I work for a National Polytechnic School that teaches engineering and sciences.
We are evaluating Dell EMC PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) and Veeam Backup & Replication. What are the biggest differences between the two? Which would you recommend?
Thanks! I appreciate the help.
Both can be used to run a backup/replication. In the case of Veeam it's a backup software that can be used to set up your data protection policies: what to backup (data set, save set, etc.), how often to run a copy process (schedules, jobs). How long to keep the copy. The Veeam system can ask the clients (e.g. Oracle server) to run the backup, and then Veeam will manage the resulting copy.
Dell EMC Data Domain is an appliance - can be hardware or virtual edition. In general, you can think of it as about a backup repository with added functionality like replication, encryption, file lock (WORM), etc. It cannot ask the client to start the backup, neither it will not automatically delete/expire any data. But can be very easily integrated with leading backup software systems and with almost any application that has its own backup/restore module (like RMAN for Oracle). Then DD presents itself to the application as a backup device.
The answer is: use DD together with a supported backup system of your choice.
First of all, we need to know that both tools work great together. On one hand, Dell EMC DD is known for being such an efficient deduplication machine. You can store hundreds and hundreds of GB at a cost without any problem. The main issue would be during restoring times. When in need of a complete restore, DD needs to rebuild the Data, and that costs a little bit of time.
On the other hand, Veeam Backup its a tool, a program, purely software, that manages and makes backups. Veeam is capable of many different things. I'm going to talk about backups all the time to simplify things. Veeam manages backups from Virtual Machines. You can make backups of them to any repository that you wan, as of an SMB, local disk, remote server, etc.
In my opinion, there's no point in comparing DD and Veeam. You can use EMC Data Domain as an SMB repository for storing your backups. Using DD as a secondary repository is a good thing, you can store hundreds of TBs and have copies of your VM from months ago. If you plan to use DD as the main repo, you should have in mind that in case that a restore it's needed, you'll have to wait sometime for the DD to complete the restore. Writing is a beast, but reading the data on it can be a pain in the butt.
From what I know DD is a dedupe storage appliance that requires backup software such as EMC Avamar or Networker. Veeam Backup and Replication is a backup software that can integrate with DD also.
These are two different domains so it's not fair to compare.
If you are trying to compare dedupe ratios between DD and Veeam then, of course, DD will win as it is VM-based.
However, I personally would prefer Veeam and Exagrid combo if I would like to compare EMC Avamar/Networker with DD. Of course that all rely on what your needs and which vendor can address it in the best way possible rather than comparing vendors.
Team I have used both DD with Avamar and Veeam Backup, They are both great products and perform the job very well, my short answer is that Veeam is just a little bit more intuitive and user-friendly, The DD product seemed kind of counter-intuitive at times, once you understood how to perform a function I would always document it as it just was not that user-friendly. With Veeam the GUI is very intuitive and user-friendly and a little bit easier to navigate when you need to perform tasks. They both perform great data deduplication and compression. Hope this helps.
A lot of companies that I know of are using Veeam.