Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) Reviews

We're a system integrator, and we're providing services for a number of customers. It's not like we are using these products ourselves.

The deduplication and compression are great. 

We started looking at Data Domain together with the Dell Cyber Recovery solution to have them work together.

The solution is stable.

We have found the product to be scalable. 

The interface is fine.

It has good documentation.

Compatibility with other products is okay.

I cannot speak to the exact areas that need improvement at this time. 

The pricing could be lower. 

We've used the solution for a couple of years now. 

It's a stable, reliable product. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. The performance is good. 

The solution is scalable and pretty simple to grow. We work mainly with medium to enterprise-level organizations, and it works well across both. 

Technical support is quite good. We find them to be helpful and responsive. 

We are mostly also working with Dell. 

I've never handled a deployment and, therefore, cannot speak to the implementation process. 

The cost could be lower. Sometimes it's not very competitive.

The licensing depends on the specific solution sizing, however, there are cheaper solutions that I have seen in the market. For example, HP tends to cost less. 

We are a partner of Dell and a reseller. 

I'm a presales consultant.

It's a very stable product. It has some drawbacks in that it's quite expensive compared to other solutions. We mostly use it for enterprise customers. So they could improve a bit on the options for pricing. Beyond that, it's a solid product.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

I'm an architect, so I only use Data Domain to design solutions for clients right now. I'm not using it so much as for management or administration. My clients all like it, and It's an effective storage system.

Data Domain is an excellent repository that's compatible with a lot of different solutions. Even Veeam Backup recommends sending backup to Data Domain. Space optimization is great. Currently, it guarantees 50-to-1 compression of the application in the same device. In all these years, I never had a client who was unsatisfied with Data Domain. It is a solid appliance with VMware integration, instant access to restore and search, and analytics.

Data Domain lacks compatibility with fiber channels and tapes. We can't use it with a tape library. That's an issue in Latin America sometimes because a lot of clients still use tapes for budget reasons. Maybe they have a lot of archives. In North America and Europe, they do a lot of archiving, but they use the cloud more than we do. Sometimes we have to put together a Frankenstein where we connect another server to the tape library and send all the data there. 

I understand why integration with tapes isn't possible because they are designing these applications for the future. In the next decade, all the information will be sent through private and public clouds. It's a great way to send data. It can be software-defined, so you have lots of paths to send information, and it's it's not too slow, so I guess that's why they don't support tapes. When we have challenges with other providers, maybe an internal ID would help.

Also,Dell's backup software comes in a lot of flavors, and there's a bundle that gives you all the functionality. You use this software to do this and another to do that. There isn't a single application that can do everything, and sometimes that makes some struggles.

I got my first Dell certification in Data Domain about six or seven years ago, but I've been working on it for maybe two years. 

We use other products, but it's not a one-to-one comparison with Data Domain because they're software solutions. For example, competitors like Veeam Backup have only one software solution that you can't license to other users. You have to buy the license for Veeam Backup for a socket, but it involves all the the functionalities. Maybe you have to buy a part of the instances for taking the backup for the databases. 

It's a perpetual license, but you pay monthly for support. If you're integrating with the cloud, you have to pay for using the cloud. That's the only recurring cost you have with this tool.

Data Domain is a 10 for me. It's a great storage device.

We use the solution as a backup and to restore applications. 

It's business continuance versus disaster recovery. Business continuance is you lose some data at your data site or maybe get data corruption, due to malware, or somebody deletes something by mistake, and you've got to restore it. You go to your backup to do that, and that's business continuance. Disaster recovery is if your whole site's gone down and you need to run at another site. For business continuance, you need a product like Data Domain Power Protect.

There are capital expense benefits that you get if you're running into issues where typically, you're charged by how much physical space you take up. Data Domain or PowerProtect will save you expenses as you have physically less space. In other words, what deduplication and compression do, is, if you have 100 terabytes of physical storage and you're backing that up, maybe you're only backing it up to 30 physical terabytes on the appliance, on the Data Domain PowerProtect device. So you're saving a lot of physical space in your rack.

It has a feature where, instead of having a separate media server for backup to run the backup software, Dell now provides a version that runs it all together, so you don't need a separate media server.

It has a feature called deduplication which saves you space in your rack. If you run somewhere else and you get charged for physical space. this avoids using extra space, and that's a big plus.

The compression aspect of the solution is great.

It is very reliable. They have 99.999% uptime.

The product is scalable. 

Nothing comes to mind in terms of improvement. It serves its purpose. That said, if they could develop higher algorithms to make it more efficient, that would be great. 

Usually, with the backup, the issue is how fast it can do it. As network speeds improve, the solution improves. It has to keep up with the available network speeds, however. For example, a 100-gigabit ethernet. They need to keep up with the advancements in network speeds, and ethernet speeds. If they keep up, instead of taking five hours to back up your daily workload, you may do it in three hours.

