NetApp ONTAP System Manager vs. PowerProtect DD

ONTAP System Manager is feature rich and all inclusive. It can work with multiple storage protocols and for various functionalities. It will replace your File Servers and your SAN and put them into one storage appliance. NFS, iSCSI, Fibre Channel, NVMe are all options. Snapshots and Offsite replication (Snapmirror) are all great. I can't think of a scenario where a NetApp wouldn't be a good fit.

The product is well suited for different scenarios like database storage and backups. Definitely can be considered as a solution for data protection and data recovery. For us, the most valuable benefit was the fact it enables us to decrease the amount of data that can appear over the network and optimizes the bandwidth of the network itself.

• System Manager is extremely good at resizing volumes, changing snapshot policies and making day-to-day changes.
• The Dashboard and the Hardware and Diagnostics tabs are a great window into the health of your filer and Cluster. You can immediately see any issues like volumes that are nearly full or errors in the event logs.

• The deduplication is fantastic. We are currently seeing total compression factors in the mid to upper 50s.
• The platform is very reliable and stable.
• It backs up a wide variety of enterprise apps (e.g. legacy applications, UNIX, iSeries, open systems etc) or your primary storage.

• Not necessarily a dislike of OnCommand per se but I do dislike that you have to still use different flavors of this tool to get a holistic view of every aspect of your NetApp - System Manager, Performance Manager, Unified Manager etc
• The initial process to connect to a filer probably could do with a little more friendly documentation as the format for filer name (or IP) and whether and SNMP string is required etc is not clear.
• The ability for more complete search capability within the logs (so therefore not having to extract them to work with them) would be an advantage for the timely resolution of faults.

• It is very slow to restore from. Backup times are great, restores can be terribly slow.
• It doesn't offload to cloud storage natively. You need to purchase an expensive license to enable this feature.
• The management interface is very basic, but it works fine.
• The new air gap solution seems to be just replication an on/off switch. I'd prefer to see them leverage AI on the existing device instead of requiring
• A second device is purchased and securing by toggling the connectivity off.

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.

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

Support is great. Our account managers and system engineers regularly contact us and check in on us. Provide free training on various topics. Our team is readily available to answer any questions. Support tickets are generated automatically if anything goes wrong such as a disk going bad and a new one is sent out immediately. Very happy with support.

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.

As far as I know, everything with the implementation went very smoothly

I've used NetApp systems for the last 12 years. The only alternative I have used is the old OnCommand system. This is a drastic improvement over what was available in the past. The ability to use this software from anywhere inside your network is huge. If you were to combine this with VPN access you could easily monitor and configure your NetApp from anywhere in the world

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.

• Previously were were running with just locally attached storage across all of our estate. With this tool we are not able to simplify the management of storage saving on resource usage across our Ops teams allowing us to focus on "more important" tasks.

• 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.