiving, but they use the cloud more than we do. Sometimes we have to put together a Frankenstein where we connect another server to the tape library and send all the data there. 

I understand why integration with tapes isn't possible because they are designing these applications for the future. In the next decade, all the information will be sent through private and public clouds. It's a great way to send data. It can be software-defined, so you have lots of paths to send information, and it's it's not too slow, so I guess that's why they don't support tapes. When we have challenges with other providers, maybe an internal ID would help.

Also,Dell's backup software comes in a lot of flavors, and there's a bundle that gives you all the functionality. You use this software to do this and another to do that. There isn't a single application that can do everything, and sometimes that makes some struggles.

I got my first Dell certification in Data Domain about six or seven years ago, but I've been working on it for maybe two years. 

We use other products, but it's not a one-to-one comparison with Data Domain because they're software solutions. For example, competitors like Veeam Backup have only one software solution that you can't license to other users. You have to buy the license for Veeam Backup for a socket, but it involves all the the functionalities. Maybe you have to buy a part of the instances for taking the backup for the databases. 

It's a perpetual license, but you pay monthly for support. If you're integrating with the cloud, you have to pay for using the cloud. That's the only recurring cost you have with this tool.

Data Domain is a 10 for me. It's a great storage device.

This solution is deployed on-premises.

The most important feature is the level of data compression provided by Dell EMC. It's a leader in data compression and deduplication, and the level of compression isn't available with any other vendors in the market.

The only problem is that it's more expensive than any other vendors available in the market. Overall, the product has a very large portfolio, and even the support level is great, but the challenge is the cost.

I would like to see a direct cloud backup solution. I should be able to directly take a backup into the cloud instead of having another product in between PowerProtect. It should be flexible enough to support the cloud.

I have been working with this solution for almost six years.

It's very stable.

They have very experienced guys, and we have exchanged information with the offices in Singapore and Europe. I would rate them 4 or 5 out of 5.

For the initial setup, you need to involve some of the OEM or service providers. You need support from the vendors because the complete design should be perfect, otherwise the product will not be deployed as per the requirement.

For maintenance, it's very limited because automations are available, but we need people to keep track of all the backup jobs that are in progress. You need a team that has experience with these products, but it depends on how large your environment is. If you have multiple offices in multiple countries, you need a large number of staff who can support these products.

It has a lot of automation which is supported, and it supports cloud-based implementation as well. The cloud side of it is very easy to create. You don't need to build anything in the cloud. If you're using it on-premise, you need people to manage and maintain it.

The price is really high compared to other vendors. The licensing cost is huge. Normal, mid-tier companies or small-scale companies wouldn't be able to afford it easily. Only bigger organizations like enterprises can afford this kind of product.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

We use the solution as a backup and to restore applications. 

It's business continuance versus disaster recovery. Business continuance is you lose some data at your data site or maybe get data corruption, due to malware, or somebody deletes something by mistake, and you've got to restore it. You go to your backup to do that, and that's business continuance. Disaster recovery is if your whole site's gone down and you need to run at another site. For business continuance, you need a product like Data Domain Power Protect.

There are capital expense benefits that you get if you're running into issues where typically, you're charged by how much physical space you take up. Data Domain or PowerProtect will save you expenses as you have physically less space. In other words, what deduplication and compression do, is, if you have 100 terabytes of physical storage and you're backing that up, maybe you're only backing it up to 30 physical terabytes on the appliance, on the Data Domain PowerProtect device. So you're saving a lot of physical space in your rack.

It has a feature where, instead of having a separate media server for backup to run the backup software, Dell now provides a version that runs it all together, so you don't need a separate media server.

It has a feature called deduplication which saves you space in your rack. If you run somewhere else and you get charged for physical space. this avoids using extra space, and that's a big plus.

The compression aspect of the solution is great.

It is very reliable. They have 99.999% uptime.

The product is scalable. 

Nothing comes to mind in terms of improvement. It serves its purpose. That said, if they could develop higher algorithms to make it more efficient, that would be great. 

Usually, with the backup, the issue is how fast it can do it. As network speeds improve, the solution improves. It has to keep up with the available network speeds, however. For example, a 100-gigabit ethernet. They need to keep up with the advancements in network speeds, and ethernet speeds. If they keep up, instead of taking five hours to back up your daily workload, you may do it in three hours.

It can be complex to implement.

I've used the solution for five to six years. 

