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reviewer1315983 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Supports legacy products well but the container support is lacking
Pros and Cons
  • "The support for legacy products is very good."
  • "I would like to see better support for the container systems, and we would like to see more support for image backups instead of pure file backups."

What is our primary use case?

We are using Dell EMC NetWorker for backup and restore purposes.

What is most valuable?

The support for legacy products is very good.

What needs improvement?

The components for container support such as Docker and Kubernetes need improvement. They are lacking.

Stability needs improvement. Also, scalability could be better.

I would like to see better support for the container systems, and we would like to see more support for image backups instead of pure file backups. Image backups are faster.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this solution for more than 15 years.

We are not using the latest version, we are one major version behind.

Buyer's Guide
Dell NetWorker
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about Dell NetWorker. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
830,526 professionals have used our research since 2012.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have had some issues with stability, but we can't say for certain that it is an issue with the client's environment, or if it's an issue with the server.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's a scalable solution.

We have approximately 5,000 clients per backup server, and we have six servers.

How are customer service and support?

We have not contacted technical support. We have only had a few issues that we were able to resolve.

What other advice do I have?

For newer software, EMC has expressed that they will not be supporting NetWorker for much longer. It is my understanding that they will continue for the next two years only. 

We are looking for new technology, and we are in the middle of an RFI.

I would not recommend Dell EMC NetWorker, as the product will end in a few years.

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

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

PeerSpot user
Enterprise Backup Administrator at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
The response time of the tech support is swift, but the security features need backup and encryption
Pros and Cons
  • "The response time of the tech support is swift. The support is fantastic."
  • "The security features need backup and encryption. It would be nice if they added this feature. I would also like to be able to decrypt when restoring the security features. Hackers can sense these vulnerabilities today, and we need to have our enterprise prepared."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use case is for our critical servers. We have servers across Unix and Linux environments. We back up our critical servers daily, some are scheduled and some are done manually. 

What is most valuable?

It has deduplication capabilities, where you have two similar data sets. This helps to speed up backup processes because it takes a shorter amount of time to do a backup because it has the deduplication feature already. Though, you have to buy this deduplication software separately from the license.

What needs improvement?

The security features need backup and encryption. It would be nice if they added this feature. I would also like to be able to decrypt when restoring the security features. Hackers can sense these vulnerabilities today, and we need to have our enterprise prepared. 

Overall, it isn't intuitive enough. It is a bit complex and not evolving with the technology. 

For how long have I used the solution?

More than five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is 80 percent out of 100. It hardly goes down. When there are issues, we can check the logs and see how to resolve it. We have never had the whole system fail. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is pretty scalable. This is not an issue. 

How is customer service and technical support?

The response time of the tech support is swift. The support is fantastic.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward. The configuration was not difficult. We used user guides which helped us with best practices. 

What other advice do I have?

When choosing a solution, I always consider:

  • Support
  • Availability of parts
  • The technology of the solution.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Dell NetWorker
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about Dell NetWorker. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
830,526 professionals have used our research since 2012.
it_user719796 - PeerSpot reviewer
Backup & Storage administrator at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Consultant
Multiple Useful Features And Long List Of Supported OSs

What is most valuable?

  • Very nice tools (nsrwatch, nsradmin) in CLI for administration, monitoring, and management. And GUI is available with enterprise level as well.
  • NetWorker’s commands are executed directly from shell/command line (you don’t need to log in to the DB or to any other kind of tool).
  • Very good backward and forward compatibility between NetWorker’s versions. You are not limited by higher version on backup client side.
  • Availability of cumulative hot fixes.
  • NetWorker server is supported on Windows and Linux OSs (unlike Commvault).
  • List of supported OSs and their versions is really long and it is the same for DBs and applications.
  • Provided documentation from EMC is quite good and well organized.
  • Block based backup and parallel save stream features are really helpful for classic backup of big file systems and lot of small files.
  • DDboost protocol speeds up backups and saves bandwidth of your LAN.
  • Possibility to create and use your own scripts in backup process or in administration.

How has it helped my organization?

