Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Our main cases for Dell PowerProtect Data Manager  are for virtual tape library.

The features I like the most include the decompression, the duplication, compression, and deduplication.

The availability of the unified dashboard fundamentally impacts my strategic decision making because it is a fundamental dashboard.

I think Dell PowerProtect  can be improved in that I see PowerStore  supporting the synchronous and asynchronous replica, similar to PowerMax .

I have been using it for 10 years.

I don't know if prior to adopting Dell PowerProtect Data Manager we were using another solution since I have worked here for five months, and we were using this solution.

Regarding return on investment, I have worked in this company for five months, so I don't have this data.

I have had a great experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing; it is clear and simple.

I did not consider any other solutions before Dell PowerProtect Data Manager; it is supported and suggested with our software, making it the correct and right choice.

The main use case for Dell PowerProtect Data Manager  is to secure all of my company's critical data and ensure that data can be restored in case of an incident.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager  has drastically improved our backup processes, reducing the time needed for backups from 12 to 15 hours to just an hour and 30 minutes, allowing me to efficiently manage critical data resources.

I have seen a return on investment with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager through reduced time spent managing a backup solution. I set the policies and let it do its job efficiently in the background while being alerted to any issues by reporting.

The feature I like the most about Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is Instant  Recovery, which allows me to restore a VM instantly by mounting it directly to the Data Domain and then performing a vMotion directly into my production environment, providing me instant availability and access to a backup that I took place up to seven hours ago.

I have used the Anomaly Detection feature of Dell PowerProtect Data Manager and recently turned it on, as it was not available in the version I was using prior. I upgraded to 19.22, which allowed me to start using Anomaly Detection, and I really appreciate it because it lets me train the data being backed up and provides insight before I ingest it into my Cyber Recovery Vault to be scanned by CyberSense.

Anomaly Detection has given me more awareness as a data administrator backing up all the data in our company because it allows me to see the overall grand scope of all the data being ingested into our organization structure and informs me about anomalies across a broad scope of accessible user data, making me more proactive than reactive.

I do utilize the Transparent Snapshots feature of Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, which is one of the best features, because it communicates with my storage solution, PowerStore , allowing it to take a snapshot at the storage level without quiescing or freezing the VM, thus enabling backups at any time without hindering production.

From a cyber resilience perspective, this means I can take more backups and snapshots quicker and more frequently without fearing the loss of critical services and systems provided to my users.

I have used the Storage Direct protection feature of Dell PowerProtect Data Manager by directly connecting to PowerStore , allowing me to back up my unified file system individually and select different retentions, providing greater granularity.

The availability of the unified dashboard of Dell PowerProtect Data Manager gives me an accurate idea of how much of my data is being protected, allowing me to discover which VMs are not protected and providing visibility into all VMs and their inclusion in a protection policy, ensuring I can restore critical resources.

One improvement I would suggest for Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is the ability to send data not just to a Data Domain but also to a PowerScale , which would provide faster backups for critical VMs, enhancing the Instant  Recovery backups' speed.

I have been using Dell PowerProtect Data Manager since September of 2023.

I find Dell PowerProtect customer service to be very good; while Avamar 's upgrades could take almost 24 hours, with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, I complete upgrades in less than an hour with fast support available if needed.

I would rate the technical support from Dell for Dell PowerProtect Data Manager a ten.

In our previous solution, we used what was called Avamar , and how Dell PowerProtect Data Manager and their features helped us drastically was that if we had an outage with the main backup, our data protection application, which we called Avamar, it took me having to contact support and within 25 to 48 hours, I would have to get the unit back up online in case I had to restore critical structures.

Prior to adopting Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, I was using Dell Avamar, which was great at the time but lacked scalability and was complex, requiring support for simple tasks, whereas with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, I can handle upgrades independently.

My experience deploying Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is straightforward compared to Avamar; with just a single OVF file, I was up and running and backing up within an hour, with the assurance of seamless connection to Data Domain for disaster recovery.

I have seen a return on investment with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager through reduced time spent managing a backup solution. I set the policies and let it do its job efficiently in the background while being alerted to any issues by reporting.

Before selecting Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, I considered a couple of solutions including NetWorker , but my Dell Solutions Engineer encouraged me to try Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, and although it was a gamble, it paid off in dividends.

My advice to organizations considering Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is to take the challenge, deploy it, and they will be amazed.

Overall, I would rate Dell PowerProtect Data Manager a nine; it will not get a ten until another application piece I am waiting for becomes available.

It allows me to sleep much better at night.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager  is a backup and recovery tool created from the ground up by Dell to cover modern workloads, mainly related to containers and Kubernetes , in addition to traditional hypervisors and normal workloads. Dell is moving their backup solutions toward everything being supported on Dell PowerProtect Data Manager , which will be their next offering. Avamar  is coming to end of life, and NetWorker  is still there mainly for tape output. In general, Dell's approach around tape-out solutions is becoming complex. Before it was simpler with NetWorker  only, but I am not sure if Dell PowerProtect Data Manager will support tape-out or if the roadmap will include it. This has made it challenging for us to sell Dell PowerProtect Data Manager on the SMB market, and even some enterprise customers have RFPs that require tape support, which is still necessary.

