What needs improvement with Veritas NetBackup?

We are looking forward to testing a feature that promises to allow us to host a workload directly from the backup appliance without rehydrating any items. The new version also promises improved governance documents, which we will be testing. However, we are cautious as vendors sometimes overpromise.

The solution is not easy to use. You need to train yourself step by step because it is complex, but it is a good solution. Its pricing could be cheaper.

We are facing a challenge regarding the support for Docker and Kubernetes features. We hope for the possibility of directly backing up Kubernetes and Docker images without the necessity of taking full virtual machine backups.

There is room for improvement in the implementation of Power servers. In future releases, implementing synthetic backup for Oracle databases would be great.

The product needs to improve its GUI. It needs to make use of a web interface.

We cannot pause and resume via web GUI, web management, or network administration management; we do that via a CLI page. Once the protection plan is created, we cannot pause or resume via the web administration page.

I do not like the way we currently schedule backups. The solution must provide a different way to schedule backups.

The backup operation interface is not as mature as those of Veritas's competitors and has room for improvement. Therefore, we are still working on the Java console, which means that we will have to use it to enter, monitor, and manage our backup jobs.

Veritas NetBackup is an expensive solution, and its pricing could be improved.

The product must enable data migration from on-premise to the cloud. It must provide features that support a hybrid approach. It should provide interconnectivity to manage data across multi-cloud providers.

We faced so many backup configuration issues. And from the Veritas side, they couldn't fix that issue. So we started from scratch, purchased everything, and then we configured everything. Therefore, the support could be better. We purchased the latest storage and the temporary library, and now we are configuring everything ourselves. In future releases, we are looking for an AI feature. Integrating AI would be beneficial because we are purchasing a separate solution for AI.

The improvement of Veritas NetBackup is the way we have to back up many infrastructures, such as Nutanix, and OpenStack, and new operating systems and applications, such as MySQL, Postgres, and MariaDB. This is a new improvement that has been added to NetBackup. We have also made some improvements to the cloud.

Data restoration from Veritas NetBackup is quite slow. I would also like documentation that I can share with my technical team.

Veritas NetBackup is a very old product, but it is based on Linux, which is not user-friendly. Although they have made some improvements in GUI to provide a more user-friendly interface, the web interface could be better organized and easier to use. It is not really suitable for anyone without strong knowledge of the product, which is its main disadvantage. So the user interface (UI) is the main area for improvement. UI feels a bit outdated, like an application from the '90s, due to its Java-based design. Additionally, because NetBackup's roots are in Linux, the best way to work with it is through commands. The current web interface is still somewhat outdated, and there are limitations compared to what can be done with the command line. That's why managing it without strong knowledge can be challenging. Though they have a GUI to make things easier, it would be better to improve the GUI and the web interface by making them more organized and easier for anyone to use the products without a strong knowledge of the product. For additional features, I could give one example. Veritas Protection and Veritas NetBackup are somehow integrated but obviously cannot be one product. If they were one product, it would be much better. So, like if it merged with SaaS protection and became one product.

Veritas NetBackup has some limitations and it would be a benefit if we had better documentation.

The user interface could improve, it seems a bit out of date.

NetBackup's reporting features are a little poor.

The pricing could be improved, and the interface could be more intuitive.

I don't believe that it is flexible enough for business operations and other things. Unlike Veeam, Veritas does not provide a Community Edition. The restoration method and the compression ratio need improvement.

The most common problem is the backup failures over the weekend. We have to troubleshoot and sometimes do restores and then we have trouble doing some of the restores.

We would like the Java console to be updated. They need to redo the console so that it is no longer on Java. It's outdated.

The flip side about NetBackup is that it is not policy-based. NetBackup doesn't give you that feature. For example, Rubrik is a policy-based type of app, so when you create a backup job with it, say you have 30 servers in that backup, you can make one policy and apply it to them all. NetBackup doesn't do that. With NetBackup, you need to create a backup job for each server you want to back up and for each server you have. That is the only thing I don't really like about NetBackup. I can use Rubrik or Cohesity where you can create one policy, and apply it to many servers at one time where with NetBackup, you can't do that. You create a backup for each server. That takes more time. If they can improve on policy-based backups, that would be great.

I think the main area that could be improved is the pricing, to make it more competitive. In the next release, I would like to see the ability to back up Office 365 and Google Workspace.

