Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review It is good hardware/software to do VMWare backup, very reliable and convenient device.
Hyper-V backup may be less appropriate to do due to specific software needs.
Read full review Pros Seamlessly integrates with DataDomain Seamlessly integrates with vmWare for extremely fast VM backups Provides agent-based integration for a very wide array of applications-aware backups, including but not limited to: Microsoft SQL/Exchange/Sharepoint, Meditech, Oracle, DB2, Informix, SAP Integrates with a wide family of NAS solutions for NDMP backups Read full review A perfect solution for D2D backups. We are seeing a large savings with the de-duplication piece. Very versatile device. We like being able to use any backup protocol we need to for the many diverse jobs we have in the medical industry. Interface is simple and easy to use. Read full review Cons The GUI is horrible. Giant windows that don't size properly, confusing terminology, multiple clicks to get things done, it's just a disorganized mess. I can't put this in front of my junior techs because it requires some background in DR software to fully comprehend, and even then it's not easy. It feels very much like this was tacked on to a command-line based product as an afterthought. Better management features. It's difficult to integrate with Active Directory, for one. You'll need a Dell EMC tech to help you. Items can't be renamed and have to be recreated. Options are buried in multiple GUI tabs and often are just command line strings in a free-text field. Diagnosing failed jobs and workflows is cumbersome and the errors are often cryptic without some experience. Design it well and pray for uptime, because you need this to work when disaster requires it to. Poor reporting features for an enterprise class product. You can't schedule any type of simple summary (an audit requirement for us) in the base product. To do this requires the additional cost of Data Protection Advisor, which is also horribly designed and impossible to get working quickly. Post-sales contact is non-existent. We've been through a few reps and the project team dropped us at one point with a half-finished implementation when the original sales guy moved on. We only got the the promised product implementation by telling Dell that we weren't paying the bill until they delivered what they promised and were contractually obligated to. Read full review Every feature on the Quantum requires a license purchase, this is seriously annoying and drives the cost of the device up The cost of the device is somewhat high Active Directory integration is a bit of a pain Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Support from Quantum was okay, they performed FW upgrade and replaced few faulty disks without any problem. Some old-style connections and requirements from them produced additional loads on our IT team.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered EMC and Unitrends are equal at the file level and SQL backups. What makes Unitrends the better product is the ability to backup VMs as a whole. They both have the ability to email reports about failures and hardware issues. Unitrends has superior support and knowledge base and support is available 24/7.
Read full review The only aleternative looked at prior to the DXi was ExGrid, while both are great options the DXi offered a little more versatility and the support has been terrific.
Read full review Return on Investment When you get into the deep dive of features there is quite a learning curve for those options so it's a lot to learn. Restores and restore verification is very fast so you save some time there. Costs are fairly high so an ROI may take some time vs a standard backup software. Read full review Storage Target for data that can be Deduped Using accent to do inline dedupe is great Works well with netbackup accelerator and netbackup Read full review ScreenShots