Some of the advantages are the way it handles VMware backups with much superior performance and being lightweight, with something called Transparent Snapshots that creates almost very little overhead on the compute of the customer infrastructure. The way it introduces NAS  backups is very competitive compared to traditional backup tools. Dell PowerProtect Data Manager integration with Data Domain and PowerStore  makes it run as an orchestrator for backups to push backups from PowerStore  to Data Domain. It has application-aware backup capabilities, which is not easy to find in the market with our competition. The integration with Cyber Vault and Cyber Resiliency, all these features, and AI workloads protection by supporting containers allows it to discover unprotected containers and include them in the backup policy. As a product, if customers are accepting Dell PowerProtect Data Manager with Data Domain as a target, we can easily sell it to them. However, when targeting Veeam customers who are more focused on simplicity, even though Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is very simple to manage, it is not easy to make satisfied customers change.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager works only with Data Domain in the backend, and both products work very well together as a very powerful solution. As Data Domain has a very tight integration with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, we have a whole solution with 65 to one data reduction guaranteed from Dell, which is something very significant compared to other competition as no one else can give this kind of guarantee.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager has tight integration with Data Domain, which is very well known for the speed of backups and restoration of backup recovery. There is even the possibility to boot the VM directly from Data Domain without needing to restore it, as we can run it directly on the backup target. This gives customers less RTO. For example, in the case of a VM failure, we do not need to restore the full VM to production but can just boot it directly from the appliance.

The potential improvements are uncertain. The tape-out support and tight integration with Data Domain are advantages, but they can be treated as disadvantages because Dell PowerProtect Data Manager only supports Data Domain as a backup target. If a customer is looking for a cheap solution with backup to local disk, cheap SAN drives, or cheap storage, we cannot proceed with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager because it supports only Data Domain as a backup target.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager can scale to nine on a rating scale.

I would say support is seven points out of ten for Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, though others rate it as eight.

The deployment procedure is quite easy and manageable for Dell PowerProtect Data Manager.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is supported to run on the cloud as well, and it is available in the marketplace on Azure  and AWS .

It is very important to have these kinds of features because there are different kinds of people to access the application. Sometimes we can have access to an application admin, so we will have an administrator to give users some backup admin access with full visibility in the full infrastructure. There is even integration with Oracle and direct integration with some applications like SAP HANA . These application admins have their own control over backups and need to make sure they can see their backups in case they are running test and dev environments where some batches are not going well, so they need to roll back to the previous version. They need to have the right access to give them this flexibility in their own backup policies.

The price for the software itself is very competitive. However, because it comes with Data Domain as a whole solution, the price will increase. From a license perspective, it is a cheaper option, and there is a subscription license as well. The way use cases are supported in the single licensing is something we can quote for each use case separately or through unified licensing. The unified licensing has flexible options to license based on source capacity in terabytes, frontend or backend, or socket-based. This depends on the customer side. If there is a customer with small two or three servers with a large amount of data, socket-based licensing will be more cost-effective rather than frontend capacity which can be very expensive. If there are a lot of servers with less capacity, frontend capacity will be more cost-effective.

The way Dell PowerProtect Data Manager handles VMware backups is very good compared to the competition. The way it handles NAS  backups is very good. The way it has direct integration with storage direct backups adds value as well.

The dashboard interface is quite simplistic and quite easy to use. Dell PowerProtect Data Manager can be deployed on-premises, and it can also be deployed in mixed environments with some projects running on the cloud through partner deployment. My overall review rating for Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is eight out of ten.

My main application is backup for the data center. Dell innovated significantly in the GUI of the product, making it very easy to use. I think it may lack some features like desktop backups, but for data center backups and enterprise applications, it is more than enough.

It supports new applications like Kubernetes  and virtualized environments, and it excels in this part of the data center.

I believe it covers both operational facilitation and eases the backup process for the data center administrators. It covers the full range of data center requirements.

I work with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager  and Dell PowerProtect Data Domain , which are the most common products in the PowerProtect  family that I use regularly.

I cover the full portfolio of Dell, including PowerEdge, PowerStore , Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, PowerScale , and PowerFlex .

I would suggest adding a desktop backup feature, which would be a valuable option for customers. It also lacks tape library support and does not back up tapes. Although tape is somewhat outdated technology, customers still have use cases where they maintain backups on tapes. Dell PowerProtect Data Manager does not have tape support. These two features would make it a complete solution.

I have been using this solution since its release, approximately two years ago.

The support is acceptable but not great. The teams are capable enough and can solve problems, but they take some time to do so.

The setup process is very straightforward and simple, taking only minutes to complete.

We primarily offer the implementation ourselves, configuring and implementing the solution for our customers. Rarely does a customer choose to implement the solution independently.

Veeam is the most comparable solution in terms of price and features.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager has full support and a comprehensive ecosystem, supporting many third-party solutions and non-Dell products.

We typically sell Dell PowerProtect Data Manager with other products like Data Domain as part of a larger solution. Customers benefit from the tight integration of Dell PowerProtect Data Manager with other Dell products.

I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.