LiveVault vs. PowerProtect DD Series

Our company was originally with VaultLogix which was taken over by LiveVault. The transition to the new product was not as smooth as expected and presented us with issues especially with a restore. Restore and what files needed to be included in the backup policy were not communicated to us correctly and it was not until a customer's server failed that we found out we couldn't do a restore because we were missing files that were needed for a complete restore.

I don't believe it works very well for backups of virtual servers. Installation of the product is user-friendly.

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

• Easy to install the client piece.
• Easy to setup the backup policies.
• Data encryption and security.

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

• It does not play very well with virtual servers.
• Support is not always responsive.
• Issues with failed backups have cost our company time and money.

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

LiveVault is the only product we have used. The reason is that we chose it initially was the fact you can restore individual files. Also that the data is transferred offsite to a secure data center and data is backed up again, providing a second offsite copy.

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

• LiveVault has initially cost us more labor time than we anticipated for our IT staff.
• Installing cloud backup has given us a piece of mind that our data and our customer's data is safe.

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