That's my opinion and that's the entire post.
23 replies (most recent on top)
@mb I'm on my way to buy Veeam. We can have the second round when I'm finished
we get the report of the sales for PPDM and CR every quarter. We're losing market share, plain and simple.
What, you're giving up already? No counter arguments to refute the facts? You're too easy. I was looking forward to more fun. You ran with your tail between your legs. LOSER!
and ..... I’ve decided to step away from this forum. It’s no longer the right place for me, so I’m signing off here.
and dont forget "Cloud Tier deduplicates before upload to Dell ECS on-prem, eliminating egress fees while ensuring data sovereignty and low-cost long-term retention." for all our
I mean ObjectScale of course. Uhhh I'm an expeeeert
Dell PowerProtect Data Domain delivers up to 65:1 data reduction with a 55:1 guarantee, cutting storage, power and TCO. DD Boost enables source-side deduplication for minimal network load and fast restores. The air-gapped Cyber Recovery Vault adds isolated, immutable ransomware resilience. Cloud Tier deduplicates before upload, keeping cloud and egress costs low. You never lose.
Yeah, yeah, keep using AI to help you. I’ll stick to my customer winning, 100% customer satisfaction explanations.
Find another forum dude, you spend your day bashing Dell. It’s not healthy especially since you are wrong all of the time.
Looks like you still need more help ...
Your response relies on classic legacy-hardware marketing tactics: focusing on narrow, best-case ingestion metrics while ignoring the fundamental architectural bottlenecks that plague Data Domain during real-world operational and recovery scenarios.
Let’s address the engineering realities behind your ignorant claims line by line.
1. Flash-Optimized Storage vs. Hydration Bottlenecks
Claim: "Modern Dell PowerProtect DD appliances are fully flash-optimized..."
The Reality: Slapping NVMe SSDs into a legacy architecture as a cache tier or storage layer does not turn a deduplication engine into a high-performance distributed file system.
The "Dehydration/Hydration" Problem: DD Boost achieves its high compression ratios by fragmenting data into tiny, variable-length chunks. While this is effective for inline ingestion, when you attempt to restore or live-mount workloads, the CPU must reassemble (hydrate) millions of non-contiguous chunks on the fly.
NVMe storage speeds cannot overcome a sequential reconstruction pipeline. Flash-native architectures (like Rubrik or Cohesity) don't just put flash in front of a legacy algorithm; their underlying file systems (e.g., Iris, Spacetime) maintain metadata structures explicitly designed to expose uncompressed/hydrated blocks instantly without CPU reconstruction stalls.
2. The Concurrent Stream & Mass Restore Fallacy
Claim: "Our latest Data Domain supports 1,850 concurrent streams... PPDM and DD can restore 200 VMs simultaneously."
The Reality: High stream counts on paper do not equal high restore throughput. Data Domain’s internal specs confirm that while write streams are high, read stream capacity is drastically lower (often a fraction of write streams) because reading deduplicated data requires massive IOPS overhead to resolve chunk pointers.
Concurrently booting 200 VMs directly off a Data Domain target introduces severe I/O degradation because every VM read request triggers metadata pointer lookups across a single target controller. Modern distributed platforms scale compute and IOPS linearly across a cluster of nodes, eliminating single-controller metadata bottlenecks during mass-restore operations.
3. Deduplication Ratios vs. Cloud Economics (DDVE)
Claim: "DDVE reduces cloud storage consumption by up to 90%+... writing raw data forces massive cloud bills."
The Reality: High deduplication ratios on object storage come with a hidden operational tax: excessive metadata disk overhead and API costs.
The DDVE Metadata Trap: Running DDVE in public cloud requires mounting massive, high-cost block storage volumes (AWS EBS / Azure Managed Disks) solely to hold the DDVE metadata index needed to track millions of micro-chunks. As data grows, the cost of running high-IOPS block storage to host Data Domain's metadata offset the savings on object storage.
