TrustRadius Insights for PowerProtect DD Series are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
Data Domain is widely used in various backup scenarios and data storage environments. One of its primary use cases is as the data storage component for Avamar backup solution, providing reliable and efficient storage for backups. Users appreciate the seamless integration of Data Domain into storage and backup strategies, eliminating the need for tape backup. Additionally, Data Domain's deduplication feature is highly valued as it helps save disk space and avoid data duplication.
Another important use case of Data Domain is its role as a local backup target and cross-replication system for geodiverse data storage. By setting up backup and data lifecycle policies on the console, users can streamline their work processes effectively. Furthermore, Data Domain offers a high scale and efficient storage solution, contributing to agility and security in data management.
In terms of performance, PowerProtect DDs are utilized as targets for enterprise backups, ensuring reliable offsite backups. The compression factor of PowerProtect DD allows users to store a large amount of data on physical disks with optimal utilization. This makes it ideal for businesses looking to protect, manage, and recover their data efficiently.
For individuals and professionals alike, PowerProtect DD offers confidence in restoring backups and minimizing data loss disruptions. The user-friendly interface makes regular data backups easy to complete. Moreover, field technicians find PowerProtect DD valuable as it enables them to access data backups whenever needed, enhancing their productivity.
Overall, Data Domain's versatility makes it suitable for a wide range of industries and settings where effective data management and protection are crucial. It provides reliable storage solutions, efficient deduplication capabilities, seamless integration into existing systems, and easy-to-use interfaces that cater to the needs of both businesses and individual users alike.
Our techs are can be in the field 24/7 so having a data backup that enables them to access whenever needed was critical - both for them and for our customers whose programming data we also backup to PowerProtect DD. We need reliability and like any other business, consider ROI before making a decision.
Pros
reliable
easy accessibility 24/7
good initial install experience
Cons
haven’t found anything.
Likelihood to Recommend
For our company’s needs, this was perfect. It might be too much for someone who is a sole prop or not enough for a much larger corporation with many global locations to maintain. We like the ease of access and the face our techs can get what they need on site or in the shop.
We had huge data of ourselves along with our partner ecosystem, and our end customers for whom we do the deployment and using PowerProtect DD made our work line very streamlined when it came to managing the entire data lifecycle. The data in use was highly duplicated, coming in from different sources, but with deduplication availability, this turned out to be really good in saving disk space and avoiding duplication. At the same time setting up policies on the console was also very reliable in order to setup backup policies and setting up data lifecycle policies. The DDOS contributes to agility and security, which helps us to deliver high-scale and very efficient storage with the utmost capabilities. The backup and restoration speed also fastens up, making the entire process very time and performance efficient.
Pros
Deduplication of data coming from different sources
Provides highly secure and efficient storage ecosystem
Backup and Restoration is fasten up
HA is achieved within independent stacks making the TCO reduced
Cons
Implementation of the product is complex and time taking, which needs to be improved.
If you have different data sources coming into the system, then installation needs to be carried away by a professional.
Likelihood to Recommend
We have huge data coming in from different sources and also from multiple organizations in our Data centres. This data had multiple copies of the same data and was huge in size therefore, we wanted to have a solution in place which can help us with a good amount of deduplication at the deepest possible level to make sure that our ecosystem does not have multiple copies of the same data and is also efficient at the same time. Having said this, we wanted this solution to be secure and reliable since it had to be exposed to a huge critical set of data in the market. To add, backup and restoration was something that we were also keen on evaluating so that once we have efficient data within our system, the time it takes to backup and restoration also reduces. And all this was justified by this solution when we signed up with them. From the pricing perspective and the implementation side, the solution needs improvement to make it more efficient and user-friendly.
We use PowerProtect DDs as the targets for all our enterprises backups. With replication between the separate data centers PowerProtect DDs we have reliable offsite backups as well. With our environment size we need a very dense data storage medium for our backups to remain entirely on disk. With the incredible compression factor PowerProtect provides we are able to store 10PiB of data on 210TiB of physical disks.
Pros
Extreme data density with compression.
Reliable and efficient replication.
At rest encryption.
Fast write speeds.
Cons
Slow read speeds.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Technician in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)
DD is used as an on-premise backup storage target in coordination with a Veeam backup environment. It is used to backup VM's running Microsoft OS primarily in a VMWare environment. DD does a good job of compressing and deduplicating data to save space on the backup storage. We also replicate the primary DD to a secondary DD in another datacenter for redundancy purposes. That works well.
Pros
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.
Cons
It is very slow to restore from. Backup times are great, restores can be terribly slow.
It doesn't offload to cloud storage natively. You need to purchase an expensive license to enable this feature.
The management interface is very basic, but it works fine.
The new air gap solution seems to be just replication an on/off switch. I'd prefer to see them leverage AI on the existing device instead of requiring
A second device is purchased and securing by toggling the connectivity off.
Likelihood to Recommend
It fits well into most backup solutions that don't require frequent restorations. <span style="letter-spacing: -0.05px; word-spacing: -0.85px;">If you need to be able to offload to cloud and can't afford extra licensing costs, this may not be for you.</span>
VU
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)
Data Domain is used across the whole organization as part of our Data Protection solution. It is used in conjunction with Avamar as back-end storage.
