Overview
What is Dell Networker?
Dell NetWorker is an enterprise-level data protection software product that unifies and automates backup to tape, disk-based, and flash-based storage media across physical and virtual environments for granular and disaster recovery.
Dell EMC: Good but not the best
NetWorker, better called "Not Workin'"
Great tool as a supplement to your existing backup solution
Not the most easy to use but it can protect your data like no others
A life saver for keeping your most important data safe!
High-Performing, Reliable, Flexible, Scalable --- and not for the faint of heart!
There are better solutions out there.
There are far better options for data protection and disaster recovery than this
Networker - Solid Small to Mid-size Product With Few Drawbacks
Networker, reliable but works like backup software
Networker review - easy to manage, does what it says
It's a single application to manage all different backup datasets
Popular Features
- Deduplication and file compression (10)6.969%
- Instant recovery (11)6.060%
- Incremental backup identification (11)4.848%
- Multiple backup destinations (10)3.030%
Pricing
What is Dell Networker?
Dell NetWorker is an enterprise-level data protection software product that unifies and automates backup to tape, disk-based, and flash-based storage media across physical and virtual environments for granular and disaster recovery.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Alternatives Pricing
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Product Demos
Dell EMC Networker: NVP-vProxy Health Check Tool Demo Using Networker Troubleshooting Tool
Features
Data Center Backup
Data center backup tools send data to a secure storage location after encryption and de-duplication
- 5.2Universal recovery(9) Ratings
Universal recovery is the ability to restore backups to any machine regardless of the platform
- 6Instant recovery(11) Ratings
Instant recovery is the ability to restore operations very rapidly
- 6Recovery verification(9) Ratings
Recovery verification is automated testing and verification of backups
- 4.5Business application protection(9) Ratings
Protection of all applications running in the data center
- 3Multiple backup destinations(10) Ratings
Multiple backup destinations is the ability to backup data to more than one location
- 4.8Incremental backup identification(11) Ratings
Incremental backup identification is the ability to identify incremental changes since last backup
- 5.2Backup to the cloud(6) Ratings
Ability to store and back up data to the cloud
- 6.9Deduplication and file compression(10) Ratings
Integrated deduplication and compression capabilities
- 6Snapshots(9) Ratings
Ability to take regular snapshots to ensure that Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is met
- 2.7Flexible deployment(9) Ratings
Deployment on any servers with full support for all applications being used
- 4.5Management dashboard(9) Ratings
Web-based dashboard allowing configuration and monitoring of all backups
- 3.9Platform support(9) Ratings
Product supports multiple operating systems and applications
- 4.7Retention options(9) Ratings
Provision of best-practice and customizable retention policies with reporting
- 7.2Encryption(7) Ratings
Data encryption to ensure that data is safe while being backed-up
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Dell Networker?
Dell EMC NetWorker is an enterprise-level data protection software product that unifies and automates backup to tape, disk-based, and flash-based storage media across physical and virtual environments for granular and disaster recovery.
Available Modules
Dell EMC NetWorker Module for Databases and Applications – Protection for business-critical databases and applications including IBM DB2, Informix, Domino (Lotus), MySQL, Oracle, and Sybase
Dell EMC NetWorker Module for MEDITECH – Integration with certified MEDITECH Backup Facility (MBF) disaster recovery capabilities for backup and application-consistent local and remote replication
Dell EMC NetWorker Module for Microsoft – VSS-based online protection for Microsoft applications including Exchange, Hyper-V, SQL Server, and SharePoint
Dell EMC NetWorker Module for SAP – Availability of mission-critical enterprise resource planning (ERP), business warehousing, and high-performance, in-memory analytics by delivering fast, online backup and recovery for SAP and SAP HANA.
Dell Networker Video
Dell Networker Technical Details
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
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Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(54)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
Dell EMC Networker is a versatile backup solution that is widely used across various industries and organizations to protect critical data. For example, Provident Funding relies on Networker to back up virtual machine images, physical Windows systems, and Cellera NAS, ensuring the safety of their data. The IT team at Provident Funding uses Networker directly and can easily make recovery requests as needed. By leveraging Networker, Provident Funding reduces the risk of data loss and maintains the integrity of their information.
Additionally, Networker has been chosen by numerous companies to safeguard their data. Although there have been experiences where the product did not meet expectations, such as backups failing regularly and encountering poor support at one undisclosed company over the past three years, for the most part, Networker has proven to be a reliable backup solution. It is utilized by both SMBs and enterprise-level organizations to protect a variety of systems including file servers, application/database servers, VMs, and databases. Moreover, Networker is often paired with Dell DataDomain to create a comprehensive backup infrastructure that handles a large volume of critical backups. This combination offers peace of mind and enhanced data protection for organizations across different sectors.
Overall, Dell EMC Networker provides valuable backup capabilities for protecting crucial data assets in diverse environments. Its versatility makes it suitable for businesses of varying sizes and needs, offering a single application to manage different backup datasets effectively. While there have been instances where users encountered challenges with the product or received subpar support, many organizations rely on Networker to ensure the integrity and availability of their data.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-2 of 2)NetWorker, better called "Not Workin'"
- When used with a Data Domain appliance, using either DDBOOST or a VTL, it is quick and does a wonderful job of deduplication. We have 2.3 PB stored on a 140 TB DD 4500. While this is expensive storage, the cost for 2+ PB would be even higher.
- It does a good job of brick-level backups of Exchange mailboxes, and does so in very good time. A few hours backs up our entire organizations mailbox stores in a way that provides object level restore.
