Customers can choose from a suite specialized niche products that can be integrated together.
EMC DataDomain has the most advanced data deduplication offering among all backup vendors because it is their primary area of focus.
The suite offering may provide some reduction in licensing costs compared to purchasing the modules separately from EMC.
The EMC DPS is suited for storage specialists who want to focus on backup and integrate multiple storage, networking, and software components in order to stitch together the solution that meets their needs. This is the opposite of Unitrends’ value proposition, which wants you to focus on your business instead of your backup.
Primary Disadvantages of EMC DPS:
The EMC DPS tends to have a lower ROI (Return on Investment) and higher TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) due to the higher operational expenses and complexity of putting together, managing, and monitoring servers, storage, networks, operating systems, and data protection (backup, archiving, and disaster recovery) software.
For larger heterogeneous datasets, the price of the EMC DPS can get very prohibitive.
EMC DPS licensing fees tend to be expensive for growing businesses due to the licensing model – charging on a per-feature, per-client, per-operating system, and the like basis.
Setting up deduplication with the EMC DPS can be difficult in terms of balancing the software requirements with the hardware and operating system requirements of the system upon which the backup will operate.
Care must be taken when performing source-level deduplication (or for that matter, compression and/or encryption) using EMC DPS on systems because of the load it places on those systems.
Integrated fixed/rotational archiving for disaster recovery and long-term retention (D2D2-disk, -NAS, -SAN) is not supported by all modules.
A comprehensive backup, archiving, and disaster recovery solution requires multiple modules of the EMC DPS to be purchased and deployed, thereby increasing the cost and complexity of the solution.
Depending on what modules the customer selects, the result could be a non-integrated solution that leads to finger-pointing among the server, storage, networks, operating systems, and data protection (backup, archiving, and disaster recovery) software vendors when a problem occurs.