It can be complex to implement.

I've used the solution for five to six years. 

The solution is stable. The products are very, very reliable. They're designed for what they call 99.999% at least, which is less than an hour a year of downtime.

It is very reliable. 

They're scalable. The Dell and HPE solutions are all scalable, and they can have up to, nowadays, multi-petabytes.

You can go to the cloud as well to scale even further. You can have some of your data in the data center, and you're physically owning this product in your data center, and at some point in time, if you want to archive some of that, it goes to the cloud. That's usually through what they call an S3 interface, which is an Amazon AWS protocol. Amazon AWS has an interface to their S3 storage. All the vendors now have an interface regardless of whatever cloud it goes to; they have expandability scalability up into the cloud through this S3 interface that was made popular by Amazon Web Service, AWS.

We're a vendor that sells the solution. Our clients decide when and if they scale. 

I think it's a well-established product, and everybody understands the functionality.

Positive

We do deal with various other solutions. There are five others on the market. One is ExaGrid. IBM has another. 

If somebody writes an RFQ, like a government agency, that says, "You guys have to tell me what's best," all those companies will be competing against each other.

The setup can be complex. 

You only need one person to implement the solution. 

Usually, we recommend that professional services do the implementation. These solutions get more complex with all the different appliances and devices. We usually recommend that we include professional services to do it for the customer.

We have seen an ROI. You get the functionality, period. And whether you need something that's going to do the deduplication and compression is the additional benefit of this type of device. Companies can't run without a backup device. This is a backup target for your backup software, so you need to back up or lose your business.

There are many different licenses, so you pay for what you need. There are various aspects you can add on, like extra speed, or something just for reading data. There are licenses to do replication as well. You have a lot of options. 

We are dealing with the newest version of the solution. We sell it. We are not end-users. 

I'm an engineer that helps with the sales teams. I'm the one who recommends these products and puts them together as a solutions architect.

One client is going from two to three shelves, or 60 to 90 terabytes.

The solution is comparable to other offerings and vendors. However, I've been pleased with its capabilities. I'd rate it nine out of ten.

I am using Dell PowerProtect DD for data extraction for extract, transform, and load(ETL) processes. This is a tool that receives data from operational platforms, or systems, such as in my factory in insurance, underwriting, claim management or health provisioning, et cetera. It receives the data from the source systems and not from the data warehouse platform by doing transformation or by loading the data or after loading the data. 

The usage of this solution is a bit difficult to develop processes, and it takes a long time to market permits.

I have been using Dell PowerProtect DD for 15 years.

Dell PowerProtect DD is a stable solution.

Dell PowerProtect DD is scalable but there are better tools.

The data engineers are using this platform in my company. There are 15 data engineers, and all of them are using this tool.

We are using technical support from the producers, and it is not good. I'm not happy with the technical support.

I rate the support from Dell PowerProtect DD a two out of five.

The initial setup of Dell PowerProtect DD is complex. Its initial setup is a bit complex because it uses many services on the operating system. Sometimes it is hard to solve the issue while installing the solution on-premises.

I rate the initial setup of Dell PowerProtect DD a three out of five

With the Dell PowerProtect DD, it is not possible to deploy the solution by ourselves. We deployed, and upgraded the solution, it took more than a month because there were problems, and the producer need to solve the issues. This is what took time.

We needed to get help to implement the solution because the producers because it is not easy.

If we do not move to the cloud solution and stay with our on-premise version we will miss some new features.

I rate the price of Dell PowerProtect DD a three out of five.

I rate Dell PowerProtect DD a six out of ten.

The cost is quite good if you look at the product. 

It should provide everything that an enterprise needs. 

It can back up all the workloads on-prem, off-prem, and mainly the VM infrastructure. You should be able to replicate to another site. 

The reporting and monitoring features that it provides are great. 

It offers security with the software.

The stability is excellent.

The solution scales well.

The new niche players are currently very good, but some things that they lack. As an example, NetApp Filer. There is no real partnership between different vendor platforms such as EMC or NetApp. They don't really talk that much. There needs to be better ease of use with like APIs and automation and things of that nature. Some vendors are more API friendly, some vendors are not. Being API friendly will help.

EMC is just coming out with their global deduplication future with virtual addition and things like that. Which is still in the works.

They need to make migration easier. 

The solution is very stable. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. There is not any other storage, deduplication storage appliance, that will match Data Domain. That is pretty much as stable a product as we have seen.

The solution can scale well.

Overall, technical support has been pretty good. However, the support recently, the support that is coming in from India, is not as good as what we used to get before. In the past year, we have seen a significant drop in call response.

