Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs Rubrik comparison

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11,346 views|7,322 comparisons
89% willing to recommend
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23,359 views|14,700 comparisons
98% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jan 2, 2023

We performed a comparison between Dell EMC PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) and Rubrik based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: A small number of PowerProtect users say that the initial deployment is complex, but many users say that it is straightforward. Rubrik users say that the initial setup is a straightforward process.

  • Features: Users of both products are happy with their stability and scalability.

    PowerProtect reviewers say that it performs well and has good deduplication, monitoring, and security features. Some users mention that PowerProtect should have more cloud integration options.

    Rubrik users like its instant recovery features and automation options and say it is user friendly and fast. A number of users mention that they would like the reporting tools to improve.
  • Pricing: Most users of both products feel that they are costly solutions.
  • ROI: Users are satisfied with the ROI of both products.

  • Service and Support: Users of both solutions report being satisfied with the level of support they receive.

Comparison Results: Rubrik’s users report that, in addition to being a powerful solution, it is simple to deploy and work with and therefore it comes out on top in this comparison. According to reviewers, PowerProtect’s deployment process can be difficult.

To learn more, read our detailed Deduplication Software Report (Updated: April 2024).
770,616 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: What is the biggest difference between EMC Data Domain and Rubrik?
Answer: As Neil Mistry said, they are quite different products: Rubrik is a complete solution where Data Domain is deduplicating storage that requires software to drive. I used to manage a B&R for a company that had a Data Domain in each data center which supported 4, Tivoli Storage Manager instances at each site and the Data Domain replicated all data cross-site. It was a simple setup but we did run into some performance issues since our TSM servers were all VMs and networking inside VMware is hard to determine performance. In the end, the customer didn't like the cost of DD disk and our devices ran out of capacity. Turns out only database full backups deduplicate well. All else, including transaction logs, can go to much less expensive disk and simply be compressed.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Our clients like the wide range of features that are available within this single solution.""The most valuable features of Dell PowerProtect DD are ease of use and deduplication.""I like the different features. We work closely with Dell on different products and features, which is why we use them all.""The hardware can operate in high temperatures, in case of any disaster.""Good starting capacity and scalability.""I find the data to be most valuable.""The backup is very secure. The deduplication using EMC is very good. We are able to make systems and handle random cloning. EMC is a very stable solution for making backups.""It is very fast as compared to the other competitors. Its simplicity and bit rate are also valuable. It takes less time if we compare it with the old solution that we have."

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"The ease of use and innovation are the features that stand out for us.""The solution's technical support team is very responsive and proactive.""Rubrik has made the process to manage backup and recovery painless. This frees up more time to work on other projects.""Takes me 80 percent less time to manage my backup environment.""Rubrik has brought all of our backups under a single pane of glass and made recovery extremely simple.""One platform for instant recovery.""Adaptative backup and SLAs simply allow you to tell a machine to backup without taking care of the backup window.""The live mount reduces complexity."

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Cons
"The initial setup is complex.""I would like to see integration with public cloud.""Looking at Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain), there is a need for improvement, especially in terms of protection from cyber resiliency, cyber recovery, or man-in-the-middle attacks.""They're scalable.""The pricing should be adjusted. Customers continuously talk about the price. They know it is a good solution and they really need the type of storage the solution offers, but it costs somewhere around $100,000 and up. It's not cheap, but it's very important for data vendors.""We would like to see the price of this solution brought down to be comparable with similar products currently on the market.""Its management can be improved.""The pricing could be better, but it's still not too expensive."

