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. 

Most cases are related to databases, such as Oracle and MySQL.

Dell PowerProtect DD does not have integration with the cloud and virtualization software.

I have been using Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) for 10 years. We are using DD6300 of the solution.

I do not remember any outage or software bug. I rate the solution’s stability a ten out of ten.

The solution is scalable. About five to ten people are using this solution. 

We are already transitioning to the cloud, and this solution is almost exclusively used for primaries. We do not intend to renew, purchase additional units, or increase capacity.

Customer support is pretty good.

Positive

The initial setup is very simple. I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

We have the installation physically. In our data center, our team and Dell personnel came to us to make the first configuration. Since we already know the solution and have been using it for many years, so it's not very hard or difficult to setup.

Dell PowerProtect is a very efficient and very stable solution. It could have more integration.

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

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 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. 

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.