3 reasons why you need to replace your aging data domain

1. It doesn’t scale to today’s data demands.

Data Domain is based on a legacy scale-up architecture with standalone appliances. To keep pace with your business’s data demands, you need to purchase larger and more appliances. Upgrades can be extremely complicated and time-consuming and often require disruptive forklift upgrades, which introduces considerable risk and downtime. To try to put off these inevitable upgrade headaches, customers often over-provision storage up-front—which adds a great deal of inefficiency and expense that you shouldn’t have to deal with.

While Data Domain does offer a Virtual Edition for smaller remote offices, this comes with its own limitations and simply does not deliver the enterprise scale your business needs to get ahead.

2. It’s become way too expensive.

For the reasons already described, Data Domain comes with a remarkably high Total Cost of Ownership. Data protection costs are soaring, and old school appliances are just too expensive and hard to manage. To make matters worse, Dell EMC locks customers into expensive hardware and maintenance contracts. Hardware costs aside, software licenses and support costs further skyrocket when it’s time for you to upgrade. With multiple Data Domain systems, these problems become even more painful—both operationally and financially. When you factor in the administrative overhead for all the additional supporting gear and solutions that you’ll need to manage alongside Data Domain, the unreasonably high costs speak for themselves if you continue to deploy and manage it with the imposed legacy solution limitations. Simply put—Data Domain has become very expensive storage with commodity features that add complexity to your already burdensome backup operations.

3. It is inefficient, slow, and risky.

Data Domain is a purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA)—designed to be a backup target and nothing more. While originally intended to simplify on-prem backup operations, it has become incredibly complex requiring additional infrastructure like media servers, master servers, cloud gateways, and storage devices—which all need to be managed and secured separately. Since you’ll always need multiple Data Domains to scale, this further exacerbates operational management complexity.

Because of its antiquated hardware-based architecture, Data Domain’s deduplication is limited to each controller. Since its architecture requires all disks to be identical, this also poses challenges when you need to expand in the future with higher capacity or performing disk types.

Restoring data with Data Domain is notoriously slow. With the massive prevalence of cyber-attacks and ransomware threats today, you need a solution that not only protects your data, but allows you to restore that data rapidly so that your business productivity can continue without a hitch. In today’s cloud era, we all realize that the scalability and cost-efficiency of cloud-based technologies go a long way to address today’s explosive data growth. But, Data Domain offers limited ability to leverage the cloud for long-term retention and tiering, and requires expensive add-ons to accomplish what more modern solutions offer natively today.