Veritas NetBackup Appliance Reviews

The solution is primarily used for business continuity. We use it for backups.

The backup capabilities are very good.

We find the ability to allow for business continuity to be very helpful. Our systems are not very stable, where we come from here in Kenya. There can be serious problems very often. There are many incidents and businesses can just collapse. The peace of mind of having a backup on hand is critical.

The initial setup is very simple.

The solution is stable. 

The product is quite scalable. 

Technical support is very good.

We find the pricing is reasonable. 

I'm not sure if I have seen any area that needs improvement. I'm not overly technical, and I personally haven't had any real issues. 

The monitoring could be a bit better.

I've used the solution for about a year or so. 

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The solution is mature and very scalable. It's not a problem to expand. 

As an established brand, Veritas has a very good technical support team. We are quite pleased with the level of service provided. They are helpful and supportive. The staff is knowledgeable. 

It's my understanding that the initial setup is straightforward. I have not seen anything about the solution that would make the process overly complex.

The pricing is fair. It's not overly expensive. 

At the moment, I don't have any relationship with the company, however, I would like to be a reseller and implementer.

I mainly handle consultancy on business continuity. I look at products to propose to my customers on business continuity, storage, and backups.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

Veritas NetBackup Appliance is a total backup solution. We don't have to buy other applications to do it. 

The tool's pricing is expensive and could be lower. 

I have been using the solution for over five years. 

I rate the tool's stability a nine out of ten. 

The product is scalable, and I rate it a seven out of ten. My company has two users for the product. 

The solution's support is good. 

Veritas NetBackup Appliance's deployment is easy for me. However, it will be difficult for beginners. The tool's deployment takes one week to complete. 

I rate the solution's pricing a nine out of ten. 

I rate Veritas NetBackup Appliance an eight out of ten. 

I use the solution for my organization.

The product enables me to recover the information of the appliances in the organization.

The product must improve its recovery features. It must also improve the use cases of the product.

I have been using the solution for two years.

I rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a seven out of ten.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The pricing could be better. Renewing subscriptions for appliance support is costly.

ExaGrid provides more features than NetBackup Appliance.

The scalability of the appliance is good, but it can be better. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The deduplication that is on this solution is its most valuable aspect. It's very robust. 

Overall, how the operating system is tuned is perfect.

The hardware on offer has no parallel. I would say that it has been more than eight years now, and in all that time, I haven't had a single hard disk failure or even hardware failure on this appliance. It's in excellent condition and works perfectly.

I can confidently say that I have managed more than 30 or 50 appliances over different time periods, and yet I never had a single hardware failure.

It is a very robust and very good product from the appliance point of view, as well as the software point of view, however, you need to have a certain level of skills in order to operate it properly. You need to be experienced at a certain level to easily manage everything. In that sense, it's not straightforward.

It's very difficult, for example, if you need to analyze the logs. If you don't know what you're doing, if you're not very experienced, you will find it very difficult to do things yourself. It's an enterprise-level solution, after all, and it has a lot of things to do. That might be the reason why it is like this. It's not for entry-level people.

In terms of implementing the solution, it's quite technical. You need to be knowledgable in order to pull off a successful deployment.

We've been using the solution since about 2011. It's been almost a decade.

I would say that it is very stable. Obviously, I had faced a lot of issues. I can't say that it is an issueless solution, however, it is very stable. You can rely on it.

Basically, I never go with the latest version. I tend to go with N minus one - one version below. That way, if there are any issues with the latest version, I'll just give time. I wait at least six months for the vendor to sort everything out before I implement it into our production environment. At that point, I would say that it is very stable. Most of the time, the issue might not be on the solution or on the appliance side. It might be on the client-side. 

In terms of scalability, you can scale it up. You just need to buy the hardware. That's the only constraint. You need to buy an appliance and just add it. Basically, as long as you have the appliance or hardware, it's very easy to scale out.

I've had vast experience with technical support.

Most of the time, I'm pretty happy with their support. I would say that there were a few instances where I was not satisfied with the support that I received, however, overall, I would say that at least 70 to 80% of the time I am quite happy with the support.

I've worked with many different solutions. A lot of them are at the top of the industry. However, I prefer NetBackup above the others.

If you know what you're doing, it's a very easy initial setup. First-timers always find it difficult. That said, if you're using a GUI, it's very straightforward. You can just photo screen. However, if you're an experienced user, you'ld probably prefer to do it on the command line, for which you need to know what you're doing. 

We're not using the latest version of the solution. We're using N minus one.

As an enterprise-level solution, you may need a bigger team to manage it, depending on your organization's size. We need a big team. Basically, it depends on the size of the solution. In the past 10 years, I've worked in different companies. At one time, we had around 10 appliances, and we had multiple people managing everything. 

One guy alone will not be able to manage it, though it depends on the sizing. Basically, if you know there is a good guy who knows the in and out of an appliance, if it is one appliance and depending on how many machines we are backing up, he might be okay. There are lot of factors that have to be considered when building a team that can handle it.

