Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) Reviews

I have proposed Dell PowerProtect DD in a couple of sectors, including defense, government, finance, and banks. Dell PowerProtect DD faces strong competition with appliances from Veritas, NetVault, and Commvault. 

Dell PowerProtect DD provides better appliances than the aforementioned competitors, has better features and the license is provided without any investments. Veritas offers solution by charging on a per-terabyte licensing model. Dell PowerProtect DD is used to retain or manage backups or sites for later use. 

The licensing model is the most valuable aspect of Dell PowerProtect DD. The pricing is cost-effective for the solution, and a one-time payment is required; no annual charges or additional costs are involved with Dell PowerProtect DD. I deal with multiple brands, so the end customer of the solution contacts me to find a suitable solution to their issues. 

There are multiple Chinese products hitting the market as a competitor tool against Dell PowerProtect DD, which doesn't have a great feature set but is available at an attractive and negotiable price. Recently, Huawei launched a backup solution that is being used in Pakistan or Afghanistan, but the vendor didn't sell it elsewhere. The aforementioned solution is providing tough competition to Dell PowerProtect DD. 

Dell previously had smaller models of Dell PowerProtect DD, which were called DD3300, if the vendor is able to launch a similar mid-range product for customers with an average budget, they will be able to compete better. 

The market is moving towards AI, and NVIDIA has been successful in growing and capturing the market. In Dell PowerProtect DD, there should also be AI features in the future. The vendor is coming up with new intelligence processors. Dell PowerProtect DD must store the data, but through AI, it should know how to retrieve and use it. AI features need to be introduced in Dell PowerProtect DD to capture the upcoming market. Customers of Dell PowerProtect DD know how to store the data but are aware of the applications or use of such data. 

I have been using Dell PowerProtect DD for a year. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. Since the past year of usage, we have never faced any stability issues with the solution, and neither did our organization's customers. 

Enterprise-level businesses, when they purchase Dell PowerProtect DD, plan to use it at least for three or five years. There are very few customers who will repurchase the license for up to seven years, the rest will buy a new version. I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

The product offers impressive scalability, but the issue is that after the initial license expires, which runs for three to five years, customers prefer to replace it with a different one. The solution is suitable for all enterprise, medium, and small-scale businesses. In several cases,  small businesses also deal with critical data, so Dell PowerProtect DD can be a suitable solution for them. 

I would rate the tech support a five out of ten. There is an inconsistency in support quality for Dell PowerProtect DD. On-ground deployment or support assistance is not available for the product in our country, Pakistan, the customers have to purchase support assistance separately.

When purchasing Dell PowerProtect DD, customers are not willing to pay an additional $3000 to $4000 for deployment services and support. But once a customer purchases the solution and faces any trouble with data migration or similar issues, they feel purchasing the deployment services and support is necessary and Dell has the same motive of pushing them to avail support services. 

Often, the account managers our company deals with want to sell equipment or reduce features to onboard the solution at a more cost-effective price.  Dell PowerProtect DD is directly integrated with the servers and not into a massive environment. The product is usually integrated into a single server that runs the software. Dell PowerProtect DD is easy to integrate, but it often involves integrating one server and two switches for redundancy. 

Neutral

It's extremely easy to setup Dell PowerProtect DD. The solution's deployment is mostly carried out by partners, and some of them face challenges because every technology around the solution, including the firmware, needs to be upgraded before the configuration.

Customers with specialized technical knowledge can deploy Dell PowerProtect DD independently. In my country, Pakistan, 95% of customers use the solution on-prem. 

In terms of pricing, Dell PowerProtect DD is facing competition from Veritas and Commvault. In my country, I have sometimes noticed that enterprise businesses are offered the aforementioned competitor solutions at a cost-effective price. I know a couple of government sector projects that have chosen a competitor solution instead of Dell PowerProtect DD due to the pricing. 

Every customer in our organization has a unique requirement; if a customer's basic requirement can be fulfilled by Veritas or Commvault, then the customer reconsiders the pricing of all the options. If Veritas offers the most affordable price, then customers might choose it over others.

If a customer has a sophisticated requirement for a data domain or if the customer's data center has already implemented a data domain, they will be eager to pay a premium price and adopt Dell PowerProtect DD. To onboard more customers in a tender business or government sector, Dell has to come up with a better price for Dell PowerProtect DD.