Within their product lineup, they need to consolidate down to one product. Veritas doesn't have one product that does everything. So, Veritas can do everything, but you basically need to run two products. I would like them to combine all the capabilities into one release.

They are discontinuing the support for IBM AIX operating system in the latest version. I would like to see them continue with this service. I would like to have support enabled for cloud backups. There are several services that are not available that would make it more compatible with cloud technologies. The majority of the features you require are deduplication, compression, and there is a dependency on the geo-clusters from a DRN standpoint. They should concentrate more on removing the dependency because preparing your DRN architecture for backup is very complex.

Like the other enterprise solutions, Veritas NetBackup isn't easy to implement. It's a little bit hard compared to other solutions like Data Protector for HPE. You have to struggle to learn a lot of features that Veritas NetBackup offers to customers. I don't think it's impossible to simplify this solution. Some solutions like backup solutions are mandatory solutions and they are inherently complicated because you have to integrate them with other services. We have a lot of services and each service has its own conditions. After several years, every engineer can learn most features of this solution and in some companies, they could use support from the source company. As such, I think it's not challenging for all customers.

I'd like to see some simplification in the solution. They currently have the Java concept and it should be less intensive and take less load. The integration should be simple, not a script-based backup with minimum input and maximum output. The solution also needs more integration, even the infrastructure has become more complex. They currently have integrated containers and Kubernetes for backup but they could include backup of SQL or Oracle, or performance in the visualization process. All those things could be improved.

I'm not fully satisfied with the product. It's a little bit complex to manage. The user interface is not user-friendly. It's a bit complex, and it's dated in appearance. It needs a much simpler, cleaner update. The reporting is too complex. There needs to be a way to customize it in a simple and straightforward manner. The solution has extra features, however, you need to pay for them. Occasionally, technical support cannot find the root cause of issues.

The solution costs too much. They should work to make it less. The licensing needs to be improved.

You cannot tell what your costs are going to be by using the dashboard, which is something that should be improved. If you overuse based on your FETB licensing, you run the risk of getting fined.

NetBackup is expensive and should be cheaper. That is why we are moving on to another solution.

Sometimes we have problems with the support team. They always end up solving and fixing everything, but sometimes they are slow to respond. Maybe they can increase the number of personnel they have for the Spanish language. I also think they could improve the reporting. They use a web-based software application OpsCenter for the reporting and I see that they haven't made any changes in years.

The deployment time is longer than it is with other products.

It was very complicated, and it required a lot of work in terms of management. We have moved to Rubrik. One of the reasons for getting rid of Veritas NetBackup was the fact that at one point, we had the support staff with 12 to 15 people to manage Veritas NetBackup, whereas, with Rubrik, I'm the only one managing Rubrik. There is one more person who works with me mostly due to the fact that in case I'm not around, someone else knows what to do, but I'm the only one who is a full-time manager of Rubrik. The complexity of Veritas required a large staff to manage it. We had daily issues that had to be looked into and resolved. A lot of these issues revolved around Veritas' handling of VMware, which is why first we moved VMware off Veritas. After we did that, we were also able to reduce our staff count. Their licensing is a disaster. It is extremely complicated. In most cases, Veritas themselves can't understand their own licensing.

The licensing costs could be more affordable.

What needs to be improved in Veritas NetBackup is its interface, e.g. they should make it more user friendly. There are certain things we can only figure out in Veritas NetBackup through the help of their support team, so we are dependent on support. If you are not an expert, you won't be able to manage this product. In the next release of Veritas NetBackup, I'd like to see better scalability in terms of the hardware appliance.

We had some issues with the hardware backup appliance. Our main customer is the one that is experiencing these issues.

The product is good, but there are extra costs for additional features.

One area for improvement with the product would be better messaging and better solutions around cloud, both on-prem and off. And along with that, which is actually mission critical to every company today, would be ransomware prevention. The biggest additional features needed are more cloud capabilities and security from ransomware.

They need to work on the GUI. It has been the same for the last 10 years.

The product could improve the user-friendliness and comfort of its environment, especially for those unfamiliar with it. There is also an issue with glitches in the network, which forces us to check the connectivity. In addition, some solutions are only available to internal Veritas users, not to customers or partners, and you have to allow Veritas to test your network before they give a report. This is a problem, and Veritas needs to add functionality for customers to test their own networks.

