Dell PowerProtect Data Domain Reviews

The data admin works within the network and Avamar. I am collaborating with the data admin on a target-based solution using their backup server. We are using this solution with Avamar to meet Target's needs.

They're attempting to take backups from their backup solution, which has improved their overall scalability and storage efficiency because they transitioned from a traditional backup solution to a more advanced solution within the Veracode domain.

It provides data protection and network cloud.

Local support is necessary because while some aspects are well-handled, others require attention. At times, working without support can be more cost-effective.

The scalability is very good.

Support is good.

As a technical user, the initial setup of Dell PowerProtect DD is straightforward and familiar because it provides a tool for first-time initialization. Additionally, if customization is needed, the process is user-friendly for creating users and configuring other settings. Overall, the setup process is designed to be simple and accessible.

I often receive feedback for synthetic data from their own data centers, such as Silicon and the National Bank of Ethiopia. Also, I recommend permissions because their data is highly integrated. Currently, the government sector is lagging in the supply chain. However, our state and technical team are actively involved in provisioning. Clients are very interested in the solution. We have also completed the installation in Darwin and are preparing to hand over the solution

Dell PowerProtect (Data Domain) is popular enough in our region.

Knowing the commitment terms is important when working with Dell PowerProtect DD. Typically, you must sign a one-year commitment if you're participating in a campaign or program. If you are provided with a voucher or other benefits, such as for students, it will usually come with the requirement to fulfill this commitment. It's essential to understand these terms clearly before proceeding.

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

Currently, we are using only NetWorker, and that too only for a file system backup. We have also started taking backup of the Oracle data. The Oracle database plugin has been installed, the license has been bought, and we are protecting a hot backup of the Oracle database.

It's deduplication and faster recovery that are the key features. We had a challenge with the backup window because earlier, we were using traditional backup methodology, which used to take an enormous amount of time. By using Data Domain, we get the advantage of data deduplication, reducing data size. The backup window is also reduced, and recovery is definitely faster.

The Data Domain solution appliance is quite expensive. It is on the higher side, but technically or functionally, there is no issue.

We have been using Dell Data Domain for the last five years.

There have been absolutely no stability issues so far.

By keeping the increasing data in mind, we decided to go for Data Domain. It was a practical solution to the challenges we faced earlier.

Technical support was absolutely supportive. Whenever we faced any issues, we logged a call with Dell and immediately received a response, which was fantastic.

Positive

We were earlier using the traditional backup methodology, which used to take a lot of time to back up the data.

Once we received proper training from the respective vendor, and since we were using NetWorker earlier, we didn't find any difficulties. We are currently using it efficiently and are happy with the experience.

Commercially, the Data Domain solution appliance is on the higher side, however, technically and functionally, there is no issue. It is quite expensive.

Just keep going with the solution as it performs. It meets our expectations well. 

Overall, I rate it nine out of ten.

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 data domain is a backup solution.

The compatibility within the Dell PowerProtect DD portfolio makes data management more seamless. This integrated solution improves efficiency in our data center and simplifies operations by relying on a single company for servers and storage.

Support is essential, for clients using servers and storage. We have a backup solution, so if a company requires data backup, we can help. An improvement would be the ability to back up some of the databases or legacy applications used by IBM. 

I have been using Dell PowerProtect DD for two years.

I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten.

350 users are using this solution.

Support takes a long time. In Bangladesh, we do not have a dedicated support team available for all products. For situations involving credentials, the first level of support is provided from a database, and additional support comes from either Malaysia or another support hub. This can cause delays.

I rate the product’s pricing an eight out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.

The client uses several servers and storage systems, so Dell PowerProtect DD does not add value in terms of efficiency and data protection. However, since it does not function as a primary storage solution, it could enhance the efficiency of solar technology applications.

Having a backup available in a disaster is crucial and makes recovery much more accessible. This is always a situational requirement; the backup is not utilized if my application or data center does not experience any attacks.

I recommend Dell PowerProtect DD. It's a perfect solution with high efficiency and numerous cost-effective security measures.

Maintenance is handled by the sales support team, and our organization has certified engineers. We strive to make as many features available as possible.