Furthermore, during a Cloud Disaster Recovery event, assembling data out of millions of tiny GET requests to object storage incurs massive cloud API request fees and latency, whereas cloud-native backup engines stream optimized, sequential object chunks.
4. "Data Lake" Repurposing vs. Storage Utility
Claim: "Turning your backup repository into a data lake consumes massive IOPS and degrades backup windows."
The Reality: This claim assumes an architecture that cannot isolate workloads. Distributed software-defined storage (SDS) utilizes QoS (Quality of Service) controls to dynamically prioritize backup/restore ingestion over secondary workloads.
In legacy Data Domain, running secondary workloads does ki-l performance because the controller is already redlining CPU utilization just to perform inline deduplication. Modern systems separate background indexing tasks, allowing organizations to run automated malware scans, compliance searches, and dev/test validation directly against backup data without degrading backup windows or creating full-copy storage bloat.
5. Ransomware & Zero Trust: Air-Gaps vs. Logical Immutability
Claim: "PowerProtect DD is the gold standard via Cyber Recovery Vault... competing storage sits on the same network."
The Reality: A physical air-gap or dedicated isolated vault is a perimeter defense, but it is a reactive mechanism built to compensate for non-immutable core architectures.
Layered Defense: Modern platforms do not rely on "network isolation" alone. They implement native WORM (Write Once, Read Many) immutability at the storage kernel level, strictly enforcing Time-Based Retention Locks, Multi-Party Authorization (MPA), and platform RBAC.
If a compromised domain admin gains access to a modern software-defined backup cluster, the underlying file system kernel physically blocks any API command attempting to modify, truncate, or delete snapshot chunks prior to their expiration date. Dell's vault model treats the symptom (network exposure) rather than building security directly into every layer of the storage fabric.
Summary
"Bragging about 1,850 write streams and 90:1 deduplication ratios is like boasting about how tightly you can pack boxes into a warehouse, while completely ignoring how long it takes to find and unpack a specific box when the building is on fire. Data protection is no longer just about cheap ingestion; it is about instant operational recovery, API-driven automation, and cloud flexibility—areas where legacy deduplication appliances continue to struggle."
Any more crying you'd like to do? Perhaps this highlights why Dell engineering struggles to compete in virtually every enterprise software category across the spectrum.
Fewer people internally debating. More revenue for Dell. Everyone wins! ...Right?
You might want to do a little more reading there Skippy to keep up with what's going on in the industry. DDBoost is old, outdated, and slow as molasses when rehydrating data. And PPDM is recycled garbage built on older garbage. It's not hate, it's just facts.
Here, I'll help you ...
DD Boost's core architecture—developed by Data Domain in the mid-2000s—is increasingly viewed as a bottleneck compared to modern standards. DD Boost relies on client-side deduplication to reduce network bandwidth, but it is bound to traditional, spinning-disk-optimized storage architectures and lacks native compatibility with cloud-scale data pipelines.
Today, several cloud-native, API-driven, and flash-optimized technologies are considered far superior to DD Boost for enterprise data management.
- Cloud-Native Object Deduplication (e.g., AWS S3, Azure Blob, Cohesity, Rubrik)
Modern backup architectures bypass dedicated, hardware-bound protocols like DD Boost by writing directly to scalable cloud object storage using high-speed APIs.
• Why it's superior: Rather than relying on a proprietary protocol to throttle data transfer over a local network, modern platforms use inline, global deduplication directly to the cloud.
• The Benefit: It eliminates the need for expensive, localized Data Domain appliances. You get infinite scalability, built-in cloud tiering, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to maintaining legacy hardware bricks.
- Instant Recovery via Flash-Optimized File Systems
DD Boost was designed to optimize slow networks and spinning disks (HDD). It was never built to maximize the performance of modern Solid State Drives (SSDs) or NVMe storage.
• Why it's superior: Next-gen platforms utilize proprietary, distributed file systems built from the ground up for flash memory.
