Triple Your Backup Efficiency with Dell PowerProtect

Key takeaways: Dell PowerProtect Data Domain All-Flash outperforms the competition with more than triple the backup efficiency and leading restore performance in new independent third-party report.

Is your backup solution costing you more than it should?

Your backup storage footprint is expanding, yet the amount of data you’re protecting isn’t. Dealing with this common issue means you are likely wasting valuable resources and exposing your business to unnecessary risk. When your backup storage, the last line of defense, is inefficient, it becomes a liability.

It’s easy to think all backup storage systems are alike. Most claim to have data reduction features like deduplication or compression. However, independent third-party testing reveals significant differences in how effectively these technologies perform. A recent study confirmed that Dell PowerProtect Data Domain All-Flash delivers superior results compared to four leading competitors.

The key findings show that PowerProtect Data Domain All-Flash delivers: ¹

• • Up to 3.8x better storage efficiency
  • 75:1 data reduction in the test environment
  • 51 TB/hour per 500 TB system recovery performance

The gap between a feature on a spec sheet and its real-world performance is substantial. This difference can lead to paying for racks of flash storage you don’t need, along with the associated costs for networking, power, and cooling.

Real-world performance: Dell vs. the Competition

Independent testing showed that PowerProtect Data Domain All-Flash Appliance achieved more than triple the efficiency of competitive solutions while protecting the exact same workload.

What does Dell’s superior efficiency mean for your organization?

• • Less Backup Infrastructure: Reduce the amount of hardware you need to purchase, manage, and maintain.
  • Smaller Data Center Footprint: Free up valuable rack space for other strategic initiatives.
  • Lower Operating Costs: Achieve significant savings on power, cooling, and networking expenses.

Because it uses significantly less physical storage than competing solutions, Data Domain All-Flash helps you improve your entire backup environment. This ultimately allows you to better allocate your critical resources to projects that drive business growth.

The source of Dell’s efficiency advantage

To validate these results, testers used a realistic VMware backup environment to run a 30-day protection cycle. They compared PowerProtect Data Domain All-Flash against four competing backup solutions. Instead of relying on marketing claims, the test measured the actual physical storage each solution consumed to protect an identical data set.

The results were decisive. Dell PowerProtect Data Domain All-Flash used the least amount of physical storage. In contrast, competitor solutions consumed up to 3.8x more capacity to protect the same data.

Consider the scale of this difference. If your environment requires 100 TB of protection with Data Domain All-Flash, a competing solution could demand up to 380 TB. That’s more than three times the storage capacity to house, power, and cool, leading to significantly higher operational costs.

Why Data Domain Leads in Data Reduction

While many vendors make bold promises about data reduction, Dell PowerProtect Data Domain All-Flash stands apart due to its purpose-built architecture for efficiency and reliability.

Here’s what makes the difference:

• • SISL-Powered Deduplication: Dell’s Stream-Informed Segment Layout (SISL) architecture uses a content-aware, variable-length deduplication process. It operates primarily in memory before data is ever written to disk. This precise method allows Data Domain All-Flash to identify redundant data more effectively, packing more logical data into less physical space.
  • Data Invulnerability Architecture (DIA): A backup is only valuable if it can be reliably restored. DIA ensures data integrity by verifying data as it’s written and continuously re-checking data stored on disk. This process protects against silent data corruption, a known weakness in some competing solutions, ensuring what you back up is exactly what you can restore.
  • Source-Side Deduplication with DD Boost: DD Boost extends efficiency to the data source. It reduces the amount of data sent over the network, minimizing traffic and optimizing storage capacity from the very beginning.

Unlike competitors that rely only on target-side reduction, PowerProtect Data Domain All-Flash is engineered from the ground up to minimize redundancy and maximize usable capacity.

Delivering true business value

Dell PowerProtect Data Domain All-Flash goes beyond technical performance to provide measurable business value across your entire IT environment.

• • Advanced Data Reduction: By leading the industry in data reduction,² Data Domain All-Flash minimizes the physical storage required for backups. This directly translates to lower hardware, power, and cooling costs. These savings compound over time, making it a highly cost-effective solution for long-term data protection.
  • Rapid Recovery: In today’s business climate, downtime is not an option. Data Domain All-Flash delivers system restore speeds of up to 51 TB/hour per 500 TB. This ensures you can recover data quickly and keep your business running. As your storage of last resort, it provides the reliability your critical workloads demand.
  • Operational Efficiency: Data Domain All-Flash is a platform that simplifies and optimizes your backup environment, freeing up critical resources that would otherwise be tied to routine data protection tasks. By reducing complexity, it enables your team to focus on higher-value work that drives innovation.

Ready to see the full data?

Data volumes continue to grow, but budgets and data center space are under constant pressure. Inefficient backup solutions are no longer a viable option. The full third-party report provides a deep dive into the testing methodology, configurations, and performance breakdowns. If you’re not using PowerProtect Data Domain, you may be paying for storage capacity you simply don’t need.

The competition can’t compare.

Read the full third-party report.

Learn more about Dell PowerProtect Data Domain.

¹Based on Prowess Consulting Report, commissioned by Dell, March 2026, comparing Dell PowerProtect Data Domain All-Flash to comparable solutions from four major competitors running the same data set. Actual results may vary. Full Report: here.
²Based on Dell analysis of the purpose-built backup appliance market and available max average deduplication ratios, December 2025.