Dell NetWorker Reviews

We run a software-based service. You need a network of software, and for that, you need one physical server with the connectivity of fiber cables and fiber cords. The server configuration has to be high.

I like that it's stable and scalable. 

It could be more user-friendly. 

I have been handling Dell NetWorker for about a year and a half. 

Dell NetWorker is a stable product. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate its stability at seven.

Dell NetWorker is a scalable product.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate its scalability at seven.

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

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Dell NetWorker a seven.

We use Dell NetWorker for backup on tape libraries and for integration with old systems. 

The solution requires better technical support. There also needs to be improvements made to the integration with the environment. This includes an improvement made to the restored models for a lot of applications.

I have been using Dell NetWorker for 10 years.

Dell NetWorker is not the best solution, but it is decent. Many customers depend on it for backup.

Dell NetWorker is a software, it is not scalable. This is not required.

Technical support for Dell NetWorker is not good. The technicians are in the USA. When you open a ticket, they send the concern to India. There, the team does not have enough knowledge to support you.

Neutral

The initial setup of Dell NetWorker uses a software package that you can implement on the server, operating system, or on a virtual machine. The software implementation takes about 30 minutes. The integration with the whole environment depends on the size of the environment.

Dell NetWorker has two types of licensing models. One is a capacity license and the other is a circuit license for virtual machines.

I do not recommend Dell NetWorker as a solution. I rate the product a five out of ten overall.

The GUI is the best feature. It's very good and easy to use.

It is very easy to manage and easy to configure the backup.

We are having some issues with some of the features. For example, the reporting, or the display of current licensing on the portal need improvement.

The reporting is not to our satisfaction and our main area of concern. It doesn't provide any form of analysis.

There is a delay in the offering from Dell.

Support is definitely an area of concern because of the time it takes to resolve our issues. We should not have to wait long periods of time to have issues resolved. When a complaint is logged the issue should be resolved within a reasonable amount of time.

I have been using Dell EMC NetWorker for 20 years.

We are currently working with version 19.0.

Version 19 has been stable, but there were several versions in between that had some issues, such as versions five, eight, and nine. In addition to the stability issues, there were some concerns with the performance.

Scalability for us is limited because we are using this solution for system backup. and not beyond that. We don't have any cloud, and we do not have any snapshot; it is simply a file system backup.

We have not yet explored scalability. Our requirement is a very basic one.

We have contacted technical support for the issues that we are facing with some of the features and their response to us was that they are faced with some delays in resolving these issues. This is the reason that we are exploring other backup solutions.

We have several cases that are pending and have been for a very long time.

Support from Dell needs improvement. We are not getting the type of response that we were expecting from Dell.

The responses we have received from Dell have not been encouraging.

The initial setup is not an issue, it can be installed easily.

We have a total of 35 servers, that were installed individually.

The licensing model can be traditional licensing or capacity-based licensing. We have traditional licensing rather than capacity-based because of our long history.

We are currently evaluating other products as we would like to replace Dell EMC NetWorker with another backup software. We would like to carry out some PoCs to see which is the best. Feature-wise, we would like to know which is the best on the market.

We are also evaluating other products to see which features this solution is lacking.

I would recommend this solution, but if asked specifically about the support then I would not recommend this solution's support.

As far as performance is concerned, and the working functionality point of view, definitely it is a good solution.

We have also used this solution for the last 20 years. Definitely, there is a level of comfort.

However, as of late, maybe when Dell had taken over from EMC, we have noticed there is an issue as far as support is concerned. We are not getting good support, which is what we are supposed to get from them, especially since we have been long-standing customers of EMC NetWorker. Regardless of what we were supposed to get, we are not getting it.

I would rate Dell EMC NetWorker a seven out of ten.

We use Dell EMC NetWorker for several solutions we have had such as Exchange, Microsoft SQL, Linux, Windows File, File data backups, and Oracle Databases.

It's easy to use.

