Dell NetWorker Reviews

I use the solution in my company as it is a product that has been sold to many customers, especially to those who need a foolproof, solid, and stable backup and restoration solution.

The use case for Dell NetWorker has been for customers with at least 60 to 75 machines for which they need a backup tool, and after that, it can go up to a couple of thousand machines. The product is useful for those who require a working solution without much technical fixing needed to make it work. The tool's restoration part is the most important, which allows users to check if the restore part is working properly with Dell NetWorker's help. The aforementioned reasons prompted me to continue selling the product to our company's customers.

The most valuable feature of the solution is a function in Dell NetWorker that works if the data that you are supposed to restore is resilient. If the data you want to restore is incomplete, then it has some functionality that will restore everything that is okay and skip the part that is not okay, so you get almost everything back.

Based on my experience, it was tricky to get support when I started working with the tool. The support is an area with concerns where improvements are required. Once the product starts working, users get good support.

I have been using Dell NetWorker since 1997.

It is an extremely stable product.

The scalability part of the product is very positive since you can scale it up or down as much as you like without any limitations.

In Sweden, where I used the tool, there were around a hundred users.

It was tricky to get the support to start working on your problem, but once you get to contact them, they offer professional help quickly.

I had technicians and engineers in my company to take care of the setup part of the product. The setup process of the product was straightforward. 

The product's setup phase can be completed in a day. My company hands over the product to the customer once they learn how it works.

The product can be deployed on an on-premises model. It can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises.

Earlier, users had to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs of the product. The licenses were expensive, but users used to get the best device to use.

My company did evaluate other products like Backup Exec, NetBackup, and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager against Dell NetWorker. My company chose to work with Dell NetWorker because of the backup and restoration speed that it offered, along with stability.

During my experience with the product, it did not have the deduplication feature in it unless you bought Dell EMC Data Domain and hardware appliance.

It is a really stable product and is one of the best solutions in the market. Based on my experience, the product has no limitations.

Dell NetWorker released a new version many years ago to cover a new operating system's latest version, but it didn't work. My company had to face a lot of problems with our customers until Dell acknowledged the problem and the fact that there was a need to do a little bit more work. The aforementioned area consists of the details of when I faced some issues with the product.

The benefit of having Dell NetWorker in infrastructure was to ensure that there was a backup and restore environment that was stable, worked well, and could deliver when needed.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Dell NetWorker is a secure and backup service tool.

The solution offers time management, reduces operational cost and do multiple backups at a time.

The tool should integrate with other solutions, like, the tape library.

I have been using Dell NetWorker for one and a half years.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

300 users are using the solution in our company.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

Dell support is better. Basically, in our region, no physical resources required to prevent such things. We need to go online supports, and time differences are too high.

Neutral

The initial setup can be difficult at times, especially when dealing with Data Domain port-based authentication. Managing where the Data Domain is located on the port side can be a particular difficulty. Deployment takes around two to three hours to complete whereas port installation take around two to three weeks. We have two users to do the implement and maintain.

We achieved 60% ROI in terms of money and time savings.

The solution’s pricing differ in some conditions. It offers perpetual licence.

I rate the product’s pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

The Dell Networker's maintenance complexity varies. It can be easy in some situations and challenging in others. Overall, its functionality is generally good. However, when monitoring the system from another location, we encounter difficulties in handling certain conditions. These difficulties arise especially during installation and client configuration. Maintaining client-level configurations also have difficulty, particularly when communication between clients and the server occurs through different ports while only one or two ports are allowed by default settings. This further complicate the process.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Dell NetWorker is used as a backup and recovery solution.

Feature-wise, the most valuable ones stem from the fact that it is the most flexible and easiest backup for your virtual machines, along with being the backup of a wide range of databases using modules.

The API side of the solution has certain shortcomings. However, I don't think much improvement because we already have APIs in place, but I think there is a scope to improve the API side.

I have been using Dell NetWorker for seven to eight years. Also, I am using the solution's latest version.

In my experience, I haven't seen many issues with the network, though there are some incidents that come up here and there. I don't see any regular issues until you have good resources. I mean, resources like CPU, RAM, and all.

It is scalable software. All you need to increase is its RAM and CPU. It's pretty easy. Apart from that, if it's the backend, where the data is stored on the data domain, it is again a scalable product.

Most large enterprises use the solution. With the storage and with the databases, Dell NetWorker has a wide range of modules to cover these databases and backups.

I contacted technical support. It's always there in any product. Usually, for backup failures, we contact support. The support you get depends on the support level that the customer takes. You have dedicated support and normal line support. Customers can always ask to escalate.

The initial setup is easy. As you go on to configure the databases, multiple teams are involved, like the database team, the Unix team, and the backup team. Even then, it's pretty easy and straightforward unless you run into some infrastructure issues.

The solution is deployed on the cloud and on-premises.

The time for deployment depends on the size of the environment. If it's a small environment, and everything is in place and works, it takes just two or three hours. If the customer has a larger enterprise, then, obviously, it will increase because you need to install extra storage nodes.

