Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Commvault Cloud vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager 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
110
Ranking in other categories
eDiscovery (3rd), Cloud Backup (2nd), Disaster Recovery as a Service (3rd), File Archiving (1st), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (3rd), SaaS Backup (1st), Threat Deception Platforms (1st), Container Backup Software (1st)
Dell PowerProtect Data Manager
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
18th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Deduplication Software (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Commvault Cloud is 7.5%, up from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is 4.6%, up from 4.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Cassandra Cinar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides excellent visibility and helps reduce costs and time
We use intuitive administrative tools that readily reveal the volume of backed-up data. Our Commvault CommCell servers alert us to failed backups and provide detailed information. This transparency allows our managed service provider to easily grasp our pre-established thresholds and readily scale up with new technologies. We're highly satisfied with Commvault's automated data security and management policies. They meet our stringent requirements for secure and private data storage, including anti-ransomware protection and encryption. Notably, they also ensure compliance with GDPR for backups stored in Europe and other regions, fulfilling our regulatory obligations. Threat Scan's ability to scan backup data for threats is invaluable because it proactively identifies and neutralizes certain viruses and threats that may originate from our G Suite or be reported by our security incident response team, preventing potential outages. Commvault provides excellent visibility across our entire organization's data. They perform regular health checks, informing us of areas of strength and offering recommendations for improvement. These recommendations may include upgrading to newer product versions or addressing issues identified during the checks. It is important for our organization that Commvault provides a unified platform for recovery across cloud, on-premises, and software-as-a-service workloads. This is particularly important because many of our existing cloud environments rely on basic backups that are insufficient for our needs. Commvault empowers us to address this issue. We have implemented it not only in our own operating company but also across the corporate structure, rolling it out to virtually all AWS users. This is because the standard backup methods, such as snapshot backups, fail to meet our stringent requirements for recovery, service level agreements, and crucial functionalities like threat detection and other security features. Commvault ensures a robust and comprehensive backup infrastructure that satisfies all our essential needs. It has improved our organization by ensuring we meet our infrastructure requirements, adhere to our vulnerability methodology, and achieve service level agreements for both backup and storage requirements. The quarterly risk analysis allows us to effectively manage the lifecycle of both data and backups. It also sheds light on the types of data and backups we have, providing valuable insights. Commvault's risk analysis is one of the tools we use to meet our compliance requirements and implement the necessary controls for immediate security policy action. To ensure comprehensive data protection and comply with international regulations like GDPR, we rely on Commvault alongside our established financial systems and SOC-compliant practices. Commvault has helped us reduce our organization's data management costs by 75 percent, particularly for long-term backups. We ditched tapes and virtual tapes thanks to Commvault, replacing them with a fully disk-based backup system and cloud backups in AWS and Azure. By implementing Commvault, we've significantly reduced our backup times. This is achieved through a combination of incremental backups and data aging. Aged data is then moved to cheaper disk or cloud storage, ensuring cost-effective long-term retention while still meeting our recovery SLAs. While the overall time savings may be around 10-15 percent, the main benefit is not keeping everything on expensive primary storage and efficiently aging it out. Consequently, retrieving data from the Azure bucket typically takes five days or more, reflecting our agreed-upon SLA. It has reduced our recovery point objective, allowing us to store more backups. However, new regulatory and compliance requirements mandate that some backups cannot be deleted and must be retained indefinitely. To address this while still improving efficiency, we've implemented solutions for long-term data storage and improved data management practices. Commvault has helped our organization not only decrease our threat detection time but also improve threat prevention to such an extent that we often avoid facing the full impact of a threat altogether. By preventing these incidents, we're often unsure of the precise amount of time saved, but the benefit is clear: we don't need to activate disaster recovery mechanisms. It has not only helped us reduce our recovery time objective, but it has also ensured that our backups and long-term storage are secure, thanks to its comprehensive capabilities. In terms of total cost of ownership, Commvault has enabled us to significantly reduce both hardware and media costs for storage and backup. After factoring in encryption and compression, the total savings amount to close to 80 percent. It has been able to reduce downtime, but having a quick recovery plan and policy and SLAs that are published are met regularly.
MinaMagdy1 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is much more scalable and flexible than everything else in the market."
"It's a complete software that can protect all the main applications. Perhaps that's the feature I like most. The integration with the NetApp and other apps is also very nice."
"The most valuable feature is the ability it gives me to automate backups well and consistently, and to follow up on them as well. It also provides consistent recovery processes. Whenever we have needed to do a restore, it has worked quickly and efficiently."
"Global deduplication and the indexing of the data object are the most valuable features. It saves costs on the product side by doing compression and deduplication. It will help you and make your life easy to reach the data that you need within the minimum downtime when it's required."
"The solution's interface is easy to use. For manageability, it doesn't matter where the resource is coming from or going to. That's the great power of the Control Panel: It's easy to use and does not matter if you manage on-prem or cloud resources."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"What is most valuable to me are the search features, where you can search through large backup data sets and find what you're looking for. Our data sets are so big that we're over the petabyte mark. To find a specific file for a specific user out of 10,000 users is a challenge... If we can glean from them a general description of where it might be, the search feature comes in very handy to actually locate it and restore it for them."
"In the VM, we have Live Recovery, Live Mount, and Live Sync."
"Dell PowerProtect Data Manager helps to reduce the amount of data being transferred and stored."
"The most valuable features of the solution are flexibility and data protection."
"The solution's initial setup is straightforward."
"It satisfies my customers' scalability needs and provides interactive features, allowing efficient integration."
"The management part of Dell PowerProtect Data Manager has improved significantly."
"Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is a comprehensive backup software that integrates with Dell backup storage to enhance data protection."
"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."
"I love that it has an interactive GUI, and it is not complicated to use."
 