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"Global management of multiple systems is lacking, as is reporting across multiple installed units.""Could be improved from an analytics point of view.""It needs to support more applications natively, like MySQL/MariaDB.""The dashboard and user interface could be improved to make them more user-friendly.""The functionality is missing, but they are very receptive to our thoughts and ideas.""The licensing cost is quite high. That is something that needs to be worked out, because so many times it happens that the team does not have the budget or there are other issues at that time. Cost has become an important factor in deciding whether to continue with the Rubrik solution.""Looking at how the data is broken down, we can see the total story, but sometimes it's difficult to see how big a particular snapshot is. Across 90 days of snapshots, which one is a particularly large one? Looking at the data holistically could be a lot easier.""Lacks availability in a NFR format of virtual appliances to test them in public cloud environment."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It is expensive, but the performance and deduplication cover for the cost."
  • "Pricing is related to size. A lower range solution might be about $33,000. My customers use higher range versions with a price of around $100,000. That's the price for both the hardware and software."
  • "In Naira it was twenty-five or twenty-seven million (approximately $75,000 USD) for the implementation and maintenance cost for three years."
  • "There are many options in the pricing structure which can cause some confusion and necessitate the purchase of additional licensing."
  • "This is one of the more expensive backup solutions on the market."
  • "Its price is reasonable."
  • "It could be more competitively priced. Its licensing was for five years. Obviously, the support will get renewed at some stage, but that's it."
  • "The price is on the high side."
  • More Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "When we compared the overall costs, Rubrik was cheaper because the engineering and operational side required FAR LESS dedication. So, all in all, they actually were cheaper than the competition."
  • "It’s simple, straightforward, and we were able to see 50% hard savings."
  • "The setup cost is a bit high, but the solution is an all-in-one solution."
  • "Rubrik is an all inclusive price. No additional implementation costs or licencing."
  • "The cost was less than our previous provider, and this is a much better product."
  • "Rubrik is not cheap. Hopefully, you can archive your data on cheap storage to keep the investment minimal."
  • "The product is not cheap, but for good reason. It simply works and is very fast."
  • "It is a great value, but its cost is still a bit high."
  • More Rubrik Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Answers from the Community
    Miriam Tover
    NeilMistry - PeerSpot reviewerNeilMistry
    Real User

    The biggest difference is Rubrik has native software and hardware on one platform. Data Domain is only a disk target and a very good one but you still need backup software such as Networker, Veritas, Commvault, etc. That software requires both a master and media server which drives a lot of complexity. Rubrik is hyperconverged data management, there is not software licensing, end of year true-ups or additional infrastructure. Policy-based backup and restore functions with cloud archiving integration. It’s also really fast! Finally, if you’re running Nutanix and its native hypervisor AHV then Rubrik can protect that hypervisor and VMware.

    JohnBowling - PeerSpot reviewerJohnBowling
    Real User

    I agree with the other answers - With Data Domain, you still require a software solution to go with the back-end storage. I.e., Avamar, Networker, etc.
    Rubrik is a Software Defined Solution or can be deployed with its own set of hardware\storage.

    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:There are many different licenses, so you pay for what you need. There are various aspects you can add on, like extra speed, or something just for reading data. There are licenses to do replication as… more »
    Top Answer:Nothing comes to mind in terms of improvement. It serves its purpose. That said, if they could develop higher algorithms to make it more efficient, that would be great. Usually, with the backup, the… more »
    Top Answer:Veeam Backup & Replication provides an easy-to-set-up solution to the issue of data storage and recovery. Setting it up is a relatively simple affair. For the most part it prompts you from screen to… more »
    Top Answer:Rubrik simplifies our data backup and recovery processes significantly. It's very straightforward to use. We start by tagging through VMware, and everything tagged for Rubrik is backed up… more »
    Ranking
    1st
    Views
    11,346
    Comparisons
    7,322
    Reviews
    22
    Average Words per Review
    419
    Rating
    8.3
    4th
    out of 133 in Backup and Recovery
    Views
    23,359
    Comparisons
    14,700
    Reviews
    13
    Average Words per Review
    521
    Rating
    8.5
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    DataDomain, Dell EMC Data Domain, PowerProtect Data Domain
    Learn More
    Dell Technologies
    Video Not Available
    Overview

    DD series enables your organization to protect, manage and recover data at scale. As the next generation of Dell Data Domain appliances, DD series sets the bar for efficient data management from edge to core to cloud and includes the ecosystem support and comprehensive data protection that customers have come to appreciate from Data Domain. The DD series offers a super-fast, secure, and an efficient solution that is built for multi-cloud data protection and to keep up with future demands. The DD series consists of the DD9900, DD9400, DD6900, DD6400, DD3300, and a software-defined option, PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition (DDVE).