The issues are not straightforward. For example, with the issues in the documentation, there are other products where if you get an error, it's completely code-based, or error codes, so it's pretty easy. Going through the document of Dell NetWorker, I see it's a bit different. You need to dig into the issues.

I rate the overall solution a nine point seven or nine point eight out of ten.

We have used the solution largely for backups, including all our databases and UX machines.

The solution offers very good backups and has all of the basic features any other solution would have on offer. 

There's tight integration between Data Domain and NetWorker as well. Data Domain is an EMC product. They have very good integration between the two.

The initial setup is simple. 

Its stability is very good. 

The solution can scale. 

The web console could be a lot better. All the customers are dependent on a separate console server. If they want to access NetWorker, they need to have a separate console server to access the management window. I know they've come up with a browser-based management site in order to monitor day-to-day backups and to perform the administration or the setup within the web console. Yet, for the web-based console, they still need to do some improvements.

The documentation could be better. I find the solution is not properly documented. If you want to set up a SharePoint, there are certain steps to be followed, which I have to discover myself, I have to find out myself, which was not found in those installation setup guides. That's something I would suggest. We have already passed this suggestion to Dell EMC, letting them know that there are a few steps missing. The documentation was not properly maintained or properly updated. Previously, the older documentation was good. However, it seems that now, when they update and move forward it's not properly documented.

I've been using the solution for ten years. 

It's stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable and the performance is good.

The solution can scale. We only need to get an additional license if we want to do a scaling of our infrastructure. We just need to buy the capacity we need. We can just upgrade the RAM in case it needs additional resources also. We can even deploy another NetWorker server. 

Scaling is purely based on capacity. You don't have to buy it per server either as most of the servers are virtualized. As you have the socket license and the capacity license, then you can actually deploy a new server.

We have more than 1,000 users on the solution right now. 

We've used EMC, Veeam, and Rubrik.

We do have Rubrik and I set up Rubrik a few months back, and it's working fine. 

EMC, in terms of cost, is more expansive. I would definitely go for NetWorker instead as, when you compare it with the Veritas NetBackup, NetWorker is cheaper. Rubrik is cheaper than NetWorker, however, with  Rubrik, we're only using it to back up our VMs. For the other kinds of workloads, such as Exchange or SharePoint, we are still using NetWorker.

The initial setup is not complex. It's straightforward. Once you have all your prerequisites ready, then you are good to go.

As integrators, we are able to handle the initial setup. We handled the setup ourselves mostly in-house. 

I don't have any information on the ROI.

We'll have the solution for about five years. I can't say how much it will cost in total. 

We are users and integrators as well. 

My advice would be to have, once you have started to use it, something more on the Windows-based tools. If you see the commands, all those commands are as if you're running a query. The underlying structure of NetWorker is a skill database, so it's actually running on a skill database. Mostly you'll be running some queries, or querying commands to get the reports using the command prompt. For someone who is familiar with Windows, they'll find it very easy to use.

I'd rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

Public Cloud

We use Dell NetWorker to back up data from several databases and virtual machines.

The software’s best feature is data backup for any system. Using it, we can back up virtual machines, servers, different applications, and modules.

While upgrading to a new version, we encounter challenges related to specific algorithms or code regulations. It causes problems if the new version is incompatible with the old authentication method or existing modules. Thus, we have to conduct non-integration tests.

It requires a specific server or a specific NRA and GNLP download to configure the application. This setup is time-consuming, especially when compared to modern web-based tools. It could be better.

Additionally, its support services need improvement. When we log a case, it takes a long time to resolve it. There could be more experienced engineers in their team.

We have been using Dell NetWorker for ten years.

The product could be more stable. Sometimes, we need to restart the server every week. That is the reason we are looking for other tools.

We have less than ten users for Dell NetWorker.

Dell NetWorkers’ technical support services need improvement.

The initial setup process is easy. The time taken for deployment depends on the kind of tool we want to integrate. Some configurations, including integration with data domain, on-premise, and on-cloud, are complicated. It took us a few weeks to complete the process. The software is simple to set up and has an OVA system allowing employees to configure IP addresses. Although, it is challenging to backup the device or library.

It is a relatively inexpensive product compared to NetBackup.

It is a good product. It has interconnection with different vendors. I recommend it to others. It offers a lot of documentation for a better understanding of configurations and modules.

I rate it a seven out of ten. There are many areas of improvement, including functionality and support.

On-premises

I've been using this solution for backups and restoration.

Backup reliability for this solution is fine. It's good.

Dell EMC NetWorker is still not mature, compared to its competitors. For example: the TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) of IBM is very accurate in error logs, and it is very rare to get failure alerts when using the TSM. It's fast and reliable which I didn't see from Dell EMC NetWorker. Another example is the Veritas which I also have experience with. Though Veritas is lower in level compared to the TSM, Veritas is more user-friendly than the TSM.

All features for Dell EMC NetWorker are good, but they are not something to be happy about.

