Cohesity DataProtect vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager comparison

Cohesity DataProtect vs. Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

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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

Cohesity DataProtect

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

8th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Backup (6th)

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

13th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Deduplication Software (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Cohesity DataProtect is 3.5%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is 4.6%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Backup and Recovery

Featured Reviews

Giovanni Golinelli.

Hybrid IT Architect at Quanture Spa

Easy to use, offers good scalability and responsive support

The deployment depends on the environment. Deploying on VMs is relatively simple. But for most of our customers, we implement physical clusters with at least three configured hosts using the existing model. So, it depends on the setup. Implementing DataProtect itself wasn't particularly challenging. One key requirement for successful DataProtect deployment is proper network configuration. If the network setup isn't right, you won't achieve optimal performance. We have developed a service for some of our customers where they implement an appliance or physical cluster of Cohesity at the customer site. Then, we use cloud clustering to replicate, and even in production, a second copy of the protected data. And in some cases, we have developed some disaster recovery procedures using Cohesity.

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MinaMagdy1

Senior System Engineer at Nutanix

Comprehensive integration and user-friendly dashboard enhance data protection workflows

PowerProtect Data Manager lacks the tape-out functionality, which is important for organizations relying on it for offsite backup. While PowerProtect Data Manager offers a workaround, it's not always accepted, notably by sectors like banking. Additionally, I would like PowerProtect Data Manager to provide microservices and container backup for modern applications.

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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

"The system automatically takes down the nodes one at a time and performs the upgrade and brings the node back up before proceeding to the next. Upgrades can now be done at any time with a high level of confidence."

"We can run test scripts on production data."

"The solution is stable, with regular updates and patching."

"Its most valuable feature is its ransomware protection, so it has immutable backups."

"The dashboard is very easy to use."

"The ease of use and the GUI have really been most valuable to us. Configuring the system to do what we need is simple and straight forward and a lot of guesswork has been removed. One of my favorite features with Cohesity is Kroll for Exchange item-level recovery. The software is simple to use and fast."

"The customer service and support are fast and professional."

"A robust, verifiable backup with a restore solution, which decreases our backup and has a restore window."

More Cohesity DataProtect pros

"The solution's initial setup is straightforward."

"One notable feature is its robust backup support for Kubernetes and container environments. Additionally, PPDM stands out for its ease of deployment and management compared to other backup solutions. It is highly user-friendly, allowing users to quickly learn and implement backup and restore processes within a week. PPDM represents the next generation of backup software and is comparable to offerings from other vendors. Furthermore, PPDM prioritizes security with various access controls, such as user and database access controls. Its deployment tool is also known for its simplicity."

"The deduplication is the most valuable feature because it helps to control the overhead."

"The most valuable features of the solution are flexibility and data protection."

"The solution adequately handles data storage."

"I would say flexibility is the most important feature of the product. The performance and speed are the best on the market."

"Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager is user-friendly and easy to use. it does what it needs to do."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its integrated approach."

More Dell PowerProtect Data Manager pros

Cons

"Cohesity DataProtect can improve in the area of databases. We have had some challenges with both Cohesity and Rubrik being able to effectively back up in a timely manner the SQL Oracle workloads."

"When a new release is launched, there may be some bugs that need to be addressed by the developers. However, they promptly resolve these issues, and the software runs smoothly once again."

"Better support for legacy platforms would be nice, but we should be moving off those anyway."

"I would like to see Cohesity have the ability to do a file level restore from a Windows server, which is storing data on dynamic disk."

"Reporting is quite limited and not customizable."

"The support team sometimes takes a long time to resolve issues, although, in our experience, these have been specific things like SQL blobs."

"Features I would like to see include a more visible data lifecycle monitoring tab, and an easier to read backup status dashboard."

"Better documentation is needed because the lack of information has necessitated having our team depend more heavily on Cohesity support."

More Cohesity DataProtect cons

"They should include a feature similar to S3 bucket."

"A lot of improvement is required in Dell's first level of support."

"The solution should enhance its user interface and make it more flexible."

"You need to use additional software to back up entire environments. It will be good if they could support entire tape libraries."

"PPDM requires further development. It is primarily integrated with DevOps systems."

"The main issue that needs improvement is the support system. When I raise a ticket, it sometimes takes a while to get a response."

"There is always room for improvement. The compression ratio should be improved as well as the efficiency."

