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Commvault Cloud vs Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

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

Commvault Cloud
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
111
Ranking in other categories
eDiscovery (3rd), Cloud Backup (2nd), Disaster Recovery as a Service (2nd), File Archiving (1st), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (4th), SaaS Backup (2nd), Threat Deception Platforms (1st), Container Backup Software (1st)
Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA)
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
21st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Commvault Cloud is 7.3%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) is 0.6%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Matt Reller - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides extremely fast backup, is easy to manage, and is flexible
Commvault Cloud's automated policies provide the notification we need to ensure our data is secure and managed correctly. Commvault Cloud provides excellent visibility across all of our organization's data. It is extremely important to our organization that Commvault has a unified platform that offers recovery across cloud, on-prem, and SaaS workloads. It has helped our organization improve by simplifying the way we manage our environment. We could not manage the same environment with only half of our current staff. We have yet to find anything in our environment that Commvault does not support. Commvault Cloud's Risk Analysis helps us identify, categorize, and classify sensitive data enabling us to take the appropriate actions to protect it. Commvault does a good job helping us limit our exposure and ensure compliance. Commvault has helped us reduce our data management costs significantly. Compared to Dell Avamar, the costs are vastly different. Commvault is much more cost-effective. We are licensed by capacity, so we don't have to worry about licensing different features. We have all the features that are licensed by capacity. And as far as ongoing support costs and other expenses, they are much lower than what they were with Dell Avamar. Commvault also gives us the flexibility to use any storage we want, while Avamar is tied to the Data Domain, which is not cheap to support. It has helped us reduce our backup time unless we are using Data Domain. This is because we can perform deduplication and compression on the client layer, which reduces the load on the network. We cannot do this with Data Domain. In fact, if we even attempt to perform a quick progress check before sending data to the Data Domain, the system fails completely. We learned this the hard way. We are using many more advanced features in Commvault Cloud than we ever did in Dell Avamar, simply because we had to license each feature separately in Avamar. As a result, we did not perform many backups in Avamar, such as all database backups (DB2, SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL). These backups were performed outside of Avamar. We are now using Direct Connect agents for all of our databases. This allows us to perform incremental backups, which we could not do with the previous method. As a result, we have reduced our backup times by two-thirds, or even more in some cases. Compared to when we were backing up directly to Data Domain, Commvault is now running our backups ten times faster. This has resulted in a significant reduction in our backup times. Commvault has helped us reduce the RPO. Even in Data Domain, it has reduced our storage times by about half. It has also helped us reduce the threat detection time. We reduced the RTO significantly with Commvault. Commvault has helped us reduce downtime primarily due to the increase in the performance of resources.
SamuelThomas - PeerSpot reviewer
Ensures data safety and effective cloud integration with AI-powered protection
Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) offers a backup, recovery, and management tool that is very easy to use. It provides a flexible protection suite that accommodates scalability and performance needs. Integration with VMware and multi-cloud protection is effective. AI integration enhances backup operations by analyzing data and ensuring malware protection. Customers also benefit from hybrid cloud options and tiers of backup.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Its compression and deduplication allow us to store more backups and save storage space. The reporting is great; we are able to obtain critical business reports and infrastructure/usage information very easily."
"It's easy to configure multiple jobs and media agent locations for each server. We do offsite backups for all of our servers, but we also do onsite hourly backups of them. That has benefited us several times when we had an incident and didn't want to roll back a server an entire day."
"What I find valuable is restoring the complete server. Restoring files is also valuable, but I like restoring the server because you don't have to rebuild a new one."
"The convenience of backing up and restoring simultaneously is very valuable."
"Commvault Backup & Recovery's search utility is its most valuable feature."
"Restoring is very fast. In testing, I did a restore for a single item from a mailbox. Within a minute, I had the message back in my mailbox. So, it didn't take hours or days. Obviously, there will be a limit. If we suddenly go into DR and have to restore five terabytes of emails for people, then it will take a couple of days, which would be acceptable. For general usage, where we have to do the odd restore, we have never had issues. It happens within minutes."
"Commvault helps to ensure broad coverage with the discovery of unprotected workloads. This is important. From the moment that we set it up, we mostly have customers telling us what they need to back up. Then, you can list the machines that are not yet protected. Sometimes, we can see that they are unaware of this, and say, "We didn't know that those servers were not protected yet," or "We did not back them up yet.""
"Complete Data Protection is convenient because you can manage various types of databases, and it's pretty easy to set it up."
"The most valuable feature is the deduplication rate."
"What I find valuable about Dell PowerProtect IDPA is its stability and strong performance."
"The product is integrated with Huawei software and its backup and recovery time is very fast."
"It backs up our Windows systems and our Linux systems and everything."
"We don't need to manage different devices."
"Dell PowerProtect is stable and scalable."
"The solution is strong."
"The product is easy to troubleshoot and store data."
 

