Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs ExaGrid EX Series comparison

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs. ExaGrid EX Series

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data ...

Ranking in Deduplication Software

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Disk Based Backup Systems (1st)

ExaGrid EX Series

Ranking in Deduplication Software

8th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Deduplication Software category, the mindshare of Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) is 28.6%, down from 30.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ExaGrid EX Series is 9.1%, up from 9.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Deduplication Software

Featured Reviews

GopalSetia

Director- Pre Sales Enterprise Solution Architect at Wipro Limited

Provides backups, including long-term retention with increased uptime and compatibility

I was looking for a virtual edition, and that is now available. Many customers struggle to find a solution for ransomware protection, but we can set up an enterprise recovery vault for that purpose. These features are now part of Dell's overall offering. The solution has matured, and while I don't criticize technology, most of our technical and business requirements are met with the Data Domain storage solution. We can meet customer requirements easily with Data Domain. Some feedback has been received from our operations team. There’s always room for improvement. For instance, there may be suggestions regarding enhancements to the reporting dashboard

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Daan Lieshout

Server and Storage Specialist at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees

With great features like deduplication and landing zone, the tool also provides stability and scalability

Speed-wise, ExaGrid is much faster than the other solutions in the market. When you choose between or from several different manufacturers, you need to understand a little bit about how the product exactly works and why its speed can be so high while being able to compare it to other solutions, allowing you to know of the backup window if you ever need it. You have to understand how it works and the product's preferences, even though the price may be slightly higher. Learning about the solution is not at all a problem, but when you open a console, you see so many things, and in the beginning you don't understand it all. Later on, it becomes more usable when you start understanding it. In general, ExaGrid provides you with a lot more information than any other system in the market. It is difficult to say what is additionally required in the solution because, presently, it has a lot of things like immutability, anti-hacking, and retention. The solution does put efforts towards improvement. The product's interface provides you with a proper overview of the deduplication rate and the status of how many storage systems you are left with through a visual screen, which is more than enough. When you go deeper, you can access all the enhanced consoles. The product can easily be integrated with third-party products because ExaGrid has all its best practice documents for integrating it with many other products. I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"It is stable. I would rate the stability of the solution a nine out of ten."

"The solution allows us to take a huge number of backups, and the footprint is quite small."

"The backup is very secure. The deduplication using EMC is very good. We are able to make systems and handle random cloning. EMC is a very stable solution for making backups."

"It's very easy to use the domain once it's been set up. The interface is also user-friendly."

"The solution can scale up to one petabyte right now. It's very good for enterprise-level organizations."

"We have never had any issues with Data Domain. It has been stable."

"We are very satisfied with this solution. It's easy to use and efficient."

"The product, a disk backup solution, improves our data application tasks. We used tape libraries with Dev drives in legacy architectures, resulting in slow backups compared to modern drives like NVMe and SSDs. By transitioning to NVMe and SSDs, backups have become much faster. The tool's backup restoration is faster compared to other tools."

More Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) pros

"One of the main features is the landing zone, it is a particular space where the information is not duplicated."

"The most valuable feature is the ease of use and data deduplication. It's extremely easy to use and does a very good job of data deduplication and compression."

"The tool has improved backup and recovery times. One of the key features contributing to this improvement is the landing zone and deduplication retention zone. When data is in the landing zone, the process is fast, ensuring smooth backup and recovery operations at high speeds. However, the process becomes slower for long-term backups moved to the retention zone due to fragmentation. So, if the data is older than a few days, the speed may be limited, especially for non-deduplicated data in the landing zone."

"The most valuable features of the solution are deduplication and landing zone."

"It is a solid and a quite simple solution, which is a good combination. The customers like the simplicity and its scale-out capacity. They like the support pricing, and even the extension capacity pricing, a fixed price, which the executive is offering in Czech market."

"The solution easily integrates with the backup targets, such as Veeam."

Cons

"PowerProtect DD should improve the hypervisor support on the DD system."

"If I were a manager for this infrastructure, I would look into load balancing for cost, maintenance after sale, and improving Dell PowerProtect DD."