The solution is stable. The products are very, very reliable. They're designed for what they call 99.999% at least, which is less than an hour a year of downtime.

It is very reliable. 

They're scalable. The Dell and HPE solutions are all scalable, and they can have up to, nowadays, multi-petabytes.

You can go to the cloud as well to scale even further. You can have some of your data in the data center, and you're physically owning this product in your data center, and at some point in time, if you want to archive some of that, it goes to the cloud. That's usually through what they call an S3 interface, which is an Amazon AWS protocol. Amazon AWS has an interface to their S3 storage. All the vendors now have an interface regardless of whatever cloud it goes to; they have expandability scalability up into the cloud through this S3 interface that was made popular by Amazon Web Service, AWS.

We're a vendor that sells the solution. Our clients decide when and if they scale. 

I think it's a well-established product, and everybody understands the functionality.

Positive

We do deal with various other solutions. There are five others on the market. One is ExaGrid. IBM has another. 

If somebody writes an RFQ, like a government agency, that says, "You guys have to tell me what's best," all those companies will be competing against each other.

The setup can be complex. 

You only need one person to implement the solution. 

Usually, we recommend that professional services do the implementation. These solutions get more complex with all the different appliances and devices. We usually recommend that we include professional services to do it for the customer.

We have seen an ROI. You get the functionality, period. And whether you need something that's going to do the deduplication and compression is the additional benefit of this type of device. Companies can't run without a backup device. This is a backup target for your backup software, so you need to back up or lose your business.

There are many different licenses, so you pay for what you need. There are various aspects you can add on, like extra speed, or something just for reading data. There are licenses to do replication as well. You have a lot of options. 

We are dealing with the newest version of the solution. We sell it. We are not end-users. 

I'm an engineer that helps with the sales teams. I'm the one who recommends these products and puts them together as a solutions architect.

One client is going from two to three shelves, or 60 to 90 terabytes.

The solution is comparable to other offerings and vendors. However, I've been pleased with its capabilities. I'd rate it nine out of ten.

The cost is quite good if you look at the product. 

It should provide everything that an enterprise needs. 

It can back up all the workloads on-prem, off-prem, and mainly the VM infrastructure. You should be able to replicate to another site. 

The reporting and monitoring features that it provides are great. 

It offers security with the software.

The stability is excellent.

The solution scales well.

The new niche players are currently very good, but some things that they lack. As an example, NetApp Filer. There is no real partnership between different vendor platforms such as EMC or NetApp. They don't really talk that much. There needs to be better ease of use with like APIs and automation and things of that nature. Some vendors are more API friendly, some vendors are not. Being API friendly will help.

EMC is just coming out with their global deduplication future with virtual addition and things like that. Which is still in the works.

They need to make migration easier. 

The solution is very stable. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. There is not any other storage, deduplication storage appliance, that will match Data Domain. That is pretty much as stable a product as we have seen.

The solution can scale well.

Overall, technical support has been pretty good. However, the support recently, the support that is coming in from India, is not as good as what we used to get before. In the past year, we have seen a significant drop in call response.

When we installed the solution, pretty much the software all was new. It was Legato earlier and then it was using Networker version eight everywhere else. When we started deploying it, we started with version nine. We pretty much started with the latest versions of the software. There were some growing pains, however, we were able to step up the enrollment and it was good in the end. Beyond a few issues right at the outset, it was a good experience. 

The cost is quite reasonable. 

Earlier, when we started deploying, we had to use a single DDBoost user for each EMP. I don't know our storage unit, however, now, with the latest release, we can use multiple users. That is one good reason why people should start using this solution, as there is one DDBoost user per entry. That way, it is easier to migrate or move across, for example, during your tech refresh. When they offer some kind of a load balancing feature in front of Data Domain it will be a good thing. We know that they always have it in the roadmap, however, we have never seen that come through.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for backup, data protection, and data encryption.

The most valuable features of the solution are recovery point, compression, and deduplication. Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) is a reliable solution.

The solution's cost, scalability, and licensing model could be improved. Nowadays, competition models offer higher capacity and scalability. The solution's marketing or awareness should be improved. Users need to buy additional Dell software technologies along with the solution, which is an additional cost.

I have been using Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) for more than ten years.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.

Around 15 to 20 customers use Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain).

The solution’s initial setup is straightforward.

Around five to seven engineers were involved in the solution's deployment.