"The tool's scalability has certain shortcomings, making it an area where improvements are required."

More Dell PowerProtect Data Manager cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's licensing costs are yearly. It is cheaper than other backup solutions."

"Licensing is per node and per protected terabyte. You will also pay 10-15% annually for support."

"The ROI is huge. Not really measurable at this point, but the price of the unit was a fraction of what a couple hours of downtime could result in."

"It has reasonable pricing, and we know they can give discounts. If you look at the primary pricing or the list pricing, it conforms to the market pricing, but you have to have a discount on it. Otherwise, it is way too expensive."

"The solution's pricing is quite high, more so than that of its competitors, Veeam, Veritas and Rubrik."

"If SQL is in heavy use at your location, I would highly recommend narrowing your PoC testing to Cohesity and Rubrik. They will be competitive on pricing with each other, so really put them through the paces."

"The tool's pricing is average."

"Cohesity came in at the best price."

More Cohesity DataProtect pricing and cost advice

"The price of Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager is reasonable."

"Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is not an expensive solution."

"The product is offered at a very competitive price in the market."

"The licensing costs and pricing model are based on capacity and the license is easy to upgrade."

"The solution is not less expensive than competitors but pricing deals are available."

"The solution is more affordable than other vendors."

"We offer monthly or yearly subscriptions. The price could be cheaper."

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845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

44%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Educational Organization

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cohesity DataProtect?

Several features enable us to perform fast recovery, such as instant fast recovery. All our virtual machines protected with the product can be quickly restored to another healthy environment with m...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cohesity DataProtect?

Typically on-premises nodes/clusters are deployed for primary backup (to enable instant mass restore) so price will be dependent on chosen OEM and capacity required. MSPs like us utilise PPU licens...

What needs improvement with Cohesity DataProtect?

While there are improvements to be made, such as providing support for older systems like IBM iSeries and tandem systems from HP, the solution overall shifts from older methods to modern practices....

What do you like most about Dell PowerProtect Data Manager?

One notable feature is its robust backup support for Kubernetes and container environments. Additionally, PPDM stands out for its ease of deployment and management compared to other backup solution...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell PowerProtect Data Manager?

The price of Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is generally perceived as reasonable. However, specific figures are not available as I am on the technical side and do not handle costs.

What needs improvement with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager?

The main issue that needs improvement is the support system. When I raise a ticket, it sometimes takes a while to get a response. Scheduling for support calls can be problematic when it does not al...

Rubrik vs Cohesity DataProtect

Comparisons

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Veeam Data Platform vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 15% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 13% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 6% of the time

Dell Avamar vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 3% of the time

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Dell Avamar vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Compared 22% of the time

Dell NetWorker vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Compared 18% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Compared 13% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Compared 13% of the time

IBM Spectrum Protect vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Compared 2% of the time

More Dell PowerProtect Data Manager Competitors

Product Reports

Cohesity DataProtect

Download Cohesity DataProtect product report

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Download Dell PowerProtect Data Manager product report

Also Known As

Cohesity

PowerProtect, Dell EMC PowerProtect

Overview

What is Cohesity DataProtect?

Cohesity DataProtect is a top-level, sophisticated, software-defined backup and recovery solution created for cloud environments. Cohesity DataProtect is made to hyperscale and is one the most thorough policy-based protection solutions available on the market today.

Cohesity DataProtect melds multiple-point products into a single software that is able to be deployed as on-premise or consumed as a service.

Top Features:

Hyperscale made easy: Cohesity DataProtect improves data protection by doing away with the need for backup silos and administers backup and recovery with a single user-friendly, easy-to-understand interface. Cohesity DataProtect provides extensive 24/7 enterprise-class protection for a large, varying set of sources, including virtual and physical servers, NAS and SaaS workloads, relational and distributed databases, and traditional and containerized applications.

Super fast recovery: Cohesity DataProtect offers near-zero recovery point objectives (RPOs) and near-instant recovery time objectives (RTOs) to satisfy your business service-level agreements (SLAs). Using Cohesity Helios’ unified data plane and control plane you can immediately search and recover data on any Cohesity cluster, located anywhere. DataProtect distinctively minimizes downtime by immediately mass restoring any amount of virtual machines (VMs) to any point in time, and lowers data protection costs by as much as 70% or more.