Pros
The deduplication is fantastic. We are currently seeing total compression factors in the mid to upper 50s.
The platform is very reliable and stable.
It backs up a wide variety of enterprise apps (e.g. legacy applications, UNIX, iSeries, open systems etc) or your primary storage.
Cons
It can be expensive to implement, especially when used in conjunction with other applications/hardware such as Avamar.
The TCO can be high, especially when it needs its storage expanded.
Recovery speeds can be slow (compared to other solutions) for when recovery is time sensitive.
Likelihood to Recommend
Data Domain is best suited for environments that have a wide range of applications in use from legacy to modern. For example, environments that have a mainframe, ERP, and open systems with a large data footprint.
Due to the price point, it may not be well suited for environments that are mostly virtualized with a small data footprint.
Like most DD users, we primarily use Data Domain restorer appliances as disk targets for backups, through CIFS and VTL protocols. Two units 100 miles apart provide local backup targets and cross-replicate for geodiverse data storage. All backups from IBM iServers (VTL), Tivoli Storage Manager, vRanger, AvePoint DocAve and SQL native backups (CIFS) land on a local DD and are replicated offsite.
Pros
High data ingestion rate. For inline dedupe, these devices can ingest a saturated Gigabit Ethernet line, plus a FibreChannel from an AS/400.
High reliability. In ten years of having at least two units and ingesting 1.5 to 2TB/night of backups, we've replaced maybe three disk drives.
Scalability. Dedupe ratios are very good (11:1 for us for all data), and the DD2500 models allow addition of disk trays to expand capacity.
Ease of use. Management interface is good, the free Data Domain Management Center Appliance is even better.
Cons
Dedupe ratios on a per-folder or per-CIFS share basis would be nice, we can only see the ratio per partition (MTree). So it's not possible to see what ratio we get from Tivoli data vs vRanger data, for instance, because they're in the same MTree.
The VTL option seems inordinately expensive given it's only software. We held off a long time because of the cost, and only went down that road because the IBM iSeries is inherently unable to do a DR recovery from disk only.
Likelihood to Recommend
Best suited for backup target, that's what it was designed for. The ingestion rate is very high, data exfil not so much. Doesn't work very well as a NAS (though functionally, that's what it is). It's very good at block-level deduplication of disparate types of data.
VU
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (201-500 employees)
Data Domain is currently being used to store our database backups. We utilize the NFS and SMB functionality to provide storage locations for our database administrators to perform their daily backups including logs. We also use MTree replication to replicate to a secondary site for offsite disaster recovery.
Pros
MTree replication to another Data Domain system. The Data Domain performs the replication every 15 minutes, so our offsite data is never more than 15 minutes out of sync with production.
DDBoost provides a faster way to back up our data.
Data encryption at rest. This allows us to protect our database data.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Data Domain is well suited in an environment where there is already a backup software in use that can take advantage of things like DDBoost. If a company is looking for an all in one solution, then Data Domain is not suited for this.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
We moved to backup with Data Domain after using several other products, for us the decision was a no-brainer we are an EMC shop and tied with networker. Data Domain was a seamless integration into our storage and backup strategy. It helped us address moving to a no tape backup and cross-site replication strategy.
Pros
Cross-site replication.
Easily maintained, organized and replicated backup schedules and policies.
Deduplication is amazing, we are seeing in some cases with OS and file 22:1 dedupe.
Cons
VMware integration from a restoration perspective.
Initial ingestion for data can get bloated at first it would be nice to see a better estimation of what you most likely will see after dedupe and compression completes.
Better data aging and deletion capabilities, we see periodic bloating with lower retention policies.
Likelihood to Recommend
Data Domain allowed us to move to a tapeless backup environment and with the product located in multiple sites we were able to achieve a cross-site replication policy that protects our data and intellectual property in a geographically diverse manner while maintaining corporate retention policies. I would say unless you are a shop that has retention policies that are low enough to keep copies in your facilities this product may not be capable for your needs.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
We utilize Data Domain as our Tier 2 disk subsystem for inline data de-duplicated data protection. This includes traditional client-server backups as well as a straight database dump to Data Domain configurations via NFS. We have many years of reliable use in both of these configurations. Overall we have been able to significantly reduce and in some cases completely eliminate use of tape in our backup schemes. Data Domain has been a set it up and forget about it appliance from a reliability perspective.
Pros
Data Domain is very good at data reduction of database backups (IBM DB2, SAP HANA, Oracle).
Data Domain is an excellent choice for WAN optimized long distance DR data replication.
Data Domain is extremely reliable and stable.
Cons
Restore speed could be improved. Restores are much slower than backups.
It would be nice if there were multi-controller larger capacity configurations.
Increased large environment remote management functionality would be a welcome addition.
Likelihood to Recommend
We have found that Data Domain excels at homogeneous data type backups such as database dumps. We are able to get very good data reduction/de-duplication rates when we are careful to place similar data types/data on the same appliance. Conversely we have found that Data Domain is only average from a data reduction perspective when mixed data types are placed on the same appliance. In order to maximize your data reduction you must pay attention to appropriately place data.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