• The Benefit: DD Boost environments often suffer from long "hydration" times when restoring data because chunks must be reassembled. Flash-optimized architectures allow for "Instant Recovery" or live-mounting VMs directly from the backup storage in seconds, completely eliminating recovery-time bottlenecks.
- API-First & Software-Defined Storage (SDS)
DD Boost acts as a rigid straw between specific backup software (like NetWorker or Veeam) and Data Domain hardware. Modern enterprises are moving toward software-defined data management.
• Why it's superior: Technologies from vendors like Rubrik or Cohesity treat backup data as an indexed, searchable data lake accessible via standard REST APIs.
• The Benefit: Instead of just being a "d-mb" dumping ground for backup files, the data can be instantly repurposed for DevOps cloning, automated compliance scanning, or feeding AI models—all without proprietary agent overhead.
- Immutable, Zero-Trust Storage (Ransomware Defense)
When DD Boost was engineered, ransomware wasn't the multi-billion-dollar threat it is today. While Dell has bolted on retention locks over time, the underlying architecture isn't inherently "Zero Trust."
• Why it's superior: Modern technologies implement logical air-gapping, multi-party authentication (MPA), and native immutability at the file-system layer.
• The Benefit: Even if an attacker gains admin credentials to the backup software, they cannot issue commands to delete or alter the underlying backup chunks. Modern systems also use inline ML to detect anomalous data reduction rates (indicating encryption in progress) during the ingestion phase.
If you really focus just on selling SRP you will have a triple digit growth.
I never lost a deal
DDBoost is still better than anything that the so called new guys have got and a lot has changed with it to add stuff. The new guys can’t compete with an 20 year old tech(your claim), how rubbish are they? and by forcing unstructured to the cloud in the event of a cyber attack renders them useless in a recovery scenario when the links are severed. How exactly is that tiny link gonna get they data back anyway? By then the customers out of business.
Try and keep up with what’s happening. PPDM 20.3 is very advanced and completes in almost all areas with Veeam and Rubrik and far exceeds them in others.
I don’t get all this PPDM hate. You lot have some other mischievous agenda.
@dd DDBoost (developed by EMC) is nearly 20 years old and hasn't really changed much since it was developed.
Also, modern companies don't care so much about deduplication since it's cheaper to move unstructured data (which doesn't dedup anyway) to the cloud vs paying for old, antiquated, archaic DD infrastructure.
Pretty sure it is you who is behind in your thinking and certainly behind the times. But keep rocking that dedup for legacy on-prem customers...
Same post over and over again.
@dc
We dominate the Target appliance around the world and our Boost strategy is better then anything going around. No one can backup data in the volumes we do. You’re so behind in your thinking and part of the problem at Dell. Volunteer for the next round of cuts. We don’t need you.
SRP folk are doing just fine.
@ct Wow, now that's some denial! I have found most people who work in SRP are fully living in denial. How could anyone do it otherwise? Good luck with that.
Our SRP products, especially PPDM, are years and years behind the competition. Worse, ten years ago, Cohesity, Commvault, Veeam, Rubrik, Veritas - they worked. PPDM still doesn't work after years of make-believe pretend development.
@cx
Defending is not Trolling. Get a life.
TROLL
Damn right someone hit a nerve. I work for Dell SRP in Presales. I have not been laid off because I’m good at my job. I sell SRP(DPS) all day long. Its a good set of products and people are slagging it off unnecessarily.
I’ll defend it till I retire and slag off the haters who post untrue lies and FUD just cause they now work for Commvault, Rubrik, Veeam or hate the west.
All those haters who were laid off needed to go because they were useless at their jobs.
I started on it when it was eCDM. It was going to be something back then. Louisville and Santa Clara got their hands on it, rebranded it and ruined it.
Another BOT generated topic. This whole website is just an attack on western economies. It’s probably run by Russians or the Chinese.
It's not opinion, it's fact. It's worse than horrible. It's an embarrassment.
Total cluster
Customer have no idea what they bought