The deduplication feature of Dell PowerProtect DD is one of the best offering from the solution. For instance, the banking sector institutions make multiple copies of their data. The deduplication feature of the tool is capable of deduplicating at an impressive ratio or amount.

Customers who have adopted Dell PowerProtect DD won't be interested in replacing it with another tool, the cost-effectiveness is one of the factors for such notion. I would overall rate Dell PowerProtect DD a nine out of ten. I would recommend the product to others. 

The solution is mainly used for backups and archiving.

DD's deduplication technology is valuable because it partially offloads deduplication on the client and backup server while the rest happens on the data domain. The deduplication is 65 times more than other products.

DD doesn't have Intel's air gap technology. Regarding the cyber technology area, we have to purchase another data domain to use CyberSense or other software packages, and that's a complex process. On ExaGrid, they do have a built-in air gap, so it's more secure. That's the only part DD has to improve.

I've been using Dell PowerProtect DD for two years now.

DD is a stable product, and we can trust it. There won't be any long downtime with it. It's always on.

I don't think any infrastructure requires more than one database of data backup. 9900 has around 1.5 petabits of capacity in a single rack, and that's huge.

My organization is small. We support other customers, with more than ten customers using the product.

I always contact Dell's technical support team for help with Data Domain. Their services are always excellent. You receive parts the next business day.

Our certified field engineers must do DD's initial setup because it's complicated. However, the initial setup is not complicated; everyone can do it. They just have to follow the procedure. It's always recommended to perform by engineers who are experienced.

Based on price, I can say you won't get 24/7 support from any other product like what Dell EMC provides. The price may be a bit higher than other products in the market, but you will receive ten out of ten support with next-business-day delivery on parts' availability. And on a product basis, DD is a good product. The product comes with a support contract, so DD will be a better option on that basis.

It's worth the money somebody is spending to use Data Domain.

I suggest people use DD because it depends on the requirement. If it's for backup purposes, you should go for it. It is the best product in the market.

I would like to implement Data Domain's virtual edition and take backups to the cloud at the cloud facility.

I rate Dell PowerProtect DD a ten out of ten because it meets all our requirements.

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 Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) for various projects, which is basically associated with the current project work. We procured it for an EHR activity.

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) is expensive. Also, it has a sort of a big physical footprint that data domains have, and that's part of the problem. If we move one of the DR locations to the new project into a data center or Cylance facility, the footprint of the data domain is quite expensive, as well as the unit being expensive. That is the reason why I am looking at options in that area.

Apart from the pricing, there is also room for improvement in the speed of recovery. With the data domains, there is a limit to how much data I can recover and the visibility from a cyber perspective. The discovery at the time when your malware impact may have occurred is quite tricky to pinpoint what, where, and when it is potentially damaged. So, the recovery is harder to define because you don't want to recover more encrypted stuff. For example, there is a piece of work associated with that, which with ease, Rubrik can do quite well.

In addition, there is also some room for improvement with technical support.

I would also like it to be a little bit smaller. It is quite a large footprint. Also, a better interface would be good.

I have been using Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) for probably two to three years.

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

I think Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) is scalable. It is fine. In our company, indirectly, everybody uses the data domain. But it's probably two to three people regularly interacting with it.

The technical support has always been good. No fault with that. However, there is always room for improvement. I would rate its support a nine out of ten.

Positive

It is complex to set that up, and we have had trouble with that. It is not as straightforward as you necessarily hope it to be.

We have got it involved with the cyber vault as well, and that took a month or two to get up and running. But some of that was associated with delivery issues with parts and stuff.

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) is not as intuitive as some other products. Other things out there provide better capabilities. The data domain has got a bit of catching up to do with Cohesity and Rubrik as well.

It is not an area that you necessarily see an ROI. You get recoveries in that, but it's not, like, something that you know. I wouldn't say it is a necessity as opposed to seeing any return on it. So, I don't think you ever would see any ROI.

The approximate license cost for Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) is around 5,00,000. It is a physical license for the term of the product. Veeam has an annual license, and the rest are all tied together.

