Dell Technologies (PowerProtect Data Manager)
Dell PowerProtect is a container protection system based on Velero that uses PowerProtect DD series appliances for deduplication and compression. These appliances can be physical or virtual (running on top of cloud object storage).
The data movers are automatically deployed on protected Kubernetes clusters by the VM-based Manager. It can also be deployed as a virtual machine (VM) in public cloud environments to secure Kubernetes installations. There is presently no SaaS version available, but future updates will have an Operator-based deployment and will be available on multiple marketplaces.
From a single Manager, the Dell solution may connect to many on-premises or cloud-based Kubernetes clusters.
PowerProtect captures Kubernetes-level objects with Velero components, while also utilizing its own data movers (running in their own namespace). Backups are performed on a per-namespace basis.
The remapping of storage classes is included in restores.
It supports AKS, EKS, and GKE, among other cloud-based Kubernetes services. It supports VMware Tanzu Guest Clusters, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition, Rancher, OpenShift, and Diamanti in the on-premises world.
At-rest and in-flight encryption, as well as target immutability via retention locks, are all included in PowerProtect. For air gapping and advanced machine learning and anomaly detection, it can be connected with Cyber Recovery Solution.
PowerProtect presently lacks mature RBAC and self-service capabilities, with self-service users restoring applications using a bespoke YAML-based format via a CLI-based procedure, but enhancements are anticipated for 2022.
MySQL, PostgreSQL, non-sharded MongoDB, and Cassandra are all supported by PowerProtect Data Manager. Support for shared databases will be added in future editions. Currently, PowerProtect exclusively backs up cloud-based databases like Amazon RDS using Cloud Snapshot Manager, a separate software. This feature will be implemented in the future.
Workflows are included in PowerProtect Data Manager to facilitate the migration of applications between clusters, as well as the underlying storage across different storage classes.
Strengths: Because PowerProtect covers more than just containers, it’s a solid choice for securing Kubernetes-based apps if you’re currently using it. It allows for effective data replication between DD appliances in on-premises or cloud environments for disaster recovery.PowerProtect backups must be saved on PowerProtect DD series appliances, which presents a challenge. While more efficient compression and deduplication reduce costs, this limits the solution’s practical application.