What are Dell PowerProtect DD Series Appliances?

Data integrity and recoverability are crucial foundations of effective data storage—without these two elements in play, an organization's backup and storage efforts are arguably carried out in vain. A myriad of issues could arise that undermine data storage operations; for this reason, storage solutions should incorporate numerous defensive and data recovery measures to ensure that data recovery capabilities are continuously intact.  

In this article, we'll discuss Dell PowerProtect DD Series Appliances, its built-in data integrity mechanisms, and other features that make it the optimal solution for maximizing data integrity and recoverability. 

What are the Dell PowerProtect DD Series Appliances? 

When it comes to data deduplication and storage, Dell PowerProtect DD Series Appliances (DD series) have a distinguished pedigree. 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. Data Domain can now be found in the DD series line of appliances in several models: 

• DD3300
• DD6400
• DD6900
• DD9400
• DD9900

Dell is also continuing to offer a fully virtualized version in the PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition which scales to 96TB on-premise or 256TB in the cloud. 

A key underlying component of DD series is the Data Domain Operating System (DDOS) and its Stream-Informed Segment Layout (SISL) scaling architecture. DDOS is a core part of DD series Data Invulnerability Architecture, a framework built into the product line for mitigating the risk of data integrity issues. SISL relies on CPU power and performance to continuously minimize the disk accesses required to deduplicate data—specifically, by identifying duplicate data segments in memory, thereby minimizing disk usage.  

Benefits of DD series

As the industry's most battle-tested and cloud-enabled data storage and protection solution, DD series enables organizations to leverage scalable cloud protection storage—regardless of the composition of their IT environments. For on-premises, automated data deduplication and protection, DD series reduces network utilization for cost-efficient storage. 

This article focuses on several of DD series Data Invulnerability Architecture's key benefits, which in combination give organizations comprehensive levels of data integrity and recoverability: inline data verification, continuous fault detection and self-healing. 

Inline data verification 

A myriad of issues can occur that impact the integrity of data during ingestion and retrieval. DD series provides continuous fault detection and self-healing to ensure that data is recoverable throughout its lifecycle. By detecting and remediating input/output (I/O) errors during the backup process, DD series eliminates the need for repeat backup jobs and ensures that each job is completed on-time and in-line with SLA agreements. Along with inline write and read verification for protecting and recovering from data integrity issues, DD series also performs end-to-end verification to confirm that data is correct and recoverable at all system levels. 

Continuous fault detection 

DD series provides continuous fault detection and on-the-fly recovery mechanisms to ensure that data restore operations are always carried out successfully. Various scenarios could occur that result in compromised backup operations: failing disk drives, unreadable disk blocks or other issues with supporting hardware and components.  

DD series periodically validates the integrity of the drives' RAID stripes—using the redundancy of the RAID system to heal any faults—and re-verify both data and container log integrity, healing any errors in real time. 

Self-healing 

As mentioned previously, DD series can leverage RAID redundancy to automatically heal any faults. The Data Invulnerability Architecture anticipates that numerous problems could occur at any level; for this reason, DD series ships with features for reconstructing lost and corrupted file system metadata, as well as tools for checking problematic file systems and bringing them back online safely.  

For example, DD series' self-describing data format ensures that metadata structures (e.g., indices for accelerating access) are entirely rebuildable from data that is resident on-disk. This allows for advanced recoverability—even in extreme cases of file system and metadata corruption. 

Ideal use cases

Data backup, archive and disaster recovery  

DD series provides high-performing, reliable backup, archive and disaster recovery capabilities to organizations of all sizes. For example, the DD6400 appliance was designed to provide high-speed, variable-length deduplication and cost-effective data protection storage to small and medium-sized data centers. 

Data on disk is available online and onsite for longer retention periods and restores and retrievals become faster and more reliable. This efficiency enables DD series to protect up to 50PB of logical capacity on a single system, with the ability to natively-tier another 100PB of deduplicated data to the cloud for long-term retention with Data Domain Cloud Tier. As a result, months of retention on disk is possible using the same amount of data center floorspace that traditionally provided only a couple of days of disk staging.   

Long-term cloud retention  

DD series offers native support and tiering to public, private and hybrid clouds, enabling organizations to implement simple and efficient long-term retention strategies—not to mention low-cost cloud-based disaster recovery mechanisms. 

Additionally, support for secure multi-tenancy allows for the logical isolation of user data; in these scenarios, only unique data is sent from the source to the cloud, with data arriving to cloud object storage already deduplicated. Supported cloud vendors include AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Alibaba Cloud, to name a few. 

Protection for physical, virtual and cloud environments 

Large enterprises and organizations with a mix of on-premises, public cloud, hybrid cloud and virtual environments benefit from DD series support of secure multi-tenancy and data protection as a service. With secure multi-tenancy, tenant data and networks are logically isolated for strict data access isolation. Additionally, PowerProtect Cloud Disaster Recovery allows for the copying of on-premises VM backups to the public cloud, as well as the orchestration of disaster recovery testing and failover of workloads to the cloud with end-to-end orchestration. 

Extensive third-party ecosystem 

DD Boost is DD series' native protocol. It can support a broad ecosystem of data protection software, natively integrating to protect your data with enhanced resilience, performance and scale; all while providing faster backups, reduced network utilization and leading data reduction.

Data protection software vendors currently providing DD Boost integration with the DD Series appliances include: 

• Commvault
• Veritas
• Veeam

Learn more about DD series

In short, DD series offers industrial-grade data storage and protection with high-speed, inline deduplication for supporting a myriad of workloads and IT environments.