TIP SHEET

3 Reasons Why You
Need to Replace Your
Aging Data Domain
Overview
While Dell EMC Data Domain may have served its purpose as a backup appliancefor the past couple of decades, the astronomical scale of today’s data landscapehas quickly rendered solutions of yesteryear like Data Domain useless. Customers
everywhere are now suffering from the costly realities and rigid limitations of its
legacy architecture.

Here are the top 3 reasons why customers are unhappy with
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 pacewith your business’s data demands, you need to purchase larger and more appliances. Upgrades canbe 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 expensethat you shouldn’t have to deal with.
While Data Domain does offer a Virtual Edition for smaller remote offices, this comes with its ownlimitations 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 ofOwnership. Data protection costs are soaring, and old school appliances are just too expensive andhard to manage. To make matters worse, Dell EMC locks customers into expensive hardware andmaintenance 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 evenmore 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 theimposed legacy solution limitations. Simply put—Data Domain has become very expensive storage
with commodity features that add complexity to your already burdensome backup operations.

Data Domain Challenges• Limited scale• Complex• Expensive• Inefficient• Slow• Risky

TIPSHEET | 3 Reasons Why You Need to Replace Your Aging Data Domain

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 toscale, this further exacerbates operational management complexity.
Because of its antiquated hardware-based architecture, Data Domain’s deduplication is limited to eachcontroller. Since its architecture requires all disks to be identical, this also poses challenges when you needto 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 andransomware 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 goa 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.

Scale, Manage, Defend, and Do More with Your Data with Cohesity
SmartFiles
Deduplication appliances were a solution to yesterday’s problems. To stay ahead, enterprises need amuch better solution that eliminates the high-costs, over-provisioning, complexity, and vendor lock-inthat go hand-in-hand with Data Domain.
Cohesity SmartFiles can help you break free from Data Domain without disrupting your business while
optimizing cost, scale, and efficiency for your unstructured data.
Cohesity SmartFiles is a software-defined, unified file and object services solution for the hybrid cloud,and integrates seamlessly with your existing enterprise backup software to replace Data Domain with amore modern, secure, cost-effective, and ultra-scalable solution.

TIP SHEET | 3 Reasons Why You Need to Replace Your Aging Data Domain

Many happy Cohesity customers are using SmartFiles today to…

• Integrate seamlessly with existing backup solutions with support for S3, SMB, and NFS• Eliminate disruptive upgrades with software-defined simplicity to run on hardware of choice• Gain up to 96x Storage Efficiency with superior global dedupe and compression• Easily expand on-demand with unlimited capacity and scale• Protect data with unlimited immutable snapshots, encryption, RBAC, MFA, and enterprisesecurity features• Detect ransomware and malicious attacks with ML-based anomaly detection and integrated
anti-virus• Recover rapidly from ransomware and other disasters• Optimize costs with hybrid cloud flexibility by intelligently replicating, tiering, and archiving to
the cloud• Reduce TCO by up to 51% or more by consolidating silos of unstructured data
• Streamline and satisfy compliance with cost-effective long-term retention, audit trails, andpowerful analytics• Simplify management with a unified management UI to protect, recover, manage, and search all
global data

• Do more with data with a Marketplace app ecosystem of integrated 3rd party applications
Those are just some reasons why Cohesity SmartFiles is the smartest way to optimize cost, scale, andefficiency for your unstructured data. That’s why thousands of happy Cohesity customers have alreadymade the switch to Cohesity’s Next-Gen Data Security and Management Platform. Industry analysts
agree, and recognize Cohesity as a…

• Leader in Gartner MQ for Enterprise Backup & Recovery Software Solutions• Visionary in Gartner MQ for Distributed File and Object Solutions• Leader in GigaOm Radar for Enterprise Scale-Out File Systems• Leader in GigaOm Sonar for File-Based Primary Storage Ransomware Protection• Major Player in IDC MarketScape WorldWide Distributed Scale-Out File System

Download this report from ESG to learn how you can lower the total cost of storage ownership up
to 51% by consolidating your data onto a more cost-effective and simpler to manage solution.

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Cohesity, the Cohesity logo, SnapTree, SpanFS, DataPlatform, DataProtect, Helios, and other Cohesity marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cohesity, Inc. in the US and/or internationally. Other company andproduct names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. This material (a) is intended to provide you information about Cohesity and our business and products; (b) was believed to betrue and accurate at the time it was written, but is subject to change without notice; and (c) is provided on an “AS IS” basis. Cohesity disclaims all express or implied conditions, representations, warranties of any kind.

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