Actifio Enterprise vs. PowerProtect DD Series

Actifio is a good fit for anyone looking for draas or backup as a service with Bluechip.co.uk being able to tailor a solution to fit your need if you are a medium size business looking to protect over 20TB of source data on a mix of virtual and physical servers in your datacentre our hosted within our state of the art datacentres.

Incentivized

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

• Reliable and easy to deploy backup solution with low administration overhead.
• Fast backup solution with low impact on production systems as it backs them up.
• Dedup and replication of backed up data between sites and with streamsnap very quick recovery on dr site.
• Great customer support with quick response to changing demands.

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

• Single file restore has always been an issue but hopefully will be added soon.
• Physical server backup restoring has always been tricky but achievable.

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

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

Actifio is quicker to deploy easier to manage and capacity plan with less components to keep patched.

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

• We have managed to scale up the size of our environment without the need for extra admin overhead.
• Over 99% backups complete.
• Solution is robust and quick to scale to meet demands.

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