As businesses adopt a cloud-first strategy, reducing on-premises infrastructure and moving IT and business applications to the cloud, the limitations and costs of traditional data protection and disaster recovery become more apparent. Druva Phoenix™ provides a cloud-native approach that helps businesses accelerate their journey to the cloud by reducing infrastructure management and improving business resilience. Delivered as-a-service, Druva Phoenix boasts…
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PowerProtect DD Series
Score 8.6 out of 10
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PowerProtect DD (a next-generation appliance replacing Dell EMC Data Domain) is a suite of hardware appliances used for
data protection, backup, storage and deduplication. PowerProtect appliance offerings are
cloud-enabled and vary by organization size, capable of supporting small
business and enterprises.
PowerProtect appliances are separated into two categories: entry-level
to midrange, and enterprise.
Entry-Level to Midrange Backup Appliances
PowerProtect…
Durva Phoenix is well suited for the VMware platform and has great restore functionality during disaster recovery. We use a different VM platform so our disaster recovery has a longer timeline if there is a critical failure as we need to get a base OS loaded before we can restore the VM data to it. This is the tradeoff between an expensive VM platform and a near free VM platform. Druva Phoenix is well suited to file version recovery if a previous data state is required by your employees or customers. Very quick to restore.
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.
The best part about Druva is that you deploy, which is fairly easy especially with your technical rep being available for the whole process, and then you let the system do your work. If a backup fails I get a report, there is no need to check it every day or even weekly.
The file server backup is great. Searching is easy and the capability to pull back a full folder or individual file makes life a lot easier to support my end users.
The UI is good, but a bit inconsistent. Some types of backups are shown differently to others. It never gets in the way, but a bit more consistency would be good.
The system is usage based, which is understandable, but a shock after using inSync, their other backup product, which is not. Careful planning and thought is needed if you are on a tight budget
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.
Certain backup solutions can be cumbersome on how they actually work. Where that's properly deploying hardware or software that will house the backups. Druva is different where the software and infrastructure is completely managed. All we needed to do is deploy agents and proxies and point the backups to Druva Phoenix
I have found PowerProtect DD to be very easy to use. The instructions are clear and the user interface is straightforward. I haven't needed to do any serious data recovery yet, however I found the process of backing up my data through PowerProtect DD to be relatively easy
It's been pretty easy to get a hold of the Support team and they work well to resolve our issues. I wish I could email support directly (which we used to be able to do) versus having to login to the console and report an issue from there, that's a feature I'd like to see brought back but otherwise, their Support team is pleasant to work with.
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.
Druva stacks up well against its competitors. I do not remember it being at a disadvantage in any category. Phoenix couldn't provide message-level restore on an on-premise Exchange server but after we moved to the cloud that requirement went away.
I have used NetBackup, CommVault, Tivoli, and Actifio in my previous environments. With Data Domain I am not constantly babysitting my backup to make sure it is not choking and dying and we are not bound by the same channel lane path constraints most backup software and hardware works on. By far the initial cost has been more than made up for with the time not being dedicated to backup.
This is a necessary service to keep your information safe. I would not say that there is a tangible ROI unless you reach a point where your server gets attacked and wiped-out. Then, you can recover your information in an easy manner, which could represent a potential several-thousand-dollar savings.
Data Domain says 20+ hours per week when compared to using a tape library. Once the unit is configured it basically takes care of itself.
With MTree replication we no longer need to send tapes to an offsite storage facility.
Having a second data domain at our DR site allows us to perform recoveries from any of our replicated backups. We do not have to order and wait for tapes to arrive.