Backup as a Service: Feel free to take advantage of the elasticity of the public cloud and the cost-effective value of Cohesity DataProtect when delivered as a service. When you choose an OPEX option, you can eliminate the need for on-premises hardware. There is a SaaS option that will allow you to very simply configure your backup workloads and immediately begin protecting your vital all-important data and applications.

It’s as easy as: sign-up, connect, and protect!

Ransomware protection: Cohesity DataProtect offers stellar recovery at scale. The solution is so intuitive, it has machine learning-based anomaly detection to stop incidents before they happen. Cohesity DataProtection can provide immutable backups, Datalock write once, read many (WORM), encryption, and role-based access control (RBAC).

Cohesity DataProtect integrates well with many of today’s top solutions, including, but not limited to:

Hypervisors: VMware vSphere (5.5 and later), Microsoft Hyper-V (2019, 2016, 2012 R2), Nutanix AHV and RHeV

Kubernetes-based data and application state

Cloud: AWS EC2, Amazon RDS, Azure VM, and Google Compute

Physical: Windows, Linux(RHEL, CentOS, OEL, Debian, Ubuntu), AIX (7.x), and Solaris

Databases: Oracle (11g R2, 12c), Oracle RAC and SQL (2008 or later)

Distributed Databases (NoSQL and Hadoop): MongoDB, CouchbaseDB, Apache, Cassandra, Cloudera, and Hortonworks.

Bare Machine Recovery: Windows and Linux

Applications: MS Exchange (2010 SP3 or later), MSFT Active Directory, Microsoft 365 (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Teams, Groups), SalesForce (SFDC), and SAP HANA

Primary storage: Pure FlashArray, HPE Nimble, and Cisco Hyperflex

NAS: Pure FlashBlade, NetApp, Isilon, IBM GPFS, Google EFS, Elastifile, and generic solutions*

Reviews from Real Users

One reviewer, who is head of IT infrastructure at Kampmann says, “Cohesity really is a Next-Gen Data Management Software,” and goes on to indicate that Cohesity “works flawlessly with easy replication of backups and numerous supported backup sources.”

Another user, who is a senior network engineer at a legal firm, relates that "Cohesity is a robust and feature-rich solution"

Cohesity

PowerProtect Data Manager offers efficient data protection capabilities leveraging the latest evolution of Dell trusted protection storage architecture.

With operational simplicity, agility and flexibility at its core, PowerProtect Data Manager enables the protection, management and recovery of data in on-premises, virtualized and cloud deployments, including protection of in-cloud workloads. You can also protect cloud-native workloads across multiple public clouds via our integrated SaaS based PowerProtect Cloud Snapshot Manager.

Modernize how you protect your VMware virtual machines using Transparent Snapshots. Transparent Snapshots simplifies VM image backups for near-zero impact to your VMs or VM resources – and it works with any VMware supported storage. Transparent Snapshots innovation increases backup performance, lowers costs and simplifies management and reduces the risk of data loss.

Streamline data protection directly for applications or Kubernetes containers to Dell PowerProtect appliances and reduce application resource constraints.

Increase business resiliency with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery capabilities to rapidly recover from cyber incidents.

Modular design allows agile delivery of new features and updates. Rapidly evolve to meet future IT demands.

Software defined: Provide flexible data protection and compliance across applications and cloud-native IT environments
Multi-cloud optimized: Extend protection to the cloud with backup to cloud, backup in-cloud, long term retention and cloud disaster recovery
Self-service: Backup and restore directly from native applications
Cloud-Based Monitoring and Analytics: Telemetry, machine learning and predictive analytics to proactively take action and speed time to resolution

Reviews from Real Users

“We keep an eye on the future, and we are confident that PowerProtect Data Manager and PowerProtect DD series appliances will support our transformation project. Both products are continuously evolving and will cover our future needs, including using the cloud for data protection.” – Dimitris Mavromichalis, IT Deputy Manager at National Bank of Greece

“PowerProtect Data Manager combined with PowerProtect appliances – that’s cutting edge. That’s world leading as far as we’re concerned.” – Drew Hills, Infrastructure Analyst at USC Australia

““Most of my wish list came true with the PowerProtect Data Manager plugin for vSphere, which provides perfect integration with vCenter.” – Dave Chapman, Senior Technician at PSC Publishing

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

Tribune Media

National Bank of Greece, USC Australia, PCS Publishing, Dell Digital IT, Rushmore Electric, Melanson Health, Arrow Electronics

Cohesity DataProtect vs. Dell PowerProtect Data Manager