Dell NetWorker vs IBM Spectrum Protect comparison

"It is the best umbrella, serving the best applications."

"NetWorker's most valuable feature is recovery, including the policy-based backups that can be configured."

"The best feature is the DR replication for us."

"Dell NetWorker's valuable feature is its ability to configure the network for immutability, specifically for backups."

"I started off as a storage engineer and ended up owning Dell EMC Data Domain and Dell EMC NetWorker. I've not used any other backup solutions at this scale. Dell EMC NetWorker does what I need it to do, it's efficient."

"The feature that offers the greatest benefits in ensuring data integrity is its backup capability."

"It has the ability to support all kinds of backups. It can be used to back up databases, operating systems, virtual machines, Lotus Notes, and Exchange. It can also do remote image backups for remote sites. It integrates and works with Data Domain. It is an enterprise-class product that can be used for anything and everything across multiple sites and locations. It is also very scalable."

"I feel that it is a good product."

"Reliability: It has never had a problem with backups or restores. If you store something, it is there."

"The ability to do dedupe in the product is nice to have."

"Because of the flexible parameters, everything can be fine-tuned to the customers’ needs in their environment."

"It allows us to have one interface."

"IBM Spectrum Protect is a scalable solution."

"This solution has improved our organization through better file and database recovery."

"The most valuable feature for data recovery in IBM Spectrum Protect is its database protection capabilities."

"The tool proves invaluable in scenarios where systems need recovery, such as restoring damaged data."

"There are some limitations regarding scalability of the product."

"When it comes to the stability of the product, some of the stores that have bad connectivity have some challenges backing them up because they operate remotely, the connection is slow, and it takes longer to manage the backup stuff."

"I would like to see the user interface improved, more documentation, faster support, and it could be easier to configure."

"Support is definitely an area of concern because of the time it takes to resolve our issues."

"The initial setup is complex."

"The user interface is hard to use, it should be simplified. There are a lot of web-based management interfaces which they should consider."

"NetWorker sometimes has issues with the backup not starting and with connecting to the Oracle servers."

"I am not very satisfied with the support. The interface on the Java application makes it difficult, whereas the web interface is simple to use."

"It is not easy to manage like other products in the market. It is okay only if you are command-line driven. Even though the operation center is there, it doesn't provide a single view of everything. You have to, for example, use TSMManager on top of it, which gives you a far better management capability, but it is a third-party product. Its management needs to be improved. There should be an HTML or graphical interface. It is a very difficult product. For example, you have a backup policy where you want a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly policy standard. It is an old kind of system where you have to keep retention for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups, which is very difficult in IBM Spectrum Protect. In other products, in a matter of five minutes, you can configure such a policy. In TSM, it takes you one, two, or three days because you need to configure a node for each of them. If you have 250 nodes, you have to configure each node for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly retention. If you have 1,000 nodes, it is going to take you ages just to configure and register the nodes. You need to configure the schedule and the CAD daemons or services, depending on whether it is a Unix or Windows OS. Unfortunately, it is a very long and drawn-out process. You have to stop and start the services for changes to take effect. This is a very difficult part of TSM in IBM Spectrum Protect. To configure a backup policy, I should be able to select the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly options in one screen and finish it. After that, everything should happen in the background. All the backup products in the market already do that, and they are very simple to manage. This particular part of this solution has really been a major pain area for us, and unfortunately, we could not find a workaround. There is nobody at IBM who can give us a way to configure all this easily through a GUI or even scripts."

"IBM Spectrum Protect does have a lot of the features that we need, but I think they need to improve their backup virtualization and backup for container."

"I am not really impressed with the Level 1 support, but once I get past that and go to Level 2, then we will usually get some type of resolution."

"Its price can be better. It is very expensive. Its interface is very old and not user friendly. They can improve its interface. Their support can also be better. My clients are not very satisfied with the support because they are not really quick."

"Better integration with other tools and databases is needed."

"The solution must protect against ransomware attacks better."

"We are having a balance issue between the reclamation and the backup function. It has to take the space back from the tapes before it can record to those tapes, but sometimes those two processes are overlapping."

"We would like to see capabilities of long-term archiving and more support for hardware platforms."

"The licensing model can be traditional licensing or capacity-based licensing."

"Low cost is key."

"Dell NetWorker has two types of licensing models."

"I have a capacity-based license, but I don't know the exact cost of that license."

"If you purchase Avamar, NetWorker is free with Avamar, for one terabyte license capacity."

"The pricing for the telecom, government, and banking sectors is relatively affordable."

"It is excellent from the pricing point of view. It is free with Data Protection Suite. Similarly, when you purchase Avamar, Dell EMC NetWorker is free with one terabyte license capacity. Its price is very competitive."

"The solution follows a subscription model for licensing. We pay annually to use the solution and the price is high."

"Spectrum Protect is not expensive, and it is simple to use."

"The pricing is a little expensive for our current employer, so they want to move to a cheaper solution."

"We have found that the pricing is high in our country."

"License-wise regarding IBM, it's licensed per terabyte. And that is after compression and deduplication."

"We have spec'd out our build, and the cost of it can work quite easily today for our future needs."

"We worked our licensing into a capacity model, which is nice. Now, everything is much simpler to manage from a licensing perspective.​"

"That's a hard estimate. It depends on the licensing, the hardware, and other stuff, but it is fairly expensive. It is generally more expensive than other solutions."

"The licensing fees are on a yearly basis, which for us it is about R400,000 (approximately $27,000 USD)."