When we installed the solution, pretty much the software all was new. It was Legato earlier and then it was using Networker version eight everywhere else. When we started deploying it, we started with version nine. We pretty much started with the latest versions of the software. There were some growing pains, however, we were able to step up the enrollment and it was good in the end. Beyond a few issues right at the outset, it was a good experience. 

The cost is quite reasonable. 

Earlier, when we started deploying, we had to use a single DDBoost user for each EMP. I don't know our storage unit, however, now, with the latest release, we can use multiple users. That is one good reason why people should start using this solution, as there is one DDBoost user per entry. That way, it is easier to migrate or move across, for example, during your tech refresh. When they offer some kind of a load balancing feature in front of Data Domain it will be a good thing. We know that they always have it in the roadmap, however, we have never seen that come through.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I have an IT company and have tested it in order to see if I could resell it to clients.

They have a very nice, clearly laid out dashboard.

The functionality has been excellent.

So far, the solution is stable. 

Its pricing is not overly expensive. 

I still need to try all the features and functions. As a reseller, it's important I understand it and I have only used it for a few weeks. It helps if you have in-depth knowledge in order to use it correctly.

Scaling can be better.

I've worked with the solution for 15 days so far. I was testing it.

I'm not sure about the stability. I haven't yet tried it with big companies. I just tested the solution for a little bit. So far, for that purpose, it was stable. I didn't come across bg or glitches, and I haven't seen it crash or freeze. 

The scalability could be better. I'm not sure how it would scale for bigger organizations. 

We have just two people using the solution right now. It's myself and an administrator.

I haven't needed any help yet and therefore have not used technical support.

I'm not sure if we used a different solution previously.

The solution is moderately straightforward to set up It's not easy or difficult. 

The deployment took about one to two hours. It didn't take long. 

I handled the implementation myself. I did not need help from integrators or consultants. 

The price of the product is pretty reasonable. 

We are dealing with the latest version of the solution.

We haven't had any difficulties with the solution while testing it. Maybe once we try to deploy to a sizeable company, we will find challenges. However, so far, it is good. 

I'd recommend the solution. It's worked well, and it has good Google reviews. 

I would rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for large backups. This is a piece of hardware that we can place software on. 

It's used widely in some of the largest banks in our country - including foreign banks. They use Data Domain in petabytes. 

The specific algorithms of backups of the data deduplication are very good. For example, some of our competitors need much more space. When we have to use one additional enclosure, they have to use two times more. Data Domain has a lot of space. 

The technology has been very useful. There are lots of features on offer.

It's very competitive. We get discounts on pricing and find the cost to be quite good. 

The solution is stable and reliable.

It is scalable. 

We'd always prefer if there was even more competitive pricing since they are very close in price to Quantum. However, the pricing isn't too bad.

The initial setup is complex. The installation process should be easier so you can install the solution without having specialized techs. 

I've used the solution for several years. It's likely been more than six years. 

The solution seems to be quite stable. We haven't had issues with bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable. 

It's a scalable product.

Technical support is helpful. The Dell rep office in the country has many experienced techs. 

We also have a lot of knowledge in our own right.

From time to time, when we do need help, it's nice to have experienced techs we can reach out to. 

The issue we have right now is spare parts. We're in Ukraine, and the war made it difficult at the outset. It has gotten better. It's okay at the moment. 

We've used a variety of different products. We use different brands simultaneously. It depends on the customer's needs. Some offer more competitive tenders, and some are used based on the government structure.

The implementation can be complex. It's not very simple to set up.

The deployment took a couple of days. 

We typically have one or two engineers working with the solution. That's enough personnel to deploy and design the setup, et cetera. One person is quite enough to maintain the product.

Our team handled the deployment of the product. We didn't need outside assistance. 

The solution is reasonably priced. We get discounts as well. They remain competitive.

It's a hardware solution. We don't have to worry about software licensing. We can use any software on it that the client likes.

Data Protect, DP 400, and higher models include EMC software and a set of various different software.

If you buy the unit, you pay for it for three or five years. They also offer support with a warranty that you can extend.

When we help our customers or some governmental structures to prepare the documents for bidding for some tenders, we investigate the details and competitive features of our solutions. That includes Dell EMC, HPE, and Quantum Alliance. They are all very close in functionality.

HP tends to have higher pricing; however, Quantum is quite close in terms of cost.

We're a platinum partner.

I'm using the latest version of the solution.

We have certified engineers for Data Domain.

I am the general manager of the company. I'm not an engineer.

I'd recommend the solution to others. 

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

The tool's performance is very good. DD Boost can improve its performance and backup. 

The tool's DD Boost is expensive. 

I have been using the product for ten years. 

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) is scalable. I rate it a six out of ten. 

I rate the product a six out of ten.