Cons

"Training."
"Sometimes, we have a performance issue with the backup speed. So, that has to be rectified and improved."
"The deployment process should be simplified because it is not something that just anybody can do."
"The support needs more improvement. I feel that the support is not yet up to the mark, with not enough professional engineers to provide assistance."
"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."
"Persistent binding is a feature that I would like to see in the next release of Commvault."
"They reply to the support portal weekly, but there are some delays."
"It takes a lot of technical expertise to implement. Commvault could increase the training it provides to customers and partners."
"The marketing strategy is lagging behind competitors such as CommVault. Dell needs to improve its market presence and communication with customers and solution providers."
"The tool's scalability has certain shortcomings, making it an area where improvements are required."
"There is always room for improvement. The compression ratio should be improved as well as the efficiency."
"PowerProtect Data Manager is missing a feature for takeout, which means I cannot store backup data off-site within the software. This is a limitation for organizations that require off-site solutions."
"As a new product, there are some things that still need to improve a bit as it matures."
"Management is difficult and it is hard to determine when things aren't working properly."
"They should include a feature similar to S3 bucket."
"PPDM requires further development. It is primarily integrated with DevOps systems."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive. However, there are no additional costs involved. I rate the pricing a five out of ten."
"It is quite expensive when compared to other applications in the market. Its license is completely based on workload capacity. If I buy a license for 100 terabytes, I can back up anything. I can back up any platform, technology, or application, which is an advantage. Previously, we had to buy an agent for a particular application, and the cost was different for each agent. Now, the cost is completely based on the storage capacity. The license for one terabyte can cost around $1,700 for backing up anything from your environment."
"Our yearly cost is around €20,000... The cost is based on the number of users and the amount of data. They sell it per terabyte."
"The pricing has improved. It is simplified compared to the way that it was a few years ago. It is fairly straightforward and pretty easy to articulate to customers, which is handy."
"There is a bit of cost involved with signing up the entire solution. It's not a cheap solution."
"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."
"The price of Commvault HyperScale X is a lot higher than competitors. As a government institution, we have annual costs. We made a budget for one year in advance. It was difficult to calculate the other solution's costs because each solution has another way of licensing. The solution is expensive but it is very good and we know the good quality we will be receiving."
"It is a little too high. I would like to get more of a consumption model or more of a periodic true-up type of model that is more friendly to the ups and downs that you may have in your data instead of locking into multi-year agreements."
"The price of Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager is reasonable."
"The solution is not less expensive than competitors but pricing deals are available."
"The product is offered at a very competitive price in the market."
"Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is not an expensive solution."
"The licensing costs and pricing model are based on capacity and the license is easy to upgrade."
"The solution is more affordable than other vendors."
"We offer monthly or yearly subscriptions. The price could be cheaper."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Backup and Recovery solutions are best for your needs.
850,760 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
11%
Educational Organization
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
9%
 

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 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?
Overall, pricing does not significantly impact our decision. The main concern is the solution itself, presales activities, and positioning it in the right place. Commercial aspects are secondary to...
What needs improvement with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager?
The marketing strategy is lagging behind competitors such as CommVault. Dell needs to improve its market presence and communication with customers and solution providers.
 

Also Known As

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

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
National Bank of Greece, USC Australia, PCS Publishing, Dell Digital IT, Rushmore Electric, Melanson Health, Arrow Electronics
Find out what your peers are saying about Commvault Cloud vs. Dell PowerProtect Data Manager and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,760 professionals have used our research since 2012.