The solution’s return on investment is good, and we haven't seen any disaster with the solution.

Users have to pay a capacity-based licensing fee for the solution.

Since the solution's backup text is in encrypted mode, it protects us against ransomware attacks. Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) is a good solution for enterprise-level customers. However, it is not suitable for small and medium-level business customers. I would recommend the solution to other users because it is stable and reliable.

The solution's performance compared to other data protection products is very good.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I have an IT company and have tested it in order to see if I could resell it to clients.

They have a very nice, clearly laid out dashboard.

The functionality has been excellent.

So far, the solution is stable. 

Its pricing is not overly expensive. 

I still need to try all the features and functions. As a reseller, it's important I understand it and I have only used it for a few weeks. It helps if you have in-depth knowledge in order to use it correctly.

Scaling can be better.

I've worked with the solution for 15 days so far. I was testing it.

I'm not sure about the stability. I haven't yet tried it with big companies. I just tested the solution for a little bit. So far, for that purpose, it was stable. I didn't come across bg or glitches, and I haven't seen it crash or freeze. 

The scalability could be better. I'm not sure how it would scale for bigger organizations. 

We have just two people using the solution right now. It's myself and an administrator.

I haven't needed any help yet and therefore have not used technical support.

I'm not sure if we used a different solution previously.

The solution is moderately straightforward to set up It's not easy or difficult. 

The deployment took about one to two hours. It didn't take long. 

I handled the implementation myself. I did not need help from integrators or consultants. 

The price of the product is pretty reasonable. 

We are dealing with the latest version of the solution.

We haven't had any difficulties with the solution while testing it. Maybe once we try to deploy to a sizeable company, we will find challenges. However, so far, it is good. 

I'd recommend the solution. It's worked well, and it has good Google reviews. 

I would rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for large backups. This is a piece of hardware that we can place software on. 

It's used widely in some of the largest banks in our country - including foreign banks. They use Data Domain in petabytes. 

The specific algorithms of backups of the data deduplication are very good. For example, some of our competitors need much more space. When we have to use one additional enclosure, they have to use two times more. Data Domain has a lot of space. 

The technology has been very useful. There are lots of features on offer.

It's very competitive. We get discounts on pricing and find the cost to be quite good. 

The solution is stable and reliable.

It is scalable. 

We'd always prefer if there was even more competitive pricing since they are very close in price to Quantum. However, the pricing isn't too bad.

The initial setup is complex. The installation process should be easier so you can install the solution without having specialized techs. 

I've used the solution for several years. It's likely been more than six years. 

The solution seems to be quite stable. We haven't had issues with bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable. 

It's a scalable product.

Technical support is helpful. The Dell rep office in the country has many experienced techs. 

We also have a lot of knowledge in our own right.

From time to time, when we do need help, it's nice to have experienced techs we can reach out to. 

The issue we have right now is spare parts. We're in Ukraine, and the war made it difficult at the outset. It has gotten better. It's okay at the moment. 

We've used a variety of different products. We use different brands simultaneously. It depends on the customer's needs. Some offer more competitive tenders, and some are used based on the government structure.

The implementation can be complex. It's not very simple to set up.

The deployment took a couple of days. 

We typically have one or two engineers working with the solution. That's enough personnel to deploy and design the setup, et cetera. One person is quite enough to maintain the product.

Our team handled the deployment of the product. We didn't need outside assistance. 

The solution is reasonably priced. We get discounts as well. They remain competitive.

It's a hardware solution. We don't have to worry about software licensing. We can use any software on it that the client likes.

Data Protect, DP 400, and higher models include EMC software and a set of various different software.

If you buy the unit, you pay for it for three or five years. They also offer support with a warranty that you can extend.

When we help our customers or some governmental structures to prepare the documents for bidding for some tenders, we investigate the details and competitive features of our solutions. That includes Dell EMC, HPE, and Quantum Alliance. They are all very close in functionality.

HP tends to have higher pricing; however, Quantum is quite close in terms of cost.

We're a platinum partner.

I'm using the latest version of the solution.

We have certified engineers for Data Domain.

I am the general manager of the company. I'm not an engineer.

I'd recommend the solution to others. 

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

The tool's performance is very good. DD Boost can improve its performance and backup. 

The tool's DD Boost is expensive. 

I have been using the product for ten years. 

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) is scalable. I rate it a six out of ten. 

I rate the product a six out of ten.