Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) Reviews

We use Data Domain to back up the SAP ERP system, and it worked very well.

We are moving to a public cloud.

We are very satisfied with this solution. It's easy to use and efficient.

The price is expensive, so that could be improved. The interface and dashboards could also be improved.

We have some problems with backing up on the Power Platform. PowerServer is an IBM product, and it forces us to back up over LAN, which is not suitable for us.

It needs some added features to back up the AIX OS or the old applications running on AIX OS.

10 years ago, we used the network backup, but we have upgraded our devices many times.

It's 99% stable.

It's 99% scalable.

Technical support is very good.

Setup was very easy.

The cost is expensive.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

I would recommend this solution to anyone who wants to use it, for an enterprise of any size.

We use it mostly combined with software, such as NetWorker, and the Data Domain works as a repository for the information.

The features that I have found most valuable with Dell EMC PowerProtect DD are its deduplication feature and its DD Boost protocol for fast transfer, which is amazing.

I have seen documentation from other products saying that they protect against ransomware and I haven't seen this in Data Domain. I don't know if it is a good idea to have it in the appliance, but I would like to see some kind of integration with the ransomware in the next release.

I have been using Dell EMC PowerProtect DD for about 15, 20 years.

It is working stably. I haven't had any trouble with the implementations I have done.

The backup solutions are from EMC umbrella. I have been using them for more than 20 years. All the implementation I have done for the past nine years+ have combined NetWorker and Data Domain.

In terms of scalability, you can grow it and you can put additional units as needed.

In terms of the number of people required to maintain the solution, that depends on the size of the customer environment. As an example, we have a customer with about 50 physical and virtual servers. They have two Data Domains with an administrator, but it is maintained by only one person.

I haven't dealt with support because I haven't had any problems with the equipment.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It is pretty straightforward to implement - nothing very complicated. Most of the work is in the software part, so it depends on the software solution, not Data Domain particularly.

The software part also depends on the amount of servers we are trying to protect. It also depends on the amount and types of database and applications. That is the complex part of these types of implementations.

My advice to anyone considering this product is that the most important thing is to have a good sizing. If the sizing at the beginning is good, you won't have any trouble with the implementation or using the product. But if you have a bad sizing, it's going to be a headache.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Dell EMC PowerProtect DD a 10.

My primary use case is as the backup storage feed application.

The most valuable features of this product are its guaranteed reliability and its duplication capability.

The size and scale of the product are limited and could be improved.

I have been using this solution for about five years.

I would say this is a fairly stable solution.

My experience has been that the tech support is pretty responsive.

This is a great product and should definitely be considered when comparing solutions. I would rate this product as seven out of ten. 

We are just using it for backing up the workloads using Avamar. We are using its latest version.

It works within backup windows and has got good deduplication.

It can probably have integration with other OEMs. It should also have more features for ransomware protection.

It could be more competitively priced.

I have been using this solution for four years.

It is stable.

It is easily scalable. We have around 2,000 people in our organization.

It is very good.

We were using HPE StoreOnce about four years ago.

It is straightforward. It only takes a couple of hours to implement.

I can do it myself. For its deployment and maintenance, I only need a couple of engineers.

It could be more competitively priced. Its licensing was for five years. Obviously, the support will get renewed at some stage, but that's it.

I would recommend this solution to others. I would rate Dell EMC PowerProtect DD a nine out of 10.

We as a company use this product to protect our information. We have Data Domain combined NetWorker for our own company, and we also install and provide services around those solutions to our customers.

In our company, Dell Data Domain is used to protect our servers (on-premises), where the most important servers for us are the File Server and the eMail server. The Dell Data Domain we have It´s combined with Dell NetWorker as the backup software. The Data Domain works as the repository of the information, taking advantage of the duplication and all the features that it has. We are getting about 30x as the deduplication ratio. It is managed by the software NetWorker, where all the backup policies reside. We have clients in all the servers directing information from the server to the Data Domain taking advantage of the software client direct feature. We make backups on a daily basis, as incremental backups, and over the weekend we have full backups. We have about 14 servers in our office. Mostly Windows and Linux.