System administrators would be more efficient in NetBackup if the number of tools and command lines was reduced.

The security and performance could improve with Veritas NetBackup. The security could be improved by protecting the data from attackers.

There are so many things which need improving. With web access, we can't access the dashboards. A person can only access the particular system in which he installed that application. We cannot get access through our local network or web. We can use the local user's details, for the purposes of looking or making modifications, but these things are not available on the web or through net access. The dashboard systems need to be addressed. It would be very good if one could get access through his LAN, without the need to involve the server. A utilizations check and the ability to utilize the number of users editing facilities would be very good. While technical support is good, it takes them a long time, for reasons unbeknownst to me, to resolve issues and this is why we involve their partners. This happens every time they take the logs and search. Technical support only gets back to us the following morning.

The solution could improve by having a feature to backup iSeries workloads.

Veritas could simplify the firmware recovery in terms of the deployed. The process shouldn't be dependent on the agents. It should be completely agentless.

Maybe they could add more cloud solutions.

The implementation process could be simplified to make it quicker.

The pricing is a bit of a concern. If could be lower. We find the solution needs better integration capabilities when it comes to mid-range and enterprise-level environments.

We have an issue with the last version on the latest backup of the solution. It's not compatible with Sybase 16.5. Two days ago the solution worked fine and we were able to use it for all our Unix and Sybase servers, as well as the back-end database. But, now there is a need for us to change the lag about a report in respect of the media on Facebook. We primarily use Unix servers, not those of Windows.

It would be better if it had a cloud integration feature. I would like to use a single product for the cloud instances and the on-premise instances. The price could also be better. I would like to have a backup option for end-user devices. That means end-user devices like mobile devices, VDI solutions, desktops, laptops, etc. In this COVID time, most of us work from home, and end-user device backup is really important today.

They started deploying with web interfaces, new web interfaces, but it doesn't have all of the functionalities as the Java consoles have. They are now adding more functionalities to the web interfaces that we need. In one or two years, you will have the full functionality using the web interface. They need to improve the interface. In regards to protecting the physical servers with parameters, it's a long and difficult process. I have tested this in Veeam and it was much easier to implement. With NetBackup, you have to configure the server and many other requirements in the process. You could have issues with restoring if the parameter is installed to different hardware. There are also a lot of requirements with the integration of SharePoint and Exchange. This is an area that customers complain about. They don't like that you have all of the requirements before you can configure the backup. Veeam is much easier to integrate with Exchange. With NetBackups there are many prerequisites that make it difficult for the customer.

The database integration could be better. That would probably be a feature we look for the most.

It's not a user-friendly solution. It's a little bit complicated. The UI is not very friendly.

It should be able to integrate with the cloud. If we leverage a cloud in the future for backup, there should be very fast help and more options for customers to choose from.

Veritas NetBackup has been in the backup and recovery market for quite a long time, but somehow, from my own observations and from feedback from end users, its user interface is lagging behind other comparable solutions such as Veeam. Our end users are more accustomed to better user interfaces and NetBackup still has a way to go in this regard. The features are great, but the user interface needs improvement, especially when you're looking at the web-based user interface. Most of the operations in NetBackup must be done using their base client user interface, and the feedback from our end users is that it isn't the most user-friendly interface. Another area where we hope to see improvements is on the integration side. Nowadays, people aren't just looking at strictly backups and recovery features alone. They're now expecting more integration features along the lines of enhanced visibility, dashboard integrations, AI integrations, and so on. The users desire these integrations so that they can make the whole process of backup and recovery less complex, without having to perform any level of scripting.

Technical support is somewhat slow and is in need of improvement.

The user interface of the product needs to be improved. It's been the same for so many years. Likely, they haven't changed it in more than 10 years. That is definitely something that needs to be changed and updated. The interface and console both need a bit of a facelift, so to speak. They have come out with a web application, however, the web application is not fully developed yet. Planning for the implementation takes a lot of time.

We want a solution that can be scaled-out because our data is growing very quickly, and we aren't able to back it up quickly. It takes one or two days, which is a problem. It is very slow. We just use one backup server. We want another solution with maybe a backup server cluster to back up more data in one day. We want a solution that can be scaled-out to back up our data quickly and efficiently.

I think reporting can always be improved. Their pricing can also be improved.