Backup admins don’t need to dedicate so much time to installation and configuration of backups.

What needs improvement?

NetWorker’s code needs improvement. There are so many bugs in each version, so I have to wait until the last cumulative hotfix of each service pack is released, to be sure that I will not affect production and create more work for myself.

For how long have I used the solution?

Since 2006.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I had some issues in the past, but I fixed them by updating the product. I would recommend installation of new, major or minor releases of EMC NetWorker if the second service pack of each version, and sixth or higher cumulative hotfix of that version, are both available.

How are customer service and technical support?

This is difficult question. Honestly, EMC NetWorker technical support is not very helpful for me, because I have much more experience with it than the engineers who are initially assigned to an issue. I have to wait till my service request is moved to a higher level of support and, often, by the time that happens, I have fixed many service requests by myself.

On the other hand, EMC engineers are friendly and try to help as much as possible, so if you are not an experienced customer they can search in knowledge database for your issue and fix it via a WebEx session. This can be done over a live chat session or via a regular service request.

You can enable notifications (at the EMC support page) for security and technical alerts as well, so you will be informed about any big issues quickly.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I used Hiback from NovaStor a long time ago, but it was not as good as NetWorker. I switched because I was no longer responsible for the Hiback backup environment; I focused on EMC NetWorker.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup of EMC NetWorker is really easy work if you have basic knowledge of OSs, LAN and SAN, if needed. (A basic IT background is really needed). Just a few clicks in Windows or the installation of a few RPMs in Linux. I really like that EMC provides specific RPM packages and not only binaries in its archive, which are installed by installation script.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Ask your EMC representative for discount. They can provide really good discounts.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I did not do so.

What other advice do I have?

Use EMC Data Domain (DD) system and EMC NetWorker. It really is number one on the market in backup and recovery solutions.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Consultant
Provides backup automation and monitoring centralization.

What is most valuable?

Provides backup automation and monitoring centralization. Having easy scalability of the covered data zone is also a big advantage.

How has it helped my organization?

All environment backups are monitored by a central management console. This allows us to have a global view and the statistics of data protection in the overall data center.

What needs improvement?

Native reports are not really user-friendly. This is the case because EMC wants to sell DPA, which can give more reports/details. I think this policy is unfair.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using this solution for seven years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There were stability issues, especially with version 9.0. The backup integration failed many times and the resolution was related to bugs fixed in later releases.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There were no scalability issues.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not use a different solution before this one.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was complex. In fact, the NetWorker Management Console is divided into many tables. To configure a simple backup, you have to switch between many tables. You must have a good understanding of the configuration logic before you can manage this tool.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Use capacity licensing instead of the traditional one. With capacity licenses, you have all the capabilities enabled. With traditional licenses, you have to activate functionalities one by one.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

  • TSM : This solution does not offer the media server option, which means that all data that has to be backed up has to be sent to the TSM backup server before being backed up to media devices. In the NetWorker solution, we can define media nodes which write data directly to the backup devices. There is no need to move data to backup server beforehand. Also in NetWorker, we can define different retention policies for backups and copies. In TSM, the same retention applies to both the first copy and the second copy.
  • DPM: This Microsoft solution is well defined for Microsoft environments, but for VMware and others (SAP, Oracle) EMC NetWorker suits better and does offer more functionalities/options.  
  • Veeam: Suitable for VMware environments only. EMC NetWorker capabilities are greater regarding other platforms (Microsoft, SAP).
  • NetBackup: This is the real EMC NetWorker competitor. For price reasons, EMC NetWorker was chosen in our case.

What other advice do I have?

Take a training course before implementing this solution, especially if you are used to managing another backup solution. The backup integration generally takes a while to stabilize. However, once you have done it, you can forget about it. The backup will run automatically and backed up data will expire automatically based on configured policies.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We are a sales & service partner with DELL EMC

PeerSpot user
reviewer1777704 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Analyst III at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Efficient, reliable support, and integrates well
Pros and Cons
  • "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 front end of the solution could improve. The user-friendliness is lacking."