Cons

"Mostly controls, visibility, cost allocation."
"Training."
"Commvault could make the product more cost-effective on the public cloud side. We are using this solution to back up whatever is still on-prem. We are not using it to back up what is on the public cloud because we have a native backup solution for that, which is provided by the vendor. As our footprint gets bigger, we will continue to evaluate this, but the last time that we did a cost analysis, the cost was not comparable to the solution that public clouds are offering."
"Commvault should keep and continue to develop the Java GUI."
"The user creation and management capabilities could be improved."
"The only problem is that some of what we snap most of is the VMs. We found about 10% of the VMs that we can't snap because they're too interactive. It actually causes the application to crash."
"In an upcoming release, the reports could be better."
"The integration of Metallic could improve. It would be a benefit if Metallic could integrate with multiple applications or platforms."
"Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) requires more updates and innovations in AI-powered cyber resilience."
"The solution should be easier to use."
"We would like to see the pricing drop a bit."
"We cannot add IDPA to DPC, and each IP has a DP Central, which cannot monitor other IDPAs."
"I would like to see integration with Dell EMC's Cloud Tier."
"There is room for improvement in terms of network connectivity."
"The price could be lowered slightly, to make it more competitive."
"Managing the product is a little bit complicated."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"One of the issues with backup vendors is that they overprice, or overvalue their products."
"The solution is highly-priced."
"We went from Veritas NetBackup to Commvault. We switched due to upfront licensing and costs. We have more visibility into what we're actually purchasing. It seemed like, overall, the cost of Commvault was cheaper."
"Hands down, Metallic provides us with more predictable costs for our backup requirements. You are getting what you pay for. If they are charging you X amount of dollars at that point, that is what you are going to pay. So far, I have not seen any hidden costs or any kind of gotchas. It is pretty cut-and-dry. They will let you know, "Hey, you are going to use our storage and it will cost you this much. You are going to use your storage, then we are going to charge you this much to backup.""
"Metallic is an affordable solution."
"The complete license gives us options for all the features. Commvault does not license based on storage or the management components. It can integrate with any storage vendor. That means that when we are out of storage and need more, we can integrate without additional licensing. In my opinion, Commvault needs to reduce the licensing cost by 20 to 40 percent to make it cost-efficient."
"The pricing is far better than we had in the past. The license for Dell EMC was not too expensive, but the storage, given that Dell EMC is based on data domains, was pretty expensive."
"The tool is cost-effective."
"I would rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."
"The licensing is billed on a monthly basis. Dell is bundled so that when you order IDPA, you get everything together with the license."
"Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) has a yearly subscription fee."
"It is a cost-effective solution."
"We have a perpetual license. It is a capacity-based license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
University
18%
Government
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Commvault?
The tool is affordable. I rate the pricing a six out of ten. Implementation requires additional costs because we need Commvault Professional Services.
What needs improvement with Commvault?
Data center backup must be improved. We also want the product to provide us with a cloud-based backup. If we use Microsoft Exchange Online for email services, we want to know how to get a backup in...
What do you like most about Commvault Complete Data Protection?
IntelliSnap and file system backups are valuable features.
What do you like most about Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA)?
What I find valuable about Dell PowerProtect IDPA is its stability and strong performance.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA)?
Pricing is competitive with other software vendors. The product's features, network, and VMware integration contribute to its value. There are different licensing options available, such as applian...
What needs improvement with Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA)?
Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) requires more updates and innovations in AI-powered cyber resilience. While technical support is generally not poor, there are challenges with expertise in Linux-based c...
 

Also Known As

Commvault Complete Data Protection, Commvault Backup & Recovery, Commvault HyperScale X, Metallic, ThreatWise
Dell EMC IDPA, Dell IDPA, EMC IDPA
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Aberdeenshire Council, Acxiom, BAM Group Ireland, Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta, CI Investments, Clifford Chance, American Municipal Power, American Pacific Mortgage, AstraZeneca, Dongbu Steel, Denver Health, Dow Jones, Emirates Steel, Penn State Health, Prime Healthcare, Sonic Healthcare, Sony Network Communications, TiVO, UCONN Health, The Weitz Company
Under Armour, Christian Brothers University, Presidio
Find out what your peers are saying about Commvault Cloud vs. Dell PowerProtect DP (IDPA) and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
864,155 professionals have used our research since 2012.