Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs Microsoft DPM vs NetApp FAS Series comparison

DD series enables your organization to protect, manage and recover data at scale. As the next generation of Dell Data Domain appliances, DD series sets the bar for efficient data management from edge to core to cloud and includes the ecosystem support and comprehensive data protection that customers have come to appreciate from Data Domain. The DD series offers a super-fast, secure, and an efficient solution that is built for multi-cloud data protection and to keep up with future demands. The DD series consists of the DD9900, DD9400, DD6900, DD6400, DD3300, and a software-defined option, PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition (DDVE).

DD series empowers organizations to protect, manage and recover data at scale across their entire diverse ecosystems. DD series provides broad ecosystem support, efficiency, powerful data protection, cloud-enabled capabilities, and the cyber resiliency that our customers demand.

The DD Operating System (DDOS) is the brilliance that drives the DD series. DDOS contributes the agility, security, and reliability that pushes DD series to deliver high-speed, scalable, and standard-setting protection storage for backup, archive, and disaster recovery. DDOS integrates seamlessly with many existing infrastructures, permitting ease-of-use with leading backup and archiving applications, and provides superior performance in conjunction with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager and Data Protection Suite. When you decide to purchase a new DD series appliance you can easily consume DDOS as a subscription providing greater flexibility for deployment while minimizing your overall upfront costs.

DD series does a great job to minimize the threat of data loss and adds to the value of protected data while meeting ever-increasing demands of SLAs and increasing ROI. DDOS drives DD series to deliver up to 38% faster backups and up to 45% faster restores at significantly higher compression levels.

DD series supports high availability within the single rack. Additionally, DD series can greatly reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) by minimizing downtime in the unlikely event of a hardware failure. DD series delivers amazing high-speed networking connectivity with support for 25GbE and 100GbE network adapters.

Benefits of Dell PowerProtect DD

Fast, secure, efficient data protection:

• Provide 1.5PB usable capacity in a single rack
• Allow for Up to 3PB capacity for long-term retention
• Logical capacity is increased by up to 30% per TB when compared to the previous generation
• Allow for instant access and instant restore of up to 64VMs and 100k IOPS
• High-speed network connectivity – 10GbE, 25GbE and 100GbE
• Seamless fast integration and outstanding performance with PowerProtect Data Manager and Data Protection Suite
• Supports many of the leading enterprise backup and archive applications

Industry-leading multi-cloud protection:

• Provides software-defined protection storage on-premises and in-cloud with PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition (DDVE).
• DDVE scales up to 256TB in-cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and others).
• Greatly improves in-cloud restore performance by as much as 10x when compared to previous versions.
• Cloud Tier delivers super simple and value-added long-term retention to public, private, or hybrid clouds
• Cost-efficient disaster recovery to the cloud

Operational simplicity:

• Enhanced DD System Manager supports a complete chassis view
• Significantly lower administrative costs
• Grants a single point of management for all DD series by PowerProtect DD Management Center
• Deploy Smart Scale for PowerProtect appliances directly from PowerProtect DD Management Center. Smart Scale helps drive down management complexities while increasing storage efficiencies. 

Reviews from Real Users

One user, who is an enterprise IT architect at a tech service company, says that “Dell PowerProtect DD is highly stable and reliable. I have not had a time when the system did not work and in an emergency this is critical.” He rates the ROI it has brought his company a five out of five.

A pre-sales and technical manager at a tech services company says that "The features that I have found most valuable with Dell PowerProtect DD are its deduplication feature and its DD Boost protocol for fast transfer, which is amazing."

Chris C., lead infrastructure architect at ThinkON, relates that Dell PowerProtect DD “allows our organization to send more data to this device compared to others. It also allows us a fast recovery of files or Virtual Machines if needed being on-premise.”

Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) is an enterprise backup system that can be used to back up data from a source location to a target secondary location. Microsoft DPM allows you to back up application data from Microsoft servers and workloads, and file data from servers and client computers. You can create full backups, incremental backups, differential backups, and bare-metal backups to completely restore a system. Microsoft DPM can store backup data to disks for short-term storage, to Azure Cloud for both for short-term and long-term storage off-premises, and to tapes for long-term storage, which can then be stored offsite. Backed up files are indexed, which allows you to easily search your recovered data.