    DD series empowers organizations to protect, manage and recover data at scale across their entire diverse ecosystems. DD series provides broad ecosystem support, efficiency, powerful data protection, cloud-enabled capabilities, and the cyber resiliency that our customers demand.

    The DD Operating System (DDOS) is the brilliance that drives the DD series. DDOS contributes the agility, security, and reliability that pushes DD series to deliver high-speed, scalable, and standard-setting protection storage for backup, archive, and disaster recovery. DDOS integrates seamlessly with many existing infrastructures, permitting ease-of-use with leading backup and archiving applications, and provides superior performance in conjunction with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager and Data Protection Suite. When you decide to purchase a new DD series appliance you can easily consume DDOS as a subscription providing greater flexibility for deployment while minimizing your overall upfront costs.

    DD series does a great job to minimize the threat of data loss and adds to the value of protected data while meeting ever-increasing demands of SLAs and increasing ROI. DDOS drives DD series to deliver up to 38% faster backups and up to 45% faster restores at significantly higher compression levels.

    DD series supports high availability within the single rack. Additionally, DD series can greatly reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) by minimizing downtime in the unlikely event of a hardware failure. DD series delivers amazing high-speed networking connectivity with support for 25GbE and 100GbE network adapters.

    Benefits of Dell PowerProtect DD

    Fast, secure, efficient data protection:

    • Provide 1.5PB usable capacity in a single rack
    • Allow for Up to 3PB capacity for long-term retention
    • Logical capacity is increased by up to 30% per TB when compared to the previous generation
    • Allow for instant access and instant restore of up to 64VMs and 100k IOPS
    • High-speed network connectivity – 10GbE, 25GbE and 100GbE
    • Seamless fast integration and outstanding performance with PowerProtect Data Manager and Data Protection Suite
    • Supports many of the leading enterprise backup and archive applications

    Industry-leading multi-cloud protection:

    • Provides software-defined protection storage on-premises and in-cloud with PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition (DDVE).
    • DDVE scales up to 256TB in-cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and others).
    • Greatly improves in-cloud restore performance by as much as 10x when compared to previous versions.
    • Cloud Tier delivers super simple and value-added long-term retention to public, private, or hybrid clouds
    • Cost-efficient disaster recovery to the cloud

    Operational simplicity:

    • Enhanced DD System Manager supports a complete chassis view
    • Significantly lower administrative costs
    • Grants a single point of management for all DD series by PowerProtect DD Management Center
    • Deploy Smart Scale for PowerProtect appliances directly from PowerProtect DD Management Center. Smart Scale helps drive down management complexities while increasing storage efficiencies. 

    Reviews from Real Users

    One user, who is an enterprise IT architect at a tech service company, says that “Dell PowerProtect DD is highly stable and reliable. I have not had a time when the system did not work and in an emergency this is critical.” He rates the ROI it has brought his company a five out of five.

    A pre-sales and technical manager at a tech services company says that "The features that I have found most valuable with Dell PowerProtect DD are its deduplication feature and its DD Boost protocol for fast transfer, which is amazing."

    Chris C., lead infrastructure architect at ThinkON, relates that Dell PowerProtect DD “allows our organization to send more data to this device compared to others. It also allows us a fast recovery of files or Virtual Machines if needed being on-premise.”