As for the maintenance costing, I have included that in the capital expenditure on the data domain for the Veeam support maintenance contract associated with that as well. But for the hardware, we purchased., a five-year block as a one-off capital cost, whereas Veeam has a shorter lifetime. This is because it's more revenue-based expenditure. Although we normally buy that for three years. But it's sort of rolling. Whereas we replace the physical hardware for up to five or seven years, depending on limitations on that.

The recovery speed is the most important one for me. The data domain has a bit of a bottleneck on it, including its AI functionality. The data domain is sort of a target. It does not really have much intelligence. So, it depends on Veeam or another solution to do all the backup intelligence around it. It does have different kinds of functionalities to help speed up a backup from Dell SANs and storage and stuff. However, I think that it's not necessarily flexible with all their options for scanning the data that's being ingested and reporting on it.

Another piece of advice that I would give the users who want to use Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) is to do your homework, I think. Making sure you look at all the alternatives and validate the speed with which you can recover is quite important, and knowing what you need to recover.

I would rate Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) an eight out of ten.

We primarily used this product as a solution for backups.

This product improved our system of backup by reducing the time and effort required to manage the system.

The reliability of Data Domain was the most useful feature to me. Every piece of data is recorded multiple times in several devices in a cluster. If any hardware failure occurs, it does not impact the data and does not result in any data loss. Resilience and reliability under any circumstances are important to data security.

Spanning the time I worked with EMC Data Domain, I had no issues that suggested to me that it needed improvement. It was working fine, and anything I wanted to do with Data Domain, I could do it. So I had no idea that it might have needed improvement. That is just thinking from a technical perspective as a user. It did what it needed to do for backup.

In hindsight, I am aware that there is a feature that does not exist in Data Domain related to the security of the product and the data. A friend who works in another organization had a problem when his organization was infected with ransomware. The ransomware locked up the data in the Data Domain and disrupted the data system asking for something in return or it would delete all the data. The ransom was not submitted and the hack successfully deleted all the data. This is a big concern and no small issue where data is critical.

So I believe security measures are not strict enough in Data Domain. I would like to see something in place for better security.

In addition to this — which is related to security as well — there are regulations from the central bank that mandates that we need to keep backup copies that are not connected to the network. They must be completely isolated from the network. Data Domain does not have any arrangements to satisfy this requirement. For compliance, we need to use a secondary solution.

The only other issue is that the prices seem high in comparison to other products and they should consider restructuring their pricing plans.

It's very stable and reliable. I have never had an issue with stability.

This is a very scalable solution. Whenever we needed to we could add new nodes with minimal effort and keep the same data structure.

Defining the number of users for the system is a little tricky because only the backup administrators actually use the Data Domain solution to do the backup procedures for the whole bank as a company. So the actual number of users of the product — hands-on — is around three people. But these three people are doing backups for many systems that are centrally connected to Data Domain. These many systems have around 300 total servers which go through the backup process. Each one of those 300 servers contains data from many users and transactions. In a way, our implementation of this product is serving many thousands of customers, and it can serve many thousands more.

So, yes, I think it is very scalable.

Our experience with customer and technical support has been very good. For example, in one instance we had a problem with the hardware and technical support guy came and replaced the failed component. This was seamless from our operations because the system is highly available and redundant. So everything continued working even with some part failing. But the technical support people were knowledgeable, quick and on-premises.

Before using Data Domain, I was using a tape library. It was IBM Tape Library with LTO (Linear Tape-Open). We switched to EMC Data Domain because of the speed. Backing up data to a tape library is much, much slower than backup to Data Domain, which is based on hard disks. it's much faster in backup.

The system we switched to is actually EMC Data Domain as the hardware device for backup, while Veritas is the software backup. Veritas has its own hardware device. However, EMC Data Domain hardware is much better than Veritas. The golden combination as I see it is EMC Data Domain hardware with Veritas software. Going that way, I get the best of each in our backup solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. For the deployment, it took one day for the hardware implementation and a couple of days for integration with the software. For several days, I worked with IBM TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) or Veritas. All of the parts came together well and I had no real issues.

The implementation was carried out by my team and myself with some input from EMC as well. That was a team was a total of two persons from EMC, one person from my team and myself. I just managed the team and oversaw the process. I think normally that a technical team of about three people can handle the deployment.