My advice to other would be, if your environment is big enough, to be aware that your biggest major expense is the on-premise solution. Even though we have top cloud solutions, if you're on-premise, if the infrastructure is on-premise and it's a large enough infrastructure, and if you have a good team to manage, the best, the most dependable solution would be NetBackup. That's considering all the other big players. I'm talking about the enterprise level, where we need to manage more than 200, 300 machines, or 300 VMs, or 300 servers, and then you need to protect these machines.

Based on the options that we have, and based on the enterprise solutions that are in the market, there are maybe five to 10 big players. Out of that, I would say that NetBackup would rank either first or second. I have personal experience with some of the other products too, or I have reviewed most of them basically.

Based on my experience, even though I had multiple choices or options to move out of NetBackup, after reviewing everything, I went back to NetBackup or I decided, okay, fine, I'll renew NetBackup. 

Overall, I'd rate the solution at seven out of ten. There are lots of things that can be done from the administrative point of view that, if accomplished, would rank them higher.

Over the past seven years, we have been using this backup solution. However, over the past year, we have begun to integrate Commvault, and have stopped worrying about upgrades for Veritas.

We are using an on-premises deployment and it has been used for our data center. We have various operating systems including Solaris, Windows, and Linux. Our databases include Oracle, MySQL, MongoDB, and Informix. We also have virtualization. This solution is responsible for everything in the data center.

We have good data backup coverage.

This solution has to have better integration with the cloud, as well as with other solutions such as Business Intelligence products.

They need to simplify the backup licensing model, as it is really complex at the moment. We are having problems with them because of the licensing, and this is why we are changing solutions.

It is not easy to manage the environment, and you need the expertise to do it.

The backup catalog is very complex and takes a lot of space compared to other vendors. There is an important need for a better catalog management system.

We have 99.9% completion of the backups.

At one point during our migration, we experienced a loss of all of our backups. It took approximately one week to restore all of them.

This solution is able to scale within an environment without a problem.

We back up more than two thousand servers.

Technical support for this solution is good, as long as you are paying for the high-level support. Otherwise, you will be dealing with somebody responsible for supporting many different products.

We did not use another solution prior to this one. We have used different versions of this solution over the past seven years, and we are now moving everything over to Commvault because they have a simple licensing model.

The initial setup of this solution is not simple. It is complex, and you really need a professional technician to assist. In the end, however, you have a really stable solution.

The deployment took place over time, where we have been improving things over the years.

We have perhaps twenty administrators and operators who manage this solution. It is not used by the end-users.

The price of this solution is very high compared to other solutions.

This is a really good technology, but they are missing some key, important features.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is that there is always something that can be improved.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The intelligent policies feature is used in order to protect the VMware infrastructure. One of the things that makes a big difference for our company is the usage of these intelligent policies. The system automatically provides extra protection for any VMware server application or service. From a backup administrator's point of view, this is what we call peace of mind. It reduces the workload and therefore reduces resources needed from the company.

The backup administrator always tends to be combined with all other administrators and tries to find if there is any new application, service, or server. With intelligent policies, this has been resolved. I create one policy for VMware because it has a very good integration when we pair it up with the API. With this intelligent policy, anything that is changed into the VMware is automatically led back to NetBackup protection and NetBackup covers it.

The other great thing for the company is that this kind of application is fully encrypted so it gives us full compliance for issues. That's the greatest benefit.

One of the best features is the VMware integration with NetBackup.

The cloud-based backup is also an excellent feature. 

The ability to establish many plans for long term retention, especially using some of their appliances is very helpful. We're not using paid backups for long term retention. It's our business procedure. Instead, we use new apps for storage. There is a type of storage they offer in which they give us member shared space and we can establish a parent point of the primary appliances in order to comply with the long term retention.

One of the other features of NetBackup is that it gives you Granular Recovery Technology for three major applications, or services: SQL, SharePoint, and Exchange. That means that you don't have to deploy an agent on Exchange servers or a DAG server. It also supports Office 365, and Cloud-based services. You don't have to deploy agents in a SharePoint environment, a SharePoint file, and you don't have to deploy an agent in SQL because when you create the VMware policy and you activate Granular Recovery Technology, the VMware technology that is used gives you the ability to restore with GRT, without the obligations which have an agent on the server. That is a great feature.

The only drawback for NetBackup, and of course for Veritas, is that they have stuck to the same environment and to the same user interface. This needs to be improved in future releases. It needs to be more dynamic.

I would like to see more prepared, pre-configured reports and higher integration with other leading-edge products. I'm not talking about backup solutions. I'm talking about other services like ticketing systems such as ServiceNow. 

They need to offer more integrations because of the convergence of the demands on the system these days.

The solution is very stable when there is no major change that actually requires corresponding changes to the policies of the NetBackup protection environment. If there are no more major changes from protected areas, like the VMware infrastructure, like the application of services, the solution is stable.

It's even stable with the patches that Microsoft releases from time to time, that can cause so many problems.

Some jobs may fail, but it reports back to the Backup administrator. An extensive loss gives the opportunity to find out what was changed and what is going on and proceed and make all the necessary adjustments to get back on track.

