Dell PowerProtect – Data Manager & DDVE – the best Data Protection Solution for the vSphere Universe?

I was a all-time Veeam Backup user, the free 10 VM Community Edition is great for Homelabs and (really) small Datacenter or Witness sites. You know how it is, both our customers and ourselves, want to discover new technologies every now and then. Right there, I came across Dell PowerProtect, which is based on the very successful EMC² DataDomain appliance.

There will surely be one or the other legacy DataDomain user reading this post, so I will go into known but primarily new features. Enough of nostalgia, let us look to the future 😀

Starting with the portfolio, we have 3 key components:

On the upper left side, the hardware appliance as PowerProtect DD or DP version.

• Both models start at 8TB and can scale up to 1.5TB. In terms of networking, there is 10/25/100 GbE Base-T/SFP+ as well as 16 GbE FC.
• DD is the universally known DataDomain
• DP stands for DataProtect, here the PowerPortect Data Manager on the far right is already running on the hardware and does not have to be deployed separately.

Then one below the DDVE stands for DataDomain Virtual Edition – pretty self-explanatory. We get an .ova, which allows us to run multiple virtual DD – DataDomain appliances on any environment whether on-prem or in the public cloud. Starting with 1TB, we can scale a DDVE appliance up to 96TB, and even 256TB in the cloud (AWS and Google Cloud).

What makes a Dell PowerProtect so special is the Data Manager mentioned earlier. The Essential features are:

• Software-defined data protection
• Autonomous operations: Automated discovery and protection of databases, virtual machines, file systems and Kubernetes containers
• Multi-cloud optimized: Extend protection to the cloud with backup to cloud, backup incloud, long term retention and cloud disaster recovery
• Unique VMware protection: Ensure availability of all your VMs at scale without business disruption
• Cyber recovery: Increase business resiliency to rapidly recovery from cyber incidents
• Self-service backup and restore: Enable data owners from their native interfaces
• Centralized oversight and governance: Mitigate risk and assures compliance of SLAs and SLOs
• Simple protection workflows: Minimize daily operations
• Cloud-based monitoring and analytics
• Efficient protection: Protect data directly to PowerProtect appliances
• ISG Sustainability Update: Dell is committed to improving energy efficiency in our storage portfolio with each generation

One of the unique features of Data Manager are the Transparent Snapshots in function with VMware vCenter:

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager can protect VMware virtual machines in a reliable and efficient manner using VMware API for Data Protection (VADP) snapshots.

Most prominent in the Transparent Snapshots method is the use of a new plug-in that embeds DD Boost on the ESX host, allowing direct data transfer to PowerProtect appliances without the need for external proxies to move either full-image or incremental data at backup time. The new plug-in is installed and deployed once on the ESX host itself as part of VM Image protection workflow.

There are three simple steps of the VM image backup lifecycle with Transparent Snapshots:

• Change monitoring, which tracks the VM deltas since the last snapshot was taken
• Snapshot processing, during which the VM deltas are accessed in memory.  Data is then transferred directly to PowerProtect appliances
• Snapshot release, at which time delta tables and temporary data blocks are removed.

Because it does not require external proxies or temporary copies to be used as part of the VM image backup lifecycle, Transparent Snapshots is superior to [traditional backups] at each step of the lifecycle.

Transparent Snapshots is a simple and efficient method to backup VMs and offers significant advantages.

• Auto-scaling: An ESX-based plugin – which is a VMware certified VMware Installation Bundle (VIB) – gets deployed real-time, as needed, eliminating the need to use proxies (that is needed with traditional methods) and allowing for scaling by leveraging additional ESXi hosts where the data mover resides, versus needing manual intervention.
• Continuous in-memory deltas: Monitors the deltas of full VMs, resulting in no impact to VM or ESX host – versus full real-time continuous data protection with traditional methods that requires extensive resources and does not scale for hundreds of VMs. 
• Storage agnostic: Transparent Snapshots deploys seamlessly into your existing storage environment.  It does not require hardware-specific snapshots to be used in order to perform a single VM backup. Traditional methods utilize vendor-specific storage hardware that supports, and is specialized for, that storage type. Therefore, Transparent Snapshots eliminates the need for expensive, specialized storage. No new storage arrays or upgrades are required.
• Direct data movement to PowerProtect appliances: Direct access to data eliminates the need for working copies. Traditional options require intermediary copies (for example, clones) that use additional compute and storage resources and impact backup processes. [Analogy: traditional options are like making a copy of an entire library just to get a copy of a single book.]

The most important feature for us VMware admins is that Data Manager can be fully integrated into the vSphere Universe.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager offers self-service capabilities for VM admins, including ad-hoc backups, VM image-level restore, file level recovery as well as basic copy management.  All of this is available through the vSphere interface.  You have also the ability to assign and manage your data protection directly through Aria (vRealize) Automation.

Another key feature of the DD Series is DD Boost software, which recognizes that traditional backups are too slow to keep up with our data centers today. DD Boost provides organizations with a faster and smarter way to perform backups for the modern age. It does this by placing portions of the deduplication process upstream of the application or backup server. This way, only unique data is sent over the network to the DD Series appliance. This speeds up backups and reduces the load on the server and reduces the impact on the network.

DD Boost software provides a high level of integration with backup applications and database utilities, improving performance and ease of use. Dell EMC also offers a DD Boost File System Plug-In (BoostFS) with DD Boost for even better application support, enabling all the benefits of DD Boost for applications that use NFS for backup.

For other applications not listed above, Dell EMC provides scripted support through the DD Boost File System plug-in.

There are a lot of other features like High Availability (not supported with DDVE), Replication, Cyber Recovery etc. but this is only an introduction, I will write several deployment guides in the next blog posts and introduce you to PowerProtect. If you feel the need to have a look at PowerProtect in advance, please leave a comment. We can organize customized demos. So stay tuned and see you next time 🙂