As far as having a return on investment, I see investing in Data Domain as having a positive return. It is reliable and it does a very good job when it comes to data compression and deduplication. It makes the backup size much smaller, which saves the company a lot of money because you are not buying tape cartridges for the tape library or even hard discs for temporary backup to store redundant information.

Another ROI which is less tangible is the time for recovery. If I have a problem and I would like to recover something, it is a much faster procedure working with hardware than with tape.

One thing that anyone considering this solution has to realize is that it is expensive. It is expensive for a reason, but it is expensive.

Anyone considering using this solution will first need to make a proper assessment of their need for the data storage because this is misleading. Sometimes managers just make a simple assumption that an organization has about 50 terabytes of data and that they don't need more than this for backup. This is not correct.

If you look into the whole backup strategy, you will see how frequently you will do backups, how many copies we will need to retain, and the period of days that the data is retained — It will be a specific period of days and the backups will rotate. There should be a retention strategy and a rate of change of the data backups. All of these are parameters that affect the sizing of the data domain device. It could be many times the initial size depending on the strategy and how critical the data is. So assessing the proper sizing is very important and key for the success of the backup strategy.

It is important, as well, to assure that the software and the hardware work seamlessly together because you can mix and match software and hardware solutions to come to the ultimate package. Making sure that every feature in the software would work with the hardware is really imperative before making any decision.

On a scale from one to ten with one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate EMC Data Domain as 7.5. The reason why it is not higher than 7.5 is mostly because of the cost. It is a very expensive solution. The lack of better security features to protect the data is really another big issue.

We use PowerProtect to back up physical servers, virtual servers, file systems, and databases.

PowerProtect is a flexible solution that you can cover various cloud and on-premise environments. 

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. 

I have used PowerProtect for about a year now. 

PowerProtect is a highly stable platform. 

PowerProtect can scale up and scale out pretty well.

I rate Dell support eight out of 10. 

I rate PowerProtect seven out of 10. Setting up PowerProtect is a little complex if you've never done it before. Some aspects aren't obvious because it isn't intuitive.

It's hard for me to rate PowerProtect on pricing because it's a large suite of products, with devices at various price points.  

I rate Dell PowerProtect Data Domain eight out of 10. My only advice is to prepare for a lengthy deployment. 

Currently, we use Dell EMC Data Domain for our back-up requirements. We use Cisco Nexus 5K5540, as our core switches. We use Cisco USC-B as a compute engine. 

We use Dell EMC storage as our core storage, and all of these products are still in use. We have had a very good experience with all of them. 

We purchased Data Domain 2500 in 2015 as a primary backup unit. In 2017, we purchased another one, which is the 6300 Data Domain, as our element for the offsite backups. That product is very good. They are both very good in the backup expertise and the installation processes but the issue that we are facing is in the software which is NetWorker. NetWorker is the core Dell EMC software which runs the backups and restores the backups. NetWorker is not as mature as the other products. I have Backup Exec running now, different backup software products. 

The hardware product (Data Domain 2500 or Data Domain 6300) is very good, very reliable, and capable of getting huge data in the form of duplexing, in the form of compressing or in the form of on-lapping. These are wonderful products.

We are using Data Domain 2500 at the primary site and Data Domain 6300 at the other site. We do backups on both the sites with these products.

As our organization functions, we have a total of 2500+ primary sites and 6300+  secondary sites. All of our backup systems are totally dependent on this product. 

Dell EMC Data Domain is very reliable and we have had no issues using it since 2015.

The most valuable feature is the reliability of the backup service. The compressing mode or the number of the backups which are available on the device is also excellent.

Dell EMC Data Domain needs to have better compatibility between NetWorker and the hardware. NetWorker is not as good as the other products which are currently on the market like Backup Exec.

NetWorker is not as feature-rich as other products. On the hardware, there is no issue but the need for improvement is always there. They need to improve the NetWorker software.

The solution is very stable, 100%.

The scalability is there. If you need more storage you can add more boxes of the hard drives and get scalability for multiple terabytes.

We do not have users on this solution, only the data backups are initiating on this product. Any user is not interacting with this device. 