"The downside of PowerProtect's flexibility is that you have so many options. It can be a little confusing. It's like having a car with too many buttons on the dash. You can do so much with it, but it takes some time to learn what everything does."

"The price could be improved."

"DD doesn't have Intel's air gap technology."

"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."

"They're scalable."

"Technical support needs improvement."

More Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) cons

"I would like for them to develop direct cloud integration with a third-party cloud. Direct integration with AWS and other cloud providers."

"The product's documentation can be made more precise."

"The one place where we are sometimes losing the opportunity with ExaGrid is that a few customers still require a fiber channel connectivity, which is not always possible."

"When speaking about a scale-out, you want to have better equipment. You cannot just add a disc to the foreign equipment. You have to buy another one and put it together, like parallel."

"The tool reduces storage footprint. However, clients are now storing data for longer durations with increasing requirements to retain backups for longer periods, particularly as a defense against ransomware attacks. As a result, the retention zone with duplicated data is experiencing more demand, leading to space constraints. This necessitates using higher-end, more expensive models to address the issue."

"The solution could improve by switching to a flash-type solution rather than the spinning drives that they currently use. However, we have not had any failure with the spinning drives. The flash-type drives are more up-to-date and are something that is in their roadmap."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the backup appliance is slightly expensive. Compared to other vendors, the pricing will be slightly higher."

"In Naira it was twenty-five or twenty-seven million (approximately $75,000 USD) for the implementation and maintenance cost for three years."

"Becoming more expensive."

"This is one of the more expensive backup solutions on the market."

"Dell PowerProtect DD's pricing is expensive, and there is no option for perpetual licensing."

"The solution is expensive. However, if you pay less you receive less, it is cost-effective."

"The pricing is cost-effective for the solution"

"Pricing is related to size. A lower range solution might be about $33,000. My customers use higher range versions with a price of around $100,000. That's the price for both the hardware and software."

More Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) pricing and cost advice

"The current agreement has 21 terabytes of free space and it cost approximately $35,000."

"In comparison to other solutions, it's affordable. They're all too expensive."

"The previous solutions I have used both included the Backup Software and the Appliance making it hard to compare to this solution. However, overall the solution is reasonably priced for the features you receive. ExaGrid EX Series is priced better than HP, Dell, and possibly Commvault which I have compared in the past."

"I rate ExaGrid EX Series' pricing eight to nine out of ten."

"My company had to pay 1,60,000 EUR for the system we use, and the payment was made just once for the system and five years of full support."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What is your primary use case for Dell EMC PowerProtect DD (Data Domain)?

My use case for this solution is for protecting or backing up data to safeguard against hacking or for disaster recovery. I utilize it in more projects on the governmental side, the non-governmenta...

What do you like most about Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain)?

The product, a disk backup solution, improves our data application tasks. We used tape libraries with Dev drives in legacy architectures, resulting in slow backups compared to modern drives like NV...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain)?

The price is also a disadvantage. Price is a disadvantage with the PowerProtect as it needs to be cheaper. The cheaper device costs around $70,000, which is a big sum to pay for a device like this.

What do you like most about ExaGrid EX Series?

The tool has improved backup and recovery times. One of the key features contributing to this improvement is the landing zone and deduplication retention zone. When data is in the landing zone, the...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ExaGrid EX Series?

I rate ExaGrid EX Series' pricing eight to nine out of ten.

What needs improvement with ExaGrid EX Series?

The tool reduces storage footprint. However, clients are now storing data for longer durations with increasing requirements to retain backups for longer periods, particularly as a defense against r...

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Product Reports

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain)

Download Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) product report

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) report

ExaGrid EX Series

Download ExaGrid EX Series product report

Also Known As

DataDomain, Dell EMC Data Domain, PowerProtect Data Domain

EX Series

Overview

DD series enables your organization to protect, manage and recover data at scale. As the next generation of Dell Data Domain appliances, DD series sets the bar for efficient data management from edge to core to cloud and includes the ecosystem support and comprehensive data protection that customers have come to appreciate from Data Domain. The DD series offers a super-fast, secure, and an efficient solution that is built for multi-cloud data protection and to keep up with future demands. The DD series consists of the DD9900, DD9400, DD6900, DD6400, DD3300, and a software-defined option, PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition (DDVE).