One server engineer is sufficient for initial support. Our team has certified engineers who are distinguished based on requirements and the complexity of support needed.

It is an appliance-based solution, so most of the insurance and volume stages are pre-installed from the factory. We need to activate the license and connect it to the environment where it will be used.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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.

We use Dell PowerProtect DD for all financial cloud and banking systems to back up critical workloads. It serves as a Data Domain product to back up their environment. Additionally, we offer a two-minute backup, which refers to the capability of the Data Domain. This requires using data protection tools, including Networker and PowerProtect Data Manager. Networker serves as traditional backup routers.

When utilizing Dell PowerProtect DD for backup systems, Data Domain offers fast performance with low latency, providing high throughput for quicker backups compared to other vendors. Additionally, the network component is suitable for backing up Dell infrastructure, particularly for managing MA workloads efficiently. Restoring data through the backup process is straightforward, especially for users with experience using the DPS software.

The Dell PowerProtect DD architecture offers several significant features. One is DD Boost, which is utilized at both the source and destination sites for application processing. By employing DD Boost, the backup process is offloaded to the server side, efficiently utilizing network resources. 

Additionally, the Data Domain incorporates a Global Deduplication feature. This feature allows Data Domain to deduplicate all data streams simultaneously, enabling more efficient utilization of backup space within the Data Domain system.

The solution's pricing could be cheaper.

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

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. 300 users are using this solution.

Dell PowerProtect DD's features and functionalities vary depending on the segment. Its advantages include cost-effectiveness, reduced footprint, and efficient management of backup services.

There are two types of licenses available for Data Domain. One is the capacity license, based on the amount of data stored. For instance, you would need a capacity license if you require one terabyte of storage in Data Domain. Additionally, if you need performance and optimization features, you would require a database license, a subset of the capacity license. Harmony licenses are also necessary for certain functionalities.

Data domain has two features. We also implement many customer tracking. We like a sum of customer tests, compliance, and regulations due to government systems and cybersecurity, and the retention length is a very useful solution.

I recommend the features for all customers.

According to benchmarks and customer feedback,  Data Domain is highly regarded for its excellent throughput and performance compared to other vendors. Customers have reported that Data Domain handles backup and restore processes exceptionally well, demonstrating quick response times and efficient performance.

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

The tool's use cases primarily revolve around structured data. We can manage backups with features like compression, deduplication, and in-line deduplication. For instance, even with just a 10 KB backup space for structured data, we can achieve data reduction ratios up to 1:10. Only 1 TB of storage is needed to accommodate the equivalent of 10 TB of backups.

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. 

The tool's most valuable feature for data protection strategies is defining backup policies with specific retention periods. For example, if we take monthly backups, we can establish a one-year retention period. Additionally, we can also use incremental or differential backup methods. 

In terms of performance, Dell PowerProtect DD outperforms other data protection solutions we've used, such as Veritas and HPE Data Protector. From our experience,  Dell PowerProtect DD stands out as the best option available in the market.

The tool supports our business continuity process since we can back up the data. 

The tool's pricing could be cheaper. 

I have been using the product for the last two years. 

Dell PowerProtect DD is stable. 

Dell PowerProtect DD is an enterprise solution that is scalable to meet needs. We have more than 400 servers with multiple users for different services. 

Dell PowerProtect DD's support is good. The speed and effectiveness of tech support depend on the priority and severity level of the issue. For instance, resolving Level 3 issues might take longer as Level 3 support may not be available on a daily basis but rather weekly.

Positive

Dell PowerProtect DD's deployment is easy. It can be deployed on both physical and virtual appliances. We require long storage volumes, which can be allocated to the server. With this setup, we can store our backups as needed across the volumes, adjusting them according to our requirements.

The product can be deployed in-house. However, it is an OEM product from Dell EMC, and we need their support for deployment.

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

While it doesn't encompass all cybersecurity aspects, the tool employs encryption algorithms to protect data. We use tools from other vendors for cybersecurity protection. For those considering starting to use it, I would advise recognizing that the tool is primarily designed for enterprise-level solutions. However, even small- and medium-scale businesses can benefit by procuring and deploying solutions that meet their needs and requirements.

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.