We only require two people for maintenance. One is the primary, the second works as a backup or alternate staff. 

Overall, scalability depends on the backup size. If the backup exceeds more than 80% of the storage, we need to add more. It allocates space for more hard drives to begin setup easily.

Technical support is not very good from the India region but very good from the UK region or the USA. Initially, the Dell EMC support initiated for us from India on the first level but it depends on the principal, i.e. the partner or the purchaser. 

You can identify that the company is not willing to get support from India or any particular region. All of the support we get is now from the USA and the UK. It's very good.

We only use Dell EMC products.

Setup with EMC Data Domain is not complex. Setup is straightforward. Deployment speed depends on the architectural design. In our case, it took around 20 or 25 days for the setup.

We used an integrator from Dell EMC for the implementation. They are the integrators for the deployment of products and their unique configurations. 

My team was also involved in deployment because most of the procedure was conducted with mutual understanding between the partner vendor and our engineers.

Licensing is available under per TB storage rates. Another level of licensing is available on technical support. There is a third licensing tier that includes more features. They are expensive but not complicated, i.e. more for high-end users. Reliability needs more cost.

We evaluated local tape drives. We were using the tape drives from IBM (LTO 3) before the Dell EMC equipment and the product was good but not reliable. 

The backups available on the tape drives have no reliability whether you store them correctly or not. They depend on the nature of the tape or the condition of the tape.

If they have the budget, then I would advise any organization that the Dell EMC Data Domain product is very good. If they don't have the budget, then go with an alternate solution like Veeam.

As a market standard, data tapes are not reliable for a long duration. Only the hard drive based solutions are technically reliable now. It all depends on your budget.

I would rate Dell EMC Data Domain an 8.5 to 9 out of ten.

The main use case for PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) is that it serves as a backup at our company. We use it to protect production data as a secondary backup. Additionally, the solution can be used for long-term storage of data that is not required for six months, one year, or longer. This data can be moved from the solution to a cloud or peer-to-peer network. So, as a long-term archiving solution, we can use it. We can use this solution even for the data moved to cloud archiving solutions. For instance, in AWS, there is something known as an S3 bucket, and if we want to move data from Data Domain to an AWS S3 bucket, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud, or Cloud Block Storage, we can move the data.

Deduplication and compression are the best features of the solution, which are popular and very effective.

Looking at Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain), there is a need for improvement, especially in terms of protection from cyber resiliency, cyber recovery, or man-in-the-middle attacks. Enhancing the cyber resiliency feature is particularly crucial.

It would be beneficial if the solution had an inbuilt virus scanning feature in the future. Some scanning feature, like a vulnerability scanning feature, is essential for all the data we store inside the solution. So, instead of installing the solution on some third-party vulnerability software like Symantec, if they come up with some inbuilt virus scanner, that would be very helpful.

I have been using Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) for eight to nine years. Also, presently I am still using it. My company has a partnership with Dell.

Stability-wise, I rate this solution an eight out of ten since, from a stability point of view, it is a good product.

About the solution, there is PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition and PowerProtect DD Physical Edition. So, I rate PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition a six out of ten since, scalability-wise, many improvements are needed. I rate PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition as a nine out of ten. Considering my clients as users and my previous company, around 5,000 clients were using this solution.

I would rate the technical support a nine out of ten since they offer good support. They assist with fixing bugs or issues and provide help with troubleshooting.

Positive

I have very good exposure using Dell Avamar, Data Domain (DD), PowerVault, and PowerProtect Data Manager.

The solution's setup process is simple and user-friendly. The solution can be deployed on-premises or hybrid cloud. So, it can be deployed both ways.

In our environment, we have integrated Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) with Dell's backup protection software, HPE Data Protector, and Veeam, a vendor.

On a scale where one represents high price, and ten represents low price, I rate the solution a five, which means that the solution is of medium pricing.

When comparing Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) to its main competitors, such as HPE StoreOnce, it is important to note that the internal features, like deduplication and compression algorithms, are significantly different. Also, the deduplication ratio in Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) is more reliable when compared with other vendors like StoreOnce or any other disk-based devices.

I can confidently recommend this solution to those intending to use it. It is a good solution for customers to protect their backup. Overall, I rate this solution a nine out of ten.