DD series empowers organizations to protect, manage and recover data at scale across their entire diverse ecosystems. DD series provides broad ecosystem support, efficiency, powerful data protection, cloud-enabled capabilities, and the cyber resiliency that our customers demand.

The DD Operating System (DDOS) is the brilliance that drives the DD series. DDOS contributes the agility, security, and reliability that pushes DD series to deliver high-speed, scalable, and standard-setting protection storage for backup, archive, and disaster recovery. DDOS integrates seamlessly with many existing infrastructures, permitting ease-of-use with leading backup and archiving applications, and provides superior performance in conjunction with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager and Data Protection Suite. When you decide to purchase a new DD series appliance you can easily consume DDOS as a subscription providing greater flexibility for deployment while minimizing your overall upfront costs.

DD series does a great job to minimize the threat of data loss and adds to the value of protected data while meeting ever-increasing demands of SLAs and increasing ROI. DDOS drives DD series to deliver up to 38% faster backups and up to 45% faster restores at significantly higher compression levels.

DD series supports high availability within the single rack. Additionally, DD series can greatly reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) by minimizing downtime in the unlikely event of a hardware failure. DD series delivers amazing high-speed networking connectivity with support for 25GbE and 100GbE network adapters.

Benefits of Dell PowerProtect DD

Fast, secure, efficient data protection:

Provide 1.5PB usable capacity in a single rack
Allow for Up to 3PB capacity for long-term retention
Logical capacity is increased by up to 30% per TB when compared to the previous generation
Allow for instant access and instant restore of up to 64VMs and 100k IOPS
High-speed network connectivity – 10GbE, 25GbE and 100GbE
Seamless fast integration and outstanding performance with PowerProtect Data Manager and Data Protection Suite
Supports many of the leading enterprise backup and archive applications

Industry-leading multi-cloud protection:

Provides software-defined protection storage on-premises and in-cloud with PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition (DDVE).
DDVE scales up to 256TB in-cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and others).
Greatly improves in-cloud restore performance by as much as 10x when compared to previous versions.
Cloud Tier delivers super simple and value-added long-term retention to public, private, or hybrid clouds
Cost-efficient disaster recovery to the cloud

Operational simplicity:

Enhanced DD System Manager supports a complete chassis view
Significantly lower administrative costs
Grants a single point of management for all DD series by PowerProtect DD Management Center
Deploy Smart Scale for PowerProtect appliances directly from PowerProtect DD Management Center. Smart Scale helps drive down management complexities while increasing storage efficiencies.

Reviews from Real Users

One user, who is an enterprise IT architect at a tech service company, says that “Dell PowerProtect DD is highly stable and reliable. I have not had a time when the system did not work and in an emergency this is critical.” He rates the ROI it has brought his company a five out of five.

A pre-sales and technical manager at a tech services company says that "The features that I have found most valuable with Dell PowerProtect DD are its deduplication feature and its DD Boost protocol for fast transfer, which is amazing."

Chris C., lead infrastructure architect at ThinkON, relates that Dell PowerProtect DD “allows our organization to send more data to this device compared to others. It also allows us a fast recovery of files or Virtual Machines if needed being on-premise.”

Dell Technologies

The ExaGrid EX Series hyper-converged secondary storage for backup product line consists of eight appliance models. Each appliance is sized for a full backup and for long-term retention. Any ExaGrid appliance can be mixed and matched in the same scale-out system with any other size or age appliance, allowing customers to buy what they need as they need it. This pay-as-you-grow model allows up to 25 appliances in a single scale-out system.

ExaGrid

Sample Customers

The US Army, City of Houston, Lloyds TSB, TiVo, Teck, Ingram Entertainment, The New York Mets

NCI Group, North Attleborough Public School, North Kingstown School Department, NPS Pharmaceuticals, Prudential Douglas Elliman, Rathbone Brothers PLC, Rio Hondo College, Ruder Finn, Sarah Lawrence College

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs. ExaGrid EX Series