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 SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) is pretty good at forecasting capacity consumption, which was a must for us. If you have LUNs that have high latency in a normal environment (user shares, for instance), you'll need to customize the alerts to tune out the noise. As with all SW modules and most other products, there is a time lag between what is in the console and what's happening now. Data in the console and alerts are typically 5 to 15 minutes old.
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 Unmasks storage performance metrics and gives a common dashboard for monitoring. A simple, intuitive interface for adding supported storage frames. Lineage -- "The guest OS is connected to the virtual host and the virtual host is connected to the ... wait, what LUN is that?!?" #SOLVED. 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 Issues getting SMI working correctly to monitor Compellents through SRM. The ability to break down alerts to a more granular level. Rob Bates Public & Private Cloud Senior Engineer
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 It has helped me prove that we need more storage as well as faster storage to management
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 Easy to set up and start. Out of the box alerts which you can tweak to your needs. Easy to use interfaces as well
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 Do not have to contact support for issues often and when i do it is fast to get response and resolve my issues
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 Easy to use set up wizard went off without a hitch.
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 We have a full suite of SolarWinds products and did not evaluate other options for a full package. For selective monitoring we log into the devices, but this has made that much easier as we have a dashboard rather than logging into devices one at a time.
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 Real-time monitoring and alerting to surpass those of native vSphere and in some occasions, better than manufacturer written software. Historical monitoring of environment with charts and graphs to assist with ever changing environment loads. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) Screenshots