Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) Reviews

We're a system integrator, and we're providing services for a number of customers. It's not like we are using these products ourselves.

The deduplication and compression are great. 

We started looking at Data Domain together with the Dell Cyber Recovery solution to have them work together.

The solution is stable.

We have found the product to be scalable. 

The interface is fine.

It has good documentation.

Compatibility with other products is okay.

I cannot speak to the exact areas that need improvement at this time. 

The pricing could be lower. 

We've used the solution for a couple of years now. 

It's a stable, reliable product. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. The performance is good. 

The solution is scalable and pretty simple to grow. We work mainly with medium to enterprise-level organizations, and it works well across both. 

Technical support is quite good. We find them to be helpful and responsive. 

We are mostly also working with Dell. 

I've never handled a deployment and, therefore, cannot speak to the implementation process. 

The cost could be lower. Sometimes it's not very competitive.

The licensing depends on the specific solution sizing, however, there are cheaper solutions that I have seen in the market. For example, HP tends to cost less. 

We are a partner of Dell and a reseller. 

I'm a presales consultant.

It's a very stable product. It has some drawbacks in that it's quite expensive compared to other solutions. We mostly use it for enterprise customers. So they could improve a bit on the options for pricing. Beyond that, it's a solid product.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) is the customer's requested solution. I did not suggest this solution to the customer.

I use Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) for disaster recovery, and for the backup of disaster recovery for a large society for training in Italy 

The backup on the secondary Data Domain and then backup on the cloud.

I like Data Domain as a protocol for data backup.

I prefer the HP solution.

Technical support needs improvement.

I have been working with Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) for ten years.

It is deployed both on the cloud and on-premises.

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) is a stable solution.

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) is absolutely scalable.

I would rate the technical support a one. It could be better.

Negative

Previously, I did not use another solution. I am only familiar with Data Domain.

Only one day is required for Data Domain setup and configuration.

I can't remember what the license costs are. They might be paid monthly or every two months.

I would not recommend this solution to others.

I would rate Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) a five out of ten.

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.

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.

I am using Dell PowerProtect DD for data extraction for extract, transform, and load(ETL) processes. This is a tool that receives data from operational platforms, or systems, such as in my factory in insurance, underwriting, claim management or health provisioning, et cetera. It receives the data from the source systems and not from the data warehouse platform by doing transformation or by loading the data or after loading the data. 

The usage of this solution is a bit difficult to develop processes, and it takes a long time to market permits.

I have been using Dell PowerProtect DD for 15 years.

Dell PowerProtect DD is a stable solution.

Dell PowerProtect DD is scalable but there are better tools.

The data engineers are using this platform in my company. There are 15 data engineers, and all of them are using this tool.

We are using technical support from the producers, and it is not good. I'm not happy with the technical support.

I rate the support from Dell PowerProtect DD a two out of five.

The initial setup of Dell PowerProtect DD is complex. Its initial setup is a bit complex because it uses many services on the operating system. Sometimes it is hard to solve the issue while installing the solution on-premises.

I rate the initial setup of Dell PowerProtect DD a three out of five

With the Dell PowerProtect DD, it is not possible to deploy the solution by ourselves. We deployed, and upgraded the solution, it took more than a month because there were problems, and the producer need to solve the issues. This is what took time.

We needed to get help to implement the solution because the producers because it is not easy.

If we do not move to the cloud solution and stay with our on-premise version we will miss some new features.

I rate the price of Dell PowerProtect DD a three out of five.

I rate Dell PowerProtect DD a six 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.

Our primary use for this product is for backup purposes and compression.

There are a number of ways that it improved our organization with the processing of backups and saving disk space, but the costs are somewhat prohibitive.

The most valuable feature, beyond simply backing up our servers, is the data compression capability.

There are several things that can be improved with this product even though it is not bad. 

The biggest concern for us is the licensing model. In terms of feature capability, there are too many separate modular features that require licensing. I would like to see a Data Domain license for one cost that contains what we need to utilize the product to its full capability. I don't like the idea of having to worry about buying another license to do something else and add functionality. So I am suggesting that it would be good if they made the product more integrated and adaptable.

