PowerProtect DD Series vs. Quest Rapid Recovery

When used as a backup target PowerProtect DD models offer incredible density and can efficiently replicate to another cloud-based or offsite unit. Most complaints about these have been addressed in software over the years and they are now a intuitive and easily managed backup system. You are not buying a Swiss army knife, you are getting a machine designed for a purpose, use it for that and you will not be disappointed. While they have the ability to serve as a CIFS server, they are not a filer and lack many of the features inherent to filers and are a poor substitute.

Incentivized

I belive AppAssure is now part of the Dell protection Suite. We have a very messy backup process where we run several backup products: one product for virtual, one for physical, Appassure for special backup needs. If you are looking at AppAssure, ask yourself if you're willing to use the entire backup suite from Dell. I feel one of the key things for backup is a single pane of glass. Can you manage a majority of your backup needs and processes from this one product

Incentivized

• It writes backups quickly. DDBoost add-on is very useful as well for improving backup speeds.
• DD is very efficient in its use of capacity. It dedupes and compresses very well.
• It spans to large capacity amounts.

Incentivized

• Backup email reporting is good.
• Deduplication makes backing up larger jobs much more manageable.
• Restoring files is fairly simple and quick.

Incentivized

• Depending on the model of Data Domain, there is a limit to the number of NFS/SMB threads that can run concurrently. When this limit is reached, the system is slow to respond to client requests.
• Data Domain support is very slow to turn out new features and bug fixes in their code.
• OS upgrades are very slow and disruptive.

Incentivized

• We have many repository corruptions and have to blow our backups away. I would not recommend using this if you are keeping a long retention.
• We upgraded the agent and it created a new base image. Duplicate base images are eating up into our repository space.
• I would like to see the repositories go away and use the type that was introduced for replay.

Incentivized

DD has performed flawlessly for almost 10 years as our backup/recovery storage with offsite replication. Given its track record and great support from EMC, we're unlikely to look elsewhere any time soon.

Incentivized

Customer support has had some ups and downs here. We've had several issues with EMC support before and during the acquisition by Dell, but in the last 18 months support has been top notch. Quick and knowledgeable help is but a chat away, or they will call you back so you don't have to wait on hold. The team supporting us is responsive and is quick to assist with any request or issue.

Incentivized

In the very few instances we've needed support they have been quick, friendly, knowledgeable, and dedicated to servicing our needs. That has only improved since AppAssure was bought out by Quest.

Incentivized

Our initial installation really was not optimum. With the help from Dell Profession Services we were able to get our implementation sized correctly and better understand how to get better deduplication results

Incentivized

We already had Avamar in place, and since we have a good ecosystem of Dell Solution suite and wanted to evaluate PowerProtect DD also from that perspective, hence we thought of going ahead with it. We knew the limitations with Avamar and PowerProtect DD were right there from that side of the business.

Incentivized

Price, features, and ease of use made AppAssure an easy decision for us.

Incentivized

• Positive: The high compression (58.0x) and data reduction (98.3%) have allowed us to optimize the storage for efficient usage.
• Negative: even after adding capacity, we are running out of space. Adding capacity adds to the overall TCO (e.g. lease cost).

Incentivized

• Because the backup software is so scalable for a Managed Service Provider, it has made managing backups for our clients daily very easy and low effort, thus increasing our revenue.
• The software runs on a wide range of hardware which has made repurposing older equipment a very effective way of deploying it to our clients cheaply.
• We have used the backup software for approximately 8-10 years, however the software does not seem to be getting heavily developed which means in comparison to other vendors it is going to quickly become obsolete.