What is our primary use case?
We use Dell EMC Data Protection Advisor to receive reports on the health of the daily backups of our data in our organization. The reports give us information in many areas, such as capacity, compression, high and lowest deduplication, workloads, and the number of failures.
What is most valuable?
The solution is easy to use, flexible and has a lot of out-of-the-box functionality. You can configure the dashboards or you can use a script. However, to fully utilize its capabilities you will want to use a lot of scripts which you will need advanced training. The reports can be customized for many things, such as chargeback billing.
Additionally, we are using this solution for Dell, but Data Protection Advisor (DPA) can be used for other backup solutions, such as NetBackup, pfSense, and Veeam Backup. However, you would have to have a license.
What needs improvement?
There is a steep learning curve to use the interface and to create new reports, this could be made easier. If the solution could provide more drag and drop functionality to build more advanced reports that would be very helpful.
In an upcoming release, there could be more analytics for our data giving us more detail. The types of information I would like to see from the backups would be, for example, how many files are old, what are the large file sizes, or unstructured or structured data. Additionally,
many other solutions today are able to tell you a lot of additional information, such as how much space is used in your backups or other information if you change your policies. It can also give you advice on how to optimize your environment for the backups to allow cost savings. DPA should follow suit to stay competitive and it would provide a great benefit to users.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for approximately seven years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In our data center managed services environment, there is not a very large space where we have a team of approximately 15 people using the solution.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support is good and they provide break/fix support. Anything that does not work or your DPA has an issue they are helpful. If you upgrade the solution using standalone DPA and you wish to upgrade it to a higher level, they will give you support documentation on how to do it. Alternatively, they will show you how to do it, but they will not assist you with the actual deployment unless you run into a problem them then there will come in as prefix support.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward. It comes built-in with IDPA. Previously, if you were using this solution separately, with a license for NetWorker, and you bought Dell EMC Data Protection Advisor then you would have to install it. Otherwise, if you are using an appliance, such as IDPA, then it comes built-in and there is no effort to install. There are a lot of built-in reports that are easy to select the type and pick the destination devices, such as Avamar, NetWorker, and Data Domain. Once you have selected those parameters and scheduled them, you are done. If you want to save the report to a portal or to an email it is flexible.
If you are doing the installation separately it could take a couple of hours to install and configure. However, the time will also depend on your environment and it may take quite some time to configure new reports in that new environment as they have to be configured manually.
What about the implementation team?
For the main deployment, we had professional services from DELL do the IDPA and some other aspects of the installation, but they did not need to work specifically on DPA. We did the configuration of the reports.
If you want more advanced reporting you need to engage with professional services if you do not have skilled employees to do the configuration.
The people who designed and configured the reports are limited in my organization. There are a couple of people who do the design of the reports and management. The rest of them receive the reports as end-users. Additionally, there are times we send the reports to management to get customized for customers.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
You have to procure the license when you are ordering or quoting for Dell Data Protection Suite (DPS). DPS is bundled with the suite and comes with a license. However, if you purchase NetWorker separately then you will have to procure the license for DPS separately.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I have evaluated many other backup solutions, such as NetBackup, pfSense, and Veeam Backup.
What other advice do I have?
My advice to others is if you are using Dell EMC, DPA is a must. You are going to need a good reporting tool and DPA is the tool that is required to provide that level of reporting.
It is worth noting, DPA comes with the same data protection advisor bundled with Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA) and you would be using the same reports.
I rate Dell EMC Data Protection Advisor an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
*Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