Yes, Dell Data Domain has improved our organization's backup strategy. As I mentioned, our infrastructure has different types of servers, all of them are virtual servers based on VMware. Once we had to make a recovery and we used the Instant Recovery feature where we started the virtual machine over the Data Domain instead of the VMWare server. Then we used VMotion to move the virtual machine from the Data Domain to the VMware server. We were able to minimize the service failure to 15 minutes approximately. 

The feature that I find the most useful is its data duplication. We had been having problems doing backups for the file server because we did not have enough space to store our backups. Data Domain solved that problem for us.

In terms of what could be improved, when you use Data Domain, you have to have at least 15% to 20% of free space so it can work properly. I understand that space is needed to process all the data, but it would be a big improvement if we could use that space too.

Just to give you a little background, I work for an integrator and we are also users of the technology. We have installed and used Data Domain for five to six years now. We also provide installation and support services for Data Domain for our customers. 

I think it is awesome. We've been using Data Domain for almost five years, and during this time we have only had one problem with one disk. We reported that to Dell and they sent us the replacement part and we only have to exchange the disk with the failure. 

We are looking at the scalability right now, because the family of Data Domain we have is already being replaced, so we are looking at changing the Data Domain. It seems that the upgrade will be easy, but we are still planning how to do the upgrade. 

Sometimes it's difficult to reach the real experts to get a solution. The escalation process is not that great, but in the end, it works.

Tape based backups

I installed the Data Domain and it was really easy. 

It is not a big Data Domain, so it was just mounted in our rack. We followed the initial setup where the IP and the name are configured. After that, most of the configurations had to be done over the software.

The complex part of the configuration is in the backup server (software part), it is not in the Data Domain. The Data Domain was really easy to set up. The Data Domain setup took us about four hours.

Our deployment plan was based on the installation of the hardware first, and after that, the software deployment, starting with the backup server.

I implemented it alone.

N/A

The licensing was not an issue because it is related to the software part. I'm not really sure about the price, because I think we've gotten a discount as we are partners.

Traditional Disk-Based backups 

The main consideration for anyone interested in Dell EMC Data Domain is to have a good initial sizing. The planning part at the beginning of the project is the most important. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Domain a nine.

We use it for backup.

It is very fast as compared to the other competitors. Its simplicity and bit rate are also valuable. It takes less time if we compare it with the old solution that we have.

Its management can be improved.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It is scalable. It gives the possibility for extension. You can add to the existing units.

They are excellent. We have access to them, and they respond immediately and provide the required solution. Their solutions are valuable and effective.

Its price is reasonable.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate Dell EMC PowerProtect DD an eight out of ten. To be able to rate a solution as ten, one must be very proficient and should know several products to compare them all, which is not true in my case.

We are a solution provider and we use the Dell EMC PowerProtect DD to provide service for our clients. It is used to provide backups for VMware environments.

The most valuable feature is the performance because you can back up data really quickly.

I would like to see better integration and support for backing up to cloud providers such as Alibaba Cloud.

In the next release, they need some monitoring, not only of the backup but monitoring of the firmware and the applications.

I have been using this product for one year.

This solution is stable and I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.

It's a scalable product.

I have a team of two that maintains it.

The technical support is okay. We opened a case and the response was good. We did not have any issues.

Previously, we deployed Commvault HyperScale and the Veritas NetBackup Appliance, but the performance is better with Dell EMC PowerProtect DD.

The initial setup was a little bit complex after the initial configuration when we tried to integrate it with the firmware.

It took one week for the deployment, configuration, initializing the backup, and monitoring of the backup for one round.

In summary, this is a good backup product and we are happy with the performance.

I would recommend this product to customers. I think that it has better performance than Commvault HyperScale.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We primarily used this product as a solution for backups.

This product improved our system of backup by reducing the time and effort required to manage the system.

The reliability of Data Domain was the most useful feature to me. Every piece of data is recorded multiple times in several devices in a cluster. If any hardware failure occurs, it does not impact the data and does not result in any data loss. Resilience and reliability under any circumstances are important to data security.

Spanning the time I worked with EMC Data Domain, I had no issues that suggested to me that it needed improvement. It was working fine, and anything I wanted to do with Data Domain, I could do it. So I had no idea that it might have needed improvement. That is just thinking from a technical perspective as a user. It did what it needed to do for backup.