NetWorker is coming to end-of-life in a couple of years, and even Dell has said that they are not going to continue with it. They no longer develop it.

They put their efforts into the new Power Protect products instead. 

Support for the cloud could be better and with the existing features, it could be a bit more robust. Also, the flexibility could be improved.

They need more support for image backups.

The company has used this solution for 15-20 years.

We are not working with the latest version.

It's a pretty stable solution.

It's not scalable. Once you have created a backup server and you have configured it for a specific load, then you can't change it. 

You have to estimate how big the load is that you are going to have. If that increases, suddenly, you will need to create a new server. 

I wouldn't suggest that it is scalable. Scalability is an area that needs improvement.

We are an admin group and we have several technicians that look into it as well. We have 40 users in our organization.

Experience with technical support varies, sometimes they are very good and other times they are not that good.

However, their higher levels of Technical support are very good.

I used other solutions in earlier employments. This company has been using NetWorker for as much as 20 years.

I did not participate in the installation. It was already installed when I arrived.

We have a team of 5 engineers to deploy and maintain this solution.

They are not cheap. I don't know the fees specifically but they should definitely be cheaper. Everything should be cheaper :-)

Since they are going to stop developing this solution, I cannot recommend it to others.

I would rate Dell EMC NetWorker a seven out of ten.

DD Boost integration for capacity reduction and backup window.

This product has provide our backup and recovery capabilities for Service Restoration and Disaster Recovery for more than a decade. We have evolved with the product over the years and it continues to meet our requirements.

Automate/role-based Virtual Machine protection and automated DR recovery capabilities.

Initial install was in 2001 with Legato 6.4. We just completed the latest upgrade to EMC Networker 9.1.

All x.0 versions that we have deployed have had issues which get worked out in the subsequent releases. We generally never deploy the x.0 version and wait instead for the x.1 SP 1 release.

Early on, we had limitations in the number of servers as a single DataZone could manage when pushed up to deploy multiple DataZones. Those numbers have significantly increased but for large environments, this could still be a limit. The number of connections that the solution uses with the VMware Hypervisor can cause issues with vCenter's performance, but that is more a limitation with VMware than EMC NetWorker.

Over the years, it’s been up and down. For this latest version, I would suggest that it’s average, with not a large number of EMC specialists understanding how all the latest features in the product are supposed to work.

In a larger environment with multiple servers types and network security zones, it’s a complex installation to ensure stability with performance.

Don’t install the newest x.0 version of the product. Make sure you understand you own requirements and expectations of data protection in terms of Service Restoration and Disaster Recovery to ensure you are implementing the solution appropriately to meet those requirements.

Backup jobs can be scheduled and automated

Monitoring of backups and configuration tasks are centralized

Compatibility of the solution covers large OS/DataBases/Applications

In a large enterprise DataCenter there is traditionally a lot of applications/databases which are owned by different administrators.

Without a centralized backup solution, each application/DB owner has to ensure its backup separately and if a problem occurs, he has to execute recovery tasks. In these conditions, the application rower has to make some extra jobs : backup scripting, verifying backups have finished successfully, recovery jobs... This does impact his efficiency and the global enterprise efficiency.

If a centralized backup solution like Networker is deployed, the backup/recovery tasks will be on the responsibility of only one resource which is the backup administrator. This does directly involve that each application/DB owner can spend more time on his real job: optimizing the platform that he owns.

With Networker 8.0 I had an issue related to VMware VADP backups.
An Image level backup of a RHEL VM finished successfully, but when I tried to restore it the transfer speed was very low, and the restore operation took 20 hours to restore 17 GB which represents 50% of total VM size. I was then obliged to abort the restore operation because there was backup jobs planned and Networker was deployed with only one tape drive in this case (the tape drive can't write backups and perform restores simultaneously).

I contacted the support team to analyze this performance issue. They said that this happened because it was a Linux machine backed up with Windows Vcenter Proxy. For me this is not acceptable... I hope this will be resolved in the 8.2 version of Networker, because restore speed is important (RTO)

4 years

Deployment tasks are not really hard. Networker is well documented.