    Rubrik is a backup and recovery solution that can be used as a converged data management platform for physical, virtual, and hybrid environments. The solution works to protect your data and applications from ransomware, operational failures, and rogue employees, and also helps your organization simplify data management and accelerate cloud mobility. In addition, Rubrik is designed for cloud integration and infinite scalability to enable hybrid cloud for all enterprises.

    Rubrik’s software is also built to support most operating systems, databases, hypervisors, clouds, and SaaS applications, and the solution integrates with on-premises hardware if necessary.

    Rubrik Features

    Rubrik has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Instant recovery
    • Live-restore
    • Single console
    • Automatic incremental backups
    • Policy-driven automation
    • Instant search
    • Live Mount capability
    • Compliance and capacity customized reporting
    • Quick and efficient snapshots
    • Multiple backup destinations
    • Deduplication and file compression
    • Intuitive web interface
    • Good performance
    • Easy to use
    • Low maintenance
    • Flexible deployment

    Rubrik Benefits

    There are several benefits to implementing Rubrik. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Single policy engine: Because Rubrik is policy-driven, it functions through a single policy engine that orchestrates service level agreements (SLAs) across the data lifecycle. Management is automated through one programmatic interface.
    • Customized reports: With Rubrik, you can create customized reports and utilize data visualizations.
    • Advanced security: Regardless of location, data remains secure in transit and at rest throughout its lifecycle, as it is stored and backed up.
    • Compliance: With Rubrik, you gain granular role-based access control while automating compliance reporting, which helps complete various industry and internal audits.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Rubrik users.

    PeerSpot user Chadd B., System Administrator at a manufacturing company, says, “The solution is easy to use with an intuitive web interface, helpful support, good performance, and saves us time. The most valuable feature is the Instant Recovery, where we can restore a VM or SQL database or any server or application, and have it up and running on their appliance within a few seconds. The VM backup and the SQL backup are blazingly fast for both backup and recovery.”

    A Storage Administrator at a healthcare company explains that the solution “Cut our backup management time significantly, and the near-instant recovery reduces our downtime. He also comments that “The scalability is wonderful. That is one of our biggest advantages with this.”

    Burhan S., Systems Engineer at Harvard University, mentions, "There is a live-restore feature, their Live Mount, and the way it works we can instantly recover a VM, a past backup, to be directly attached to our VMware environment. Rubrik will act as a disk for it. It's like an instant restore. Within a few minutes our VM is up and running. And then, if we want to restore it, we can just migrate it to our actual storage."

    Kevin M., Head Of Operations at University of Reading, states, “The solution’s SLA-based functionality means we don't have to manually manage backup windows, and recovery times have been notably reduced. Its web interface is really easy to use. It's just click and go. It's fast and intuitive. We've never had any problems in navigating.”

    Sample Customers
    The US Army, City of Houston, Lloyds TSB, TiVo, Teck, Ingram Entertainment, The New York Mets
    Driscoll's, Red Hawk Casino, Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP, Wabash National, Chateau Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, Galliker Transport & Logistics
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm21%
    Computer Software Company17%
    Insurance Company14%
    Energy/Utilities Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Government8%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm12%
    University12%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Computer Software Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company13%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Government10%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business38%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise42%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise61%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise24%
    Large Enterprise53%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise63%
    Buyer's Guide
    Deduplication Software
    April 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NetApp and others in Deduplication Software. Updated: April 2024.
    770,616 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) is ranked 1st in Deduplication Software with 63 reviews while Rubrik is ranked 4th in Backup and Recovery with 83 reviews. Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) is rated 8.6, while Rubrik is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) writes "Supports business continuity process but needs improvement in pricing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Rubrik writes "Easy to use with minimal training required, innovative, good support". Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) is most compared with HPE StoreOnce, Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, ExaGrid EX Series, Veeam Backup & Replication and Veritas NetBackup Appliance, whereas Rubrik is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Cohesity DataProtect, Commvault Cloud, Zerto and Azure Backup.

    We monitor all Deduplication Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.