In hindsight, I am aware that there is a feature that does not exist in Data Domain related to the security of the product and the data. A friend who works in another organization had a problem when his organization was infected with ransomware. The ransomware locked up the data in the Data Domain and disrupted the data system asking for something in return or it would delete all the data. The ransom was not submitted and the hack successfully deleted all the data. This is a big concern and no small issue where data is critical.

So I believe security measures are not strict enough in Data Domain. I would like to see something in place for better security.

In addition to this — which is related to security as well — there are regulations from the central bank that mandates that we need to keep backup copies that are not connected to the network. They must be completely isolated from the network. Data Domain does not have any arrangements to satisfy this requirement. For compliance, we need to use a secondary solution.

The only other issue is that the prices seem high in comparison to other products and they should consider restructuring their pricing plans.

It's very stable and reliable. I have never had an issue with stability.

This is a very scalable solution. Whenever we needed to we could add new nodes with minimal effort and keep the same data structure.

Defining the number of users for the system is a little tricky because only the backup administrators actually use the Data Domain solution to do the backup procedures for the whole bank as a company. So the actual number of users of the product — hands-on — is around three people. But these three people are doing backups for many systems that are centrally connected to Data Domain. These many systems have around 300 total servers which go through the backup process. Each one of those 300 servers contains data from many users and transactions. In a way, our implementation of this product is serving many thousands of customers, and it can serve many thousands more.

So, yes, I think it is very scalable.

Our experience with customer and technical support has been very good. For example, in one instance we had a problem with the hardware and technical support guy came and replaced the failed component. This was seamless from our operations because the system is highly available and redundant. So everything continued working even with some part failing. But the technical support people were knowledgeable, quick and on-premises.

Before using Data Domain, I was using a tape library. It was IBM Tape Library with LTO (Linear Tape-Open). We switched to EMC Data Domain because of the speed. Backing up data to a tape library is much, much slower than backup to Data Domain, which is based on hard disks. it's much faster in backup.

The system we switched to is actually EMC Data Domain as the hardware device for backup, while Veritas is the software backup. Veritas has its own hardware device. However, EMC Data Domain hardware is much better than Veritas. The golden combination as I see it is EMC Data Domain hardware with Veritas software. Going that way, I get the best of each in our backup solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. For the deployment, it took one day for the hardware implementation and a couple of days for integration with the software. For several days, I worked with IBM TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) or Veritas. All of the parts came together well and I had no real issues.

The implementation was carried out by my team and myself with some input from EMC as well. That was a team was a total of two persons from EMC, one person from my team and myself. I just managed the team and oversaw the process. I think normally that a technical team of about three people can handle the deployment.

As far as having a return on investment, I see investing in Data Domain as having a positive return. It is reliable and it does a very good job when it comes to data compression and deduplication. It makes the backup size much smaller, which saves the company a lot of money because you are not buying tape cartridges for the tape library or even hard discs for temporary backup to store redundant information.

Another ROI which is less tangible is the time for recovery. If I have a problem and I would like to recover something, it is a much faster procedure working with hardware than with tape.

One thing that anyone considering this solution has to realize is that it is expensive. It is expensive for a reason, but it is expensive.

Anyone considering using this solution will first need to make a proper assessment of their need for the data storage because this is misleading. Sometimes managers just make a simple assumption that an organization has about 50 terabytes of data and that they don't need more than this for backup. This is not correct.

If you look into the whole backup strategy, you will see how frequently you will do backups, how many copies we will need to retain, and the period of days that the data is retained — It will be a specific period of days and the backups will rotate. There should be a retention strategy and a rate of change of the data backups. All of these are parameters that affect the sizing of the data domain device. It could be many times the initial size depending on the strategy and how critical the data is. So assessing the proper sizing is very important and key for the success of the backup strategy.

It is important, as well, to assure that the software and the hardware work seamlessly together because you can mix and match software and hardware solutions to come to the ultimate package. Making sure that every feature in the software would work with the hardware is really imperative before making any decision.

On a scale from one to ten with one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate EMC Data Domain as 7.5. The reason why it is not higher than 7.5 is mostly because of the cost. It is a very expensive solution. The lack of better security features to protect the data is really another big issue.