Microsoft DPM contributes to your business continuity and disaster recovery strategy by facilitating the backup and recovery of enterprise data, ensuring resources are available and recoverable during planned and unplanned outages. When outages occur and source data is unavailable, you can use DPM to easily restore data to the original source or to an alternate location.

Key Features of Microsoft DPM:

• Application-aware backup: Application-aware backup of Microsoft workloads, including SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, and SharePoint.
  
  
• File backup: Back up files and folders on computers running Windows Server and Windows operating systems.
  
  
• System backup: Back up the entire system state or run complete backups of physical computers running Windows Server or Windows client operating systems.
  
  
• Hyper-V backup: Back up Hyper-V virtual machines running either Windows or Linux. You can choose to back up an entire virtual machine or specific applications on the virtual machine.

Reviews from Real Users

Microsoft DPM stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its robust and flexible backup capabilities and its being easy to manage with one central dashboard.

William M., the head of ICT infrastructure & security at a tech services company, notes, "The automated procedure is quite good for us, as it is able to capture all of the information that we require. The compatibility is very good. We have an IBM AS/400 machine in our office that we're using, and we're able to back it up fine. This is the same for other systems, as well. I think that overall, it is really adaptable, compatible, and scalable."

Mohammed I., a managing director at Adalites, notes, "I would definitely recommend data protection DPM. It has an application backup, a file backup, a system backup and a hypervisor. It works flawlessly, never a problem."

Rodney C. a system analyst at a financial services firm, writes, "The most valuable feature is that DPM has an index so individual files can be searched. This is our primary tool for recovering deleted files or folders. Once we implement a System Center Operations Manager, all of our DPM servers can then be seen on one dashboard."

NetApp FAS series is an enterprise-level storage system that provides a wide variety of data management services, including data protection, block and file storage, and data management.

NetApp FAS is designed to be highly scalable, allowing your organization to grow storage capacity on demand. NetApp FAS also supports multiple protocols, including NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel, as well as various storage architectures, including SAN (Storage Area Network) and NAS (Network-Attached Storage).

The FAS series has multiple data protection and data management features, including snapshots, cloning, replication, and deduplication, to help secure your data and manage it more efficiently. The system integrates with other NetApp products and solutions, to create a unified data management platform. The system can be deployed on-premise, on multi-cloud environments, or hybrid.

NetApp FAS Series Benefits and Features

NetApp FAS series provides its users with several key benefits and features, including:

• Scalability: NetApp FAS series is easy to scale, allowing organizations to rapidly grow their storage capacity according to demand.

• Security: Protect and manage your data with various data protection and data management tools, including snapshots, cloning, replication, and deduplication.

• Seamless integration: Integrate with other NetApp products and solutions to ensure a unified data management platform across on-premise, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

• Reduced costs: Consolidation of multiple storage boxes greatly reduces the data center footprint. From a management point of view, with NetApp FAS you manage a single storage box instead of multiple storage boxes.
  
  
• Compatibility: Forward and backward compatibility ensures that you don’t have to trade in existing controllers. New controllers can always integrate with previously released controllers.

• Multi-protocol support: Support for multiple protocols, including NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel.

• High performance and availability: The solution has high input and output per second performance and ensures that critical data remains accessible in the event of a hardware failure.
  
  
• Intuitive interface: The FAS series has a user-friendly interface and management dashboard, making it easy to manage your storage systems. With unified management, you can quickly run a single protocol on your entire system
  
  
• Data cloning and replication: Easily clone databases of any size. Clones occupy a very, very small footprint on the storage until they are severed from the main database. Replications carried out by the system are fast and require very little bandwidth.

Reviews from Real Users

NetApp FAS Series stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its speed, reliability, and a wide variety of features.

Adriano S., IT project and infrastructure service manager, writes, “The replication feature is noteworthy because it's faster than most and it uses little bandwidth. Then there's the friendly interface that the equipment offers. With this interface, it is very easy to manage.”

Temitope O., a NetApp product manager at Hiperdist Ltd, says, “I like the unified management feature because sometimes you end up running a single protocol on the entire system. You rather have a system for a particular protocol and another system for other protocols, especially in a big environment like mine.”