The security of the solution can be improved to include a secure backup feature with full encryption capabilities.

It is not very user-friendly. There are delays in Veritas that can be done in automation. In the next release, I would like to see automation and better support.

It would be useful if they could maintain the information that is in the cloud. When the customer is using SaaS applications like Office 365, the integration falls short and needs to be improved. The price could be reduced.

The cost of the license could be improved, it's quite expensive.

Its integration with Nutanix and technical support can be improved.

It is a very expensive solution. They should have a different scheme for selling it. They should also make it easy for us to switch from Solaris to Linux. We are having some trouble in migrating our actual catalog from Solaris to Linux.

The ransomware protection needs improvement. The reporting tool that you get out of the box is not sufficient, so you have to purchase other tools or modules. When it's out of the box, the visibility is a problem and it's not very clear. Overall, the visibility into the environment is lacking. When you come across an issue to present to technical support, you have to enable the verbose logging, and when that happens you are generating huge amounts of log files. I have to wait for this problem to present itself again. I cannot leave it running on verbose logging, as it takes up the capacity from the logs. However, if I don't enable it then I won't be able to locate the issue. In the next release, I would like to have a better way to protect against ransomware attacks and a better way of logging issues where you don't have to enable the verbose logging to capture the problems.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything that can be added to the solution. Our real issue is the pricing and it's a recurring cost, so it's not something that will go away any time soon.

The biggest problem with NetBackup is licensing. With more customers working with virtual machines, they are now licensing based on the number of CPU cores. Some customers choose Veeam because if they have two servers with 100 terabytes then that is four CPU cores, and it will cost less than it would with NetBackup. This is a change from the past, where the licensing was on a per-socket basis.

Lots of features are in need of improvement. The SQL Server backup features are not up to date. I would also like to see the Exchange server and Cloud backup handled better. There are no features for cloud backup in my on-premises environment, which limits me when it comes to managing them. The performance is poor on our system and it takes too long to complete a backup.

The only pain point we have with this solution is the cost. It's very expensive. In fact, it's so expensive we are looking for other platforms. We want to move away from it in order to save our organization costs.

We are not able to back up our attached drives, which is something that should be improved. The speed of restoring data could be improved. The pricing is an area that can be improved.

How the solution operates in the cloud could be improved. There's a feature called data immutability, and needs to be improved within the product. I'm only familiar with the 8.2 version of the solution. It is my understanding that there are some new features that are being released in 8.3. However, more API integration is required in future releases, if that's not already in the works. It would be extremely helpful if the solution offered near-zero recovery time for SQL.

This product doesn't come with a reporting feature which means it has to be installed separately. The outcome is that you don't have good analytical tools or business intelligence reports that you can share with top management. Previously, we were unable to do regular restore of sites, especially with mailbox backup which made things cumbersome. That seems to have been sorted in recent versions. Finally, if you need to change the server, the solution requires retention of the initial domain name. I think this can possibly create security concerns. The solution is also quite costly.

The interaction of NetBackup with the cloud is not an easy process. You can't choose, for example, data optimization with the cloud. We would like to use CloudCatalyst with AWS and we can't. I don't know how to explain it, but the data file optimization is not usable everywhere. It's not a seamless solution in all instances. We'd like it to be multi-cloud and it's not there yet. It would be helpful, in future releases, if the solution could add WORM (Write Once Read Many) support right within the product. The solution would benefit from the addition of disaster recovery.

In terms of improvement, it's very difficult to make it work with multiple business units. Its security model is too constricted.

This solution would benefit from a more friendly, web-based interface. I would like to see better integration with more systems and appliances. Better integrity would also be an improvement. We would like to have a unified solution that includes backup-over-disk, as opposed to only backup-over-tape. Currently, we are using more than one solution.

This product would be improved with the inclusion of a Sandbox feature like Veeam Sandbox.

Improvements can be made to the service by providing better and more competitive ratios on data backups. The functionality for backups is there with Veritas, but I would like to see them optimize and enhance this feature more.

Add endpoint backup capability for a particular appliance. Currently it is server level only.

Better ways of backing up larger filesystems with many, millions of small files.

The application needs more flexibility and reliability should be the top priority of the enhancement.

The interface should be improved.

I think that the licensing model needs improvement.

* It needs support for Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVMs). * Some of the hardware is out of support. * The product is not able to keep up with other competitors in the market.