AWS Backup vs. Dell Networker

AWS [Backup] does what it intends on doing. AWS [Backup] is very fast, however, for that speed, you'll end up with a high bill at the end of the month. Compared to competitors, AWS [Backup] is a lot more expensive than others. However, I believe it makes it up in it's versatility - there's no company more compatible with others than AWS.

Incentivized

For users with a basic backup system that does not provide advanced data protection this is a life saver in the age we live in where hackers are looking to encrypt and ruin your important backups. I would recommend [Dell EMC Networker] based on its features, price, and ease of use. If you have a similar product already it does not offer many unique features however.

Incentivized

• Centralized management - single pane of glass to manage backups for multiple AWS services.
• Encryption - integrates with KMS to encrypt backup data at rest and in transit.
• Cross Account management - manage backups across multiple AWS accounts with AWS organizations.

Incentivized

• Networker has a UI and set that is relatively easy to use. It has a policy-based backup system that is straightforward as far as configuration.
• Networker has fairly robust reporting on current save sets and easily exportable pdfs and spreadsheets of statistics and metrics
• Networker has a monitoring dialogue which allows you to find out quickly what has succeeded or failed.

Incentivized

• Lacks built-in features for granular recovery, such as files or DB records, without restoring the entire backup.
• Complexity - managing backups with multiple rules and resources, with limitations on the number of tags and resources per plan.
• D/R recovery orchestration - does not offer advanced D/R orchestration.

Incentivized

• Networker terminology is awful. My favorite example is that many required-to-function configuration changes need to occur with the advanced configuration enabled. To make this worse, the 'advanced configuration' I am speaking of is actually called 'Debug Mode'. That's right, you must use debug mode in order to have a functional administrator interface.
• Errors are common and to resolve you often must go to support. You really need to be an expert to fix many errors, the steps usually involve being really knowledgeable in the CLI tools, which I am getting good at, but the public documentation is seriously lacking for troubleshooting these issues. That said, support (through emc) is really good at handling the common issues, friendly, generally knowledgeable, and quick to respond.
• It runs on Java, and sometimes I need to clear java cache to fix interface bugs. Generally this isn't an issue, but it is additional software you must worry about.

Incentivized

There are three reasons for not renewing our use of NetWorker: 1) the rising and extremely high cost of support and proprietary hardware needed for deduplication, 2) the complete unreliability of the product (we couldn't recover from a true disaster if we wanted to), and 3) the horrible support from EMC for the product

Incentivized

Overall because I can sell it white labeled and use my white labeled software like CloudBerry and the native backup apps on my synology NAS servers to store things in real time and do duplication and disaster recovery directly to it was game changing for my client in the advertising world they are never down now.

Incentivized

NetWorker has the clunkiest interface and unfriendliest CLI with which I have ever had to work. I spent three years hating this application because it took ALL of my time just to keep it running. Even then, I had no confidence in our ability to recover from a disaster because of its unreliability.

Incentivized

Support for AWS Backup is by Amazon itself so it is solid as always. If you have a business or higher level support plan you'll have no trouble getting engineers or other staff on the job to help you with whatever comes up.

Incentivized

The support team has always been good, and there is never an issue that can't be resolved. The techs are competent and know the product. The slightly less than perfect rating I'm giving is because Support shouldn't carry the burden themselves. We hear from Dell sales people all the time, but they never call and ask about this product, nor do they offer to upsell it or make it better. That lack of sales support and coherence hurts the overall rating a bit. When I spend my company's money on your product, I expect you to at least ACT like you care, if not actually care for real. It influences my opinion and future purchasing habits.

Incentivized

How can anyone build a house without a blueprint? NetWorker was ramrodded into place here without a design or implementation plan. The result was a setup that was doomed from the start and never worked reliable over the full three years of our contract obligation.

Incentivized

Linode requires a minimum data purchase for their S3 storage solution. While the convenience of being able to mount the drive directly is great, it isn't the best for small amounts of data for our different customers. I initially tried there other backup solution but they couldn't guarantee where the data would be stored in relation to the server we were using. The risk being an incident in our near our server could result in the loss of our backup as well.

Incentivized

Our trust in DataDomain as a premier deduplication technology naturally leads to [Dell EMC] Networker being the appropriate backup application to integrate with. Networker provides the most favorable dedup with DataDomain when compared to other backup technologies, and provides the highest combination of protection flexibility and performance that most other applications cannot provide. For example, Veeam provides excellent VM backup capability, but is unable to protect Meditech. If you go down the list of backup applications, you'll find that Networker is unique in what it is able to protect and in its backup performance.

• With AWS Backup we can restore a resource in minutes
• With AWS Backup we don't need to worry if a resources is being backed up or not, the plan you can configure can cover all resources
• With AWS Backup you can plan for Disaster Recovery as it lets you copy the backup to other account or region

Incentivized

• Now that it's been implemented and the many kinks worked out, we have far less exposure to downtime, but that's only because we didn't have an adequate backup solution in the target environment initially. We used native tools to protect SQL data and a few other tricks, but really didn't have anything proper. In other words, the bar was low.
• We have reduced the load on some of our application servers through the use of Networker's agent for Microsoft. However, compare that with Veeam, which just has a checkbox and no agent required to properly back up a SQL box.
• Agent-based backups require monitoring and periodic updates. This adds complexity and additional staff time to manage.

Incentivized