Dell Data Protection Suite

Dell Data Protection Suite will be mainly used for backup and recovery solutions.

With the direct integration with PowerProtect Data Domain, we can achieve a 55 to one data reduction or deduplication ratio. The native integration with our backup software, which is included in Dell Data Protection Suite with Data Domain, gives an advantage to customers to deduplicate data, so they will have less space, less data to manage, and a smaller data footprint.

Dell Data Protection Suite includes multiple tools that help customers achieve their disaster recovery plan, their RPOs and RTOs. First, it includes RecoverPoint for VMs, which is specialized for VMware workloads to do live replication between two sites to achieve an active-active or an active-passive data center. On top of that, in each Data Domain, we have multiple features to have an offsite copy of your backup environment, either by cloud or by replicating to another Data Domain. This can be another domain physically located on the DR site, or it can be a virtual one running on the cloud as well.

One of the main features about any backup software is the ability to create policies that depend on the customer's requirement, such as how often you need to do backups and how long you need to retain the backup copies. These are flexible options from our dashboard to configure these things so they can comply with customer requirements. Some of the policies may specify that data needs to be retained on the production Data Domain, which is the on-premises Data Domain, for maybe one month. After that, an additional copy needs to be created and replicated to the offsite, which can be retained for maybe one year or two years. This is configurable based on something called data sets.

Automated workflows mean that from an operational perspective, we have the ability to replicate the data directly from the backup software, which can be Networker or PowerProtect Data Manager. When you create the policy, you can specify that these copies should reside with the first Data Domain, and then you can replicate one of these copies to the DR site, which is managed by our backup software itself. When you do the restore, the software will understand how many copies you have in your first Data Domain on-premises on the production main site, and how many copies are available in the DR site.

The analytics tool is very important to give us insights about how the device actually behaves. It provides performance metrics, capacity utilization, and the deduplication ratio. All of this actually gives us telemetry to be collected from the appliances and from the backup tools and sent to the dashboard, which can create alarms and events to the customer to understand what the current utilization of their environment is.

From a data protection perspective, Dell is moving away from Dell Data Protection Suite to focus on PowerProtect Data Manager. The idea here is the silos kind of architecture because Dell Data Protection Suite includes multiple engines inside, and these can all be consolidated by Data Protection Central. However, at the end of the day, the customer still needs to go into details in each of these software depending on their environment and do some configurations. However, this depends on the customer requirement. A customer with a complex environment with multiple workloads may find that a single tool cannot cover everything. That is why we have multiple tools under the same licensing umbrella to make sure we are covering all customer workloads, including traditional applications, physical servers, and next-generation applications.

Improvement is happening now because they are moving to a mixed generation platform which is trying to cover whatever use cases there are.

I have used this solution for more than 10 years.

The solution is stable when it is implemented in the right way.

Scalability is present. We can scale enough without limitations.

I would rate the support as eight out of ten. The support quality depends on what kind of problems are happening, which is why it is difficult to comment much on it in general.

The ROI normally will be mentioned from the total IT infrastructure. We need this kind of solution to make sure that in case something happens, we are not spending a lot of money to recover the data. If you have the right products in place with data recoverability, data protection strategies, and cyber resiliency strategy, customers can depend on this solution to recover their data rather than spending a lot of time and money paying ransomware to restore their data.

Dell Data Protection Suite is a comprehensive product with comprehensive tools. When you sell it, sometimes customers are not using all the tools, but the customer will have availability of these tools to cover more workloads that cannot be supported by other tools. Dell Data Protection Suite includes PowerProtect Data Manager, Networker, and Avamar. Avamar is now in flight. We have included all these tools. Avamar specializes for certain workloads where it can perform better on that workload. When we speak about tape outs, we can do it natively with Networker, which is not included by PowerProtect Data Manager and Avamar. If you have workloads with KVM or Nutanix hypervisor, we have a specified tool for that, and it will be coming to be pre-integrated with PowerProtect Data Manager. We used to have the tool V-Protect, which will now be replaced with PowerProtect Data Manager natively supporting EHP from Nutanix. The whole idea behind it is that the complexity of the backup solutions and the complexity of the data center is reflected in how you protect this data center. That is why customers may not have one backup software for everything. If you need to integrate with a certain kind of applications with hot backups, image-level backup, and granular restore, customers may need to look at different tools for this. Now they are trying to consolidate whatever they can on PowerProtect Data Manager as the next-generation backup tool.

This solution requires skills and is not customer installable. Partners or deployment partners need to have the right certification to implement it.

I would rate this review as a seven out of ten overall.

As a reseller and partner of Dell Technologies, I sell and resell whatever Dell offers in Pakistan. I am involved in storage solutions, including products like Powerwall, Compellent, and PowerStore. I also sell servers, desktops, and SD-WAN solutions. Additionally, I am engaged in selling workstations and covering all the segments of lines of business from Dell.

Dell Data Protection Suite (DPS) ensures my data is virus-free and protected from ransomware. Dell DPS provides both appliance-based and disk-based protection solutions, which include hardware and software integration. It offers efficient data management and supports compression and deduplication to save an extensive amount of data. My organization benefits from Dell DPS for backup and recovery, especially in disaster situations, as it ensures data availability without loss.

Dell Data Protection Suite is a comprehensive suite offering virus-free and ransomware-free data protection. It combines both hardware and software for data security and includes features like compression and deduplication. The suite also provides a high level of encryption for data traveling between primary and disaster recovery sites, ensuring its security.

While Dell DPS is a powerful solution, it is expensive, which allows competitors to find their place in the market. The deployment is complex and not simplified, requiring professional expertise.

Additionally, there are issues with initial setup, particularly network speed and latency, which can cause disruption. Once configured, it is easy to manage, but training is necessary due to the technical complexity.

I have been using it for five years now.

Overall, the Dell DPS provides efficient performance when properly integrated with other infrastructures. It is effective, but the initial integration might present technical challenges.

Dell DPS hardware is scalable, and multiple data domain storage boxes are offered by Dell for storage expansion.

The support is excellent, with on-ground people and a well-established partner ecosystem providing assistance. Dell requires partners to have technical capabilities and be certified to offer their products.

The initial setup is complex and requires a professional team. Training is mandatory to ensure proper configuration and management.

A professional team is necessary for the initial installation and deployment due to the complexity of the system. One person alone may not be sufficient, and expert personnel are required, especially for enterprise-grade deployments.

Dell Data Protection Suite justifies its ROI in cases of disaster by ensuring data availability and preventing losses in time and data. The solution promptly provides data availability to customers during primary infrastructure issues.

The solution is very expensive, which is its main drawback compared to competition in the market.

Other backup solutions I'm aware of include Veeam, NetWorker, and Symantec.

Training is essential to avoid operational disasters because these systems are complex and involve core infrastructure processes.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.