If I choose not to use only EMC products, it should allow me to make whatever integration I choose to do with ease. It is not so easy to do this.

The technical support after the initial deployment and having the service account manager on site was not so good. They should have better means of support while you are using the product to encourage success with the product and that you remain a customer. 

During the period where you have resident, live support to take care of issues the product remains stable because they help with any issues. Without a service account manager after the initial deployment, the support is poor. Because of this, stability starts to become a problem.

The solution is centralized to the company or business process, so I don't really have users using it as an application. I've got one division — a team — that takes care of data protection which makes use of Data Domain services.

The initial, on-premises EMC technical support is pretty good. I have no complaints about them. Although we did have some initial support issues with Data Domain during the implementation, we always had that EMC account manager available. He dealt with most of the support issues when they arose and he was resident on-site. He was there only for as long as he was required to be there. He was very good. So we didn't really have support issues with EMC product initially as they addressed problems fully. However, when we did not have the service account manager resident on-premises anymore, the level of service changed. The regular channels for support are poor and not so responsive or they don't come back with good with solutions.

EMC is a solution we are starting to move away from because of the cost more than anything. We are evaluating it along-side a Veritas product currently.

The installation and initial setup of the program was a straightforward process.

We did use EMC services for that initial implementation and had a service account manager on site.

I can't say I am very happy with the cost of the EMC product because we also have got a Veritas product. The comparison is that the EMC Data Domain solution is more expensive than the Veritas and they have similar capabilities.

We were satisfied at the time we made the purchase of the EMC product, but subsequently, we went in a different direction. We added another product because we decided the price was too high for the original solution and to continue to add licenses. We are running both environments now.

Anyone who is considering this as a solution should study the availability of the features and caveats surrounding the licensing. You will want to make sure that you are covered for all the capabilities that you require. Then, if you choose to go with the product, I suggest adding a service account manager as part of the initial scope of the project and implementation as that was very helpful to us. That sort of guarantees you will definitely have a more controlled approach to implementation and better continuity from your experience with EMC.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate the product about seven or eight. For us now it is a little closer to a seven.

A lesson that we learned in using the product is that its CPU capability does not match its storage capacity. These two things should be more in synch to enhance performance.

The primary use of the solution is inline deduplication.

The solution offers good storage. Also, deduplication and completion are the best features, in my opinion.

The pricing should be adjusted. Customers continuously talk about the price. They know it is a good solution and they really need the type of storage the solution offers, but it costs somewhere around $100,000 and up for enterprises. It's not cheap, but it's very important for data vendors. My customers are banks and petroleum sectors, so they need the backup and archiving systems. They can't leave a data center without it, even if the cost is high.

The solution is very stable. My customers have been very pleased with the solution so far.

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

I think this level of scale is still only for cloud providers. It's not for every customer. If I am a cloud provider or internet service provider, I can use it, as my scale is very, very, large. With any other company, you will not need more than 200 kilobytes. 

The level of technical support depends on your SLA. You have, for example, next business day, full support, full support plus, full support in four hours, onsite service, etc. 

EMC is under the Dell technologies portfolio. You've got one of the best technical support teams looking out for you. 

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 the software.

I'm using the solution as a technical case professional. I'm selling it to my customers.

I sell the on-premises deployment model.

It's the best solution for deduplication and compression of storage, but the pricing is a little high. 

The solution works with any backup software. You might use it as a standalone or use it with VM, or solutions like Symantec, CMC software, etc. 

For those considering implementing the solution, I would say that they need to know their data gross and they need to allow for architecting. They need an understanding of their current backup situation and what they will need. They will need to remember to back up every day if their data is very, very important. 

When you are buying a backup solution, the Dell EMC team has an architecture team. They can be used to study the environment, so they can advise on what you need. A new user won't have to worry about it. Dell EMC will take care of everything.

Also, a user will still need to do data protection. They need to buy security devices for their environment. They should make a backup outside of their environment and make sure the backup is not connected to any internet connection to avoid hacking. 

I would rate the solution ten out of ten.