What is our primary use case?

We use Dell EMC NetWorker as our backup application and everything backs up to Dell EMC Data Domain, where we replicate it to another EMC Data Domain. The two solutions work combined to meet our use case. Both solutions are from the same vendor and work very well together.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

The front end of the solution could improve. The user-friendliness is lacking.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Dell EMC NetWorker for approximately eight years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have had limited downtime, the solution is highly reliable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Dell EMC NetWorker is scalable.

How are customer service and support?

When I need Dell EMC NetWorker support and there's a Dell EMC Data Domain issue, it's really easy to have support for both of them from one location. Support has always been there when we needed them.

What about the implementation team?

We have a team of two that does the management of Dell EMC NetWorker and Dell EMC Data Domain.

What other advice do I have?

I rate Dell EMC NetWorker a ten out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Consultant
Backup software solution which supports majority of IT platforms (Windows, UNIX, Oracle, SQL, Lotus, VMware etc.)

Valuable Features

Backup jobs can be scheduled and automated

Monitoring of backups and configuration tasks are centralized

Compatibility of the solution covers large OS/DataBases/Applications

Improvements to My Organization

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.

Room for Improvement

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)

Use of Solution

4 years

Deployment Issues

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

Customer Service and Technical Support

7/10

Initial Setup

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.

Other Solutions Considered

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!

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We are an EMC partner

PeerSpot user
Manager at Securetech
Real User
Has good configure management and server and enterprise data but requires a skill set to set up
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution is simple to understand."
  • "The implementation process could be improved."

What is most valuable?

This solution had multiple options like configure management, user data, and server and enterprise data. The solution is simple to understand. Some products only use storage media, but Dell NetWorker has multiple options.

What needs improvement?

The implementation process could be improved. It requires a skill set to set up. In addition, the product line should support all brands and solutions.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using this solution for about a year, and it is deployed on-premises.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is a stable solution. It has worked for a couple of years without any troubles or significant issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is scalable after a specific limit. It is suitable for medium-sized enterprises. We have about 1,000 users.

How are customer service and support?

We have used Dell technical support. I rate the technical support team a six out of ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I rate the pricing a six out of ten, where ten is a good price, and one is a high price. The price could be lower.

What other advice do I have?

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. Veeam Backup is a competitor in the market because it has a lot of utilization. It is easy for people to get a license with them, and they benefit from one solution. Regarding potential future improvements, they should look at IT and compare it to other products because things are becoming streamlined for all the product lines, new storage is readily available, and things are moving to the cloud.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner/Integrator

PeerSpot user
DanielArregui - PeerSpot reviewer
Technological Infrastructure Project Engineer at Sinetcom SA
Real User
Backup and recovery software that is highly scalable and stable
Pros and Cons
  • "The extensive information provided on tool properties has been very useful, specifically the information on databases"
  • "The user interface of this solution could be improved. It is not user friendly and is difficult to understand for new users. New users struggle to understand the logic."

What is our primary use case?

We use it to record sites in the system.

What is most valuable?

The extensive information provided on tool properties has been very useful, specifically the information on databases.

What needs improvement?

The user interface of this solution could be improved. It is not user friendly and is difficult to understand for new users. New users struggle to understand the logic.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used this solution for five years. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

This is a stable solution. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is really scalable but the scaling process is not that easy. You have to find the documentation to support setting it up for scale.

How are customer service and support?

The customer service and support is good, but at times I have wanted more involvement from the people that are giving support. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

How was the initial setup?

The initial set up is easy, but when you do it for the first time you will need videos and some information to support the process. Once you do it once, you can do it really quickly the next time.

We have a lot of clients who use NetWorker. Especially in government and big companies, they rely on the NetWorker to do their backups. Two or three people are needed for deployment. 

What other advice do I have?

In order to use this solution, you need to rely on communication and information on how to do a proper setup. At the beginning, you have to understand how the process works to configure the devices data needs to be stored.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner

PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Dell NetWorker Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: January 2025
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Backup and Recovery
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Dell NetWorker Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.