It's very stable also as an environment. After one and a half years we've never had a failure in a hard disk startup and we've never had a failure of NetBackup services. We never had any kind of corruption or any kind of failure, generally speaking.

There are some small issues, as with any product. However, the backup administrator continues reporting daily and checking to see if everything is working fine.

The solution is very scalable.

There are different types of technical support. They offer Gold and 24/7 monitoring, for example. The also offer support where they take the responsibility of monitoring the appliances. Even in cases where the backup administrator is not aware of an imminent hard disk failure, they know about it and send the replacement.

We decided to go with the Essential Support because my knowledge is very good on this product, so we try to eliminate the costs of more premium offerings. Even with Essential Support, their response time is very, very satisfactory. There was no situation where I had to call them or open on the technical support portal and chase them to get answers. Usually, they respond within 4 hours. That's really good especially because it's merely Essential Support, not Platinum or Gold. 

There was one case where we had a problem that needed escalation. The escalation happens after the second or the third action from their side. Usually, they request some logs to provide immediate feedback. They didn't spend too much time investigating the logs, and they responded immediately. They can escalate it as well if they need to.

We used to use Symantec, but it was a very smooth transition because Symantec and Veritas were part of the same company.

We looked at Veeam, which was very competitive in the process but was only software.  

Veritas won out because it offered a solution that also had native hardware and we didn't want to use space from our core storage.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. We use a Linux based backup, and we chose the solution because we are using Veritas appliances as well; it was recommended by Veritas.

It's quite easy for someone who is experienced with backup administration. It might not be as easy for someone implementing for the first time, but for someone who is already experienced, it's very easy.

There is only one server you have to prepare. The configuration is very easy and the integration with VMware was a piece of cake. It's not a complex ATI that you need to strip down, connect, stream, send, etc. It's very, very easy.

Thre are initially only four or five policies that NetBackup uses with Microsoft Windows, SQL, Oracle, VMware and Check Point. That means that you don't have to deploy agents everywhere.

The correlation between the amount that the company spends to start with the infrastructure and the gain that it has seen in terms of work components has been good. For example, the deduplication ratio that NetBackup performs is highly competitive. It's a very, very good thing because we don't have to buy extra storage that creates an extra cost for the company. 

We use the on-premises deployment model.

We've been very happy with this solution. The correlation of NetBackup with a Veritas solution, which gave us the opportunity to dynamically capture the protected data in the two different styles, was helpful. Another Veritas webpage solution works perfectly with NetBackup and gives us a dynamic picture of protected data.

One other improvement we've seen since implementation, from a business' point of view, is that the usage of the new popular technology of Veritas, like the access storage, where the initial configuration is 700 terabytes, gives us long term retention. The company avoids paying for quite expensive robotic libraries. The access storage is outside the company but the backup and the reach hold times are working in tandem. The speed on daily operation, in terms of cataloging, restoring operations, and related things are very good.

The DR (Disaster Recovery) in RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) has also improved. Everybody is looking for the best solution that actually gives a balance RPO or RTO. And these two terms are highly related to the DR, the disaster recovery plans. From that point of view, they are a great improvement in contrast with the previous solution that we had. The previous solution was a backup exit. Again, it was the very best, before it was Symantec. We had it for more than five years but when we moved to NetBackup we discovered a whole new world of possibilities and capabilities.

I would advise anyone to use NetBackup. I know the solution well, and I know that they offer very good implication ratio. Of course, I have this opinion because we are also using their appliances, which are pre-configured specifically for this operation.

I don't know if these ratios will be sustained if a customer buys just the software, and uses a third-party storage option to keep the backup. In our case, I would suggest sharing the POC with NetBackup, and even if the POC is without an appliance, I think they can expect to see a big difference. It's very fast.

I would rate the solution ten out of ten. If you would ask me about the software alone I would give it 9, but with the appliance, it deserves a 10.

The most valuable feature of the Veritas NetBackup Appliance is the virtual machine backups.

Veritas NetBackup Appliance can improve by having a more direct connection to the cloud. It should have the technology to be able to directly communicate with the cloud.

I have been using Veritas NetBackup Appliance for approximately 12 years.

Most of our customers are enterprise-sized companies.

The support has been good, I have not had any problems with the support.

The steps to deploy Veritas NetBackup Appliance need to be made simpler.

The price of Veritas NetBackup Appliance is competitive. There are different models of Veritas NetBackup Appliance, such as perpetual licenses and subscriptions. Having the choice is good.

I rate Veritas NetBackup Appliance a seven out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution is for backup and visualization. We are customers of Veritas.

I like the fiber channel transport, and that the solution can make it a media server. It saves us a lot of resources, unlike other products which consume a lot of resources.

The price for Veritas is very high and I'd like to see that reduced. 

I've been using this solution for seven years. 

The solution is stable. 

This is a scalable solution. 

Technical support could be improved, the knowledge base is quite low and it's complicated to deal with them. 

The initial setup is very easy, it took around two hours. We used a Veritas consultant. We deal with the maintenance ourselves.

I would recommend this solution.

I rate this solution an eight out of 10.