Sometimes this solution shows some errors, e.g. related to open files. It is based on Java, which is very bad. There's so many issues not reflecting what's really happening in the background.

Reporting is very bad in Dell EMC NetWorker. It's also very difficult to get whatever you need based on the backup time duration.

Dell EMC NetWorker has so many versions in a short span of time, which contain a lot of bugs that need to be fixed because each upgrade has its own issues. For every new update of this solution, bugs get fixed, but something new, e.g. a new bug comes up in each version which needs to be fixed. 

I've been using Dell EMC NetWorker for four years.

This solution is 95% stable.

This solution is scalable. It's easy to scale. The only thing that matters in terms of scalability is the storage for the data domain, e.g. adding the disk and another unit, and that's it.

Support, especially from the Middle East region, is very bad. Sometimes support is good, but it's usually bad.

Setting up Dell EMC NetWorker is not complex. The setup was straightforward.

We implemented this solution internally, with guidance from the Dell team.

The price for this solution is cheaper than other products. The price is the only reason we are renewing, otherwise we'll be moving to Veeam.

I evaluated IBM TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) and Veritas.

We deployed Dell EMC NetWorker to 300 machines. It took us six to seven months to stabilize all issues during the upgrade and complete the deployment.

We only did maintenance for the upgrade and for versions such as the kernel, or the code slash code upgrade, or the version of the software. No major maintenance was needed for this solution.

There are two users in our company working with Dell EMC NetWorker. The backup is a daily process, while administration is not done on a daily basis. For checking and reviewing errors and failures, this solution is used daily.

Usage will depend on the company: how much activity they have and the types of activity they have, e.g. registration or development through IT.

The main reasons we're thinking of switching from Dell EMC NetWorker to another product include the reporting, support, and the bugs. There are so many issues we find annoying which require additional resources.

My advice to people looking into implementing this solution is that for big environments, it's so complicated. For example, for a clustered environment, you have a clustered environment for Oracle RAC, where you have so many firewalls in between, but Dell EMC NetWorker is not mature enough to handle that kind of environment and setup. Oracle RAC works well in big environments, but not this solution. Dell EMC NetWorker would be good for smaller environments where it won't be heavily used. We are an airline company with 300 machines, but we're not comparable to a big company like Google.

My rating for Dell EMC NetWorker is a seven out of ten.

On-premises

Our primary use cases for the product include taking regular backups of critical systems and utilizing its archiving solution. We back up our enterprise systems to a disk-based backup system and subsequently transfer these backups to an archiving system. When necessary, we recover these backups for our users, such as application and database users.

The product's most valuable features are robust integration options with databases and email systems. It allows seamless integration with native tools like Oracle's, significantly accelerating the backup process by eliminating the need for manual configuration.

We encountered challenges during the solution's deployment, particularly integrating our database system and Microsoft Exchange. This area needs improvement. 

They could improve their licensing policy, particularly in terms of measuring customer systems for backups. For example, they could refine distinguishing between capacity-based backups and the number of system-based backups. 

I have been working with Dell NetWorker for about five years.

I rate the product stability an eight out of ten. 

I rate the product scalability a nine out of ten. 

Dell could improve its technical support by enhancing the response time, especially for the initial ticket raised. The first ticket could be addressed promptly and within the agreed-upon service level agreement (SLA).

Positive

The setup is straightforward for smaller deployments, but it becomes more complicated for larger deployments.

Excluding the integration with other systems, it typically takes one to two days. However, the process can take about one week if system integrations are included.

The solution's automation capabilities are efficient. Once the scheduler is configured, backups proceed without any interruption. This includes automatic transfers from disk-based to archiving systems, making the process highly effective.

I rate it an eight out of ten. 

On-premises

This is a very good product. The administration is very good when it comes to backup scenarios. However, maintenance and support are very difficult. The creation of jobs and backups could be easier.

It helps improve the jobs of administrators. It can make things more compatible from an end-user perspective. 

The most valuable feature is the Dell EMC-based product backups. We were using Dell storage, and it offered good compatibility with it. 

The solution is stable.

It can scale.

Technical support has been helpful. 

The end-user experience is not good. They need to improve the product to make it easier to use. We're missing that right now. 

The integration with Hyper-V needs to be better.

They need better compatibility with Exchange backups. 

It is difficult to set up.

While the stability is good, the troubleshooting is hard.

I've been using the solution for seven or eight years. 

It is stable. I'd rate it eight out of ten. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

It is a scalable product. I'd rate it eight out of ten. It extends well. 

Technical support is very good. 

Neutral

I've also used Veeam and Microsft DPM. Veeam and Microsoft are very easier to use. They are also less expensive.

The initial setup was not straightforward. It is complex.

We had two people managing the process. 

We have not noted any ROI.

The pricing is relatively high compared to Microwsft DPM and Veeam.

I'm not sure which version of the solution I'm using. 

New users can try it. It is good when it is in the right landscape. In certain cases, it could be a very useful tool.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

On-premises