7/10

Initial setup was complex because I had to integrate Exchange Server and I had no knowledge on how it works.

I asked to the Exchange administrator to assist me on the deployment and together we setup up the Exchange backup job.

IBM TSM; HP data protector; Symantec Netbackup/Backupexec are main competitor to Networker.

I remember a customer asked me to advise him between deploying Networker or TSM. The customer wanted to integrate a Data Domain device to his backup solution. I advised him to use Networker because TSM is not compatible with DDBoost protocol which improves DataDomain performance: Deploying TSM in this case was a limitation!

The primary use case is for system and data backup. I'm the area technical manager and we are resellers. 

This is a good solution and our clients are happy with it. There are no issues and it meets expectations. It's very user-friendly with a good interface. 

I'd like to see a faster recovery window. Having a better recovery system would make a big difference. 

We've been using this product for 20 years. 

The stability is great. 

The scalability is good, we currently have over 100 users. 

Customer support is very good and I rate it highly. 

Positive

The initial setup is very straightforward and usually takes a couple of hours. 

Licensing costs are a little high. Dell has different kinds of licenses including a traditional license and a capacity-based license.

I recommend this solution and rate it nine out of 10. 

I am a business partner of Dell EMC. For POC purposes, we deploy and use it on-premises to get an overview of each and every feature of Dell EMC NetWorker.

We use Dell EMC NetWorker for physical workload as well as virtual workload. We have deployed it on-premises as well as on the cloud for our clients. We have deployed it for a number of projects, and we are completely satisfied with it.

The best feature of Dell EMC NetWorker is its wide spectrum of available plugins for each and every software that you can back up, such as SAP HANA, Oracle, AXI-based machines, or Dell-based machines. Whatever you want to back up, you can do it with Dell EMC NetWorker. It is a very solid backup software. It is the oldest backup software from EMC, and it comes from Dell EMC's legacy.

It is not easy to understand and deploy. It is complex in nature. Simplicity is not there. When we deploy it, the customer always needs some training from us. To make it user friendly, there should be one agent that can be used to back up every product. Dell EMC NetWorker uses so many user agents. In PowerProtect Data Manager, you can just install its VM, import that VM into vCenter, and you can start to do backups directly from vCenter. However, in Dell EMC NetWorker, you always need one server, and from that server, you need to initiate all backups. You must know the interface and the CLI. It is not user friendly.

It would be a great feature if we can deploy Dell EMC NetWorker on a virtual machine, like Avamar. The additional features that are required in Dell EMC NetWorker are already available in PowerProtect Data Manager and Avamar. Therefore, there is no need to enhance Dell EMC NetWorker. It would be better if they can just rename it to PowerProtect Data Manager or Avamar.

I have been using Dell EMC NetWorker for more than six years.

It is stable.

It always provides you ethical backup. When you reach your maximum license capability, it never stops you from doing your backups. This is a caring feature of this solution that I always liked. 

When you get a license for one terabyte, you can back up 100 terabytes of data. They never stop you from doing that ethically. We always need to follow the ethics of any software. Customers in Pakistan are using over commercial licenses, and they are happy with this feature.

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. 

We have deployed this solution for many companies and for every kind of company, such as banks, logistics companies. One of the biggest companies in Pakistan is using Dell EMC NetWorker since 2015, and they are very happy with it. Another company with a big data center is using this solution since 2016, and they are also happy. There is no challenge in adapting and having this solution in your environment.

Dell EMC NetWorker is a very good software for physical workloads and virtual workloads. It is known for certain features. PowerProtect Data Manager is a next-generation backup software. It also provides you the simplicity and ease of use. It is not complex. I always recommend using the latest backup software. I would first recommend PowerProtect Data Manager. Avamar would be number two, and Dell EMC NetWorker would be number three. 

I would rate Dell EMC NetWorker a seven out of ten.