- Used in combination with DPA (Data Protection Advisor), it has a very good reporting capability. DPA, however, requires more than just surface knowledge in order to get really good reports, and the DDOS changes can wreck havoc with customized reports.
- NetWorker has a number of glaring flaws. For starters, it does not have any built-in vaulting capability. I simply cannot believe that EMC thinks nobody takes tapes out of their libraries. Their response to our inquiry about it? "We can write a program for you that will cost x-thousands of dollars, or you can develop one yourself." We wrote our own customized program to vault tapes.
- NetWorker does not posses any Disaster Recovery reporting capability. Again, we had to custom code reporting for this so that tape librarians would know what tapes to recall from offsite storage for entire groups of servers. During a crisis there isn't time to be doing that on a one at a time basis for hundred or thousands of servers.
- NetWorker is extremely sensitive to DNS changes, and appears to cache DNS data in hidden locations. We have servers being reported by NetWorker as not connected when they were decommissioned years ago, removed from AD and DNS, yet we still cannot get NetWorker to stop complaining about them.
- NetWorker does not play well at all with multi-homed clients (more than one network interface). In environments where it is not conducive to backup servers of a production network, it becomes crucial to do so over a dedicated or secondary LAN. This causes huge issues with NetWorker.
- If a group contains a number of clients, and one of those gets hung up during a backup, the entire group fails. That is a very wasteful approach for both time and infrastructure resources. Instead, it should fail the one client and allow the remainder in the group to complete successfully. It should also allow the group run to be canceled and still keep the good clients backups rather than registering the entire group as failed.
- There is no way in NetWorker to identify specific file/directories that fail to backup successfully. It will report on savesets, but I need to know that file abc.dat or directory F:\Program Data\ failed and why. It does me no good to get a warning that the saveset for the F drive failed. What failed and why? It may have been a critical problem, or it may have been of no importance.
- We endured three years of NetWorker experiencing problems, enduring a grueling process of trying to get knowledgeable and rapid support -- sometimes taking days and weeks, and only after getting really pushy with support managers -- only to have the problems return over and over. For example, it has been a regular issue for the peer information to get clobbered for no apparent reason. The result is the backup fails for that client, and then I have to go in and remove the peer information on the NetWorker Server, all affected Storage Nodes, and the client. I can now run nsradmin -p nsrexec and then the print and delete statements for nsr peer information in my sleep.
- Universal recovery
- 10%1.0
- Instant recovery
- 10%1.0
- Recovery verification
- 20%2.0
- Business application protection
- 10%1.0
- Multiple backup destinations
- 20%2.0
- Incremental backup identification
- 20%2.0
- Backup to the cloud
- N/AN/A
- Deduplication and file compression
- 80%8.0
- Snapshots
- 50%5.0
- Flexible deployment
- 10%1.0
- Management dashboard
- 10%1.0
- Platform support
- 20%2.0
- Retention options
- 10%1.0
- Encryption
- N/AN/A
- In our experience, NetWorker was extremely expensive to use. It requires very expensive proprietary hardware, like Data Domain, for deduplication. CommVault, in stark contrast, is hardware agnostic for deduplication, and will deduce across any/all hardware, even on tape.
- Extremely wasteful of personnel resources. In our experience it required a dedicated administrator, working 50-60 hours a week for the three years we used it, just to attempt to keep up with the backups. That amounted to a cost of about $270K over the three year period.
- Because it was never designed or implemented as it should have, for a three year period we were completely vulnerable to a real life disaster. If the need had arisen to recover from, say, and tornado hitting our datacenter, we would have gone out of business because the NetWorker backups were completely unreliable.
- File level backups of both physical and virtual servers.
- Sweeping native SQL backups from CIFS and writing it to tape for offsite retention
- Providing recoverability to the end-user community for files/directories on an ad-hoc basis
- Source for the restore operation of 96-hour disaster recovery exercises performed annually
- We were never able to get it working as designed, much less to get innovative with it.
- We have no plans to continue the use of this miserable product. We are abandoning ship with it as rapidly as possible.
- Price
- Professional services company
- First and foremost, there wasn't any design plan or implementation plan. Everything was done "on the fly."
- Implementation was done without anyone in our company having any knowledge, experience, or training with the product.
- Configurations were changed often during implementation, depending on what the EMC engineer here at the time though was the right way to do it. This changed from engineer to engineer, causing configurations that didn't work as well as causing re-work to accommodate the engineer's ideas about the "best way" to do it.
- Nothing. Nothing at all is easy or elegant with NetWorker. It is extremely complex, finicky, cumbersome and totally unreliable.
- Everything. Configuration and maintenance are a nightmare. It breaks on its own even when nothing is changed, and then after fixing whatever the issue happen to be, breaks again days or weeks later.
- Tape vaulting is completely absent from NetWorker. We had to write a custom in-house program in order to vault tapes for offsite storage.
- Unless you're a Unix administrator you will hate the CLI and its corresponding syntax. Much of the highly needed troubleshooting (and you will be troubleshooting every day) can only be done at the CLI.
- I don't think this product does anything well. It shines only because of the Data Domain integration.
- The support teams is excellent, which is good, because you'll need them. Frequently.
- The project implementation team is also competent and professional but their hands were often tied due to poor direction from the sales team.
- 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.
- Universal recovery
- N/AN/A
- Instant recovery
- 80%8.0
- Recovery verification
- 50%5.0
- Business application protection
- 30%3.0
- Multiple backup destinations
- 50%5.0
- Incremental backup identification
- 30%3.0
- Backup to the cloud
- N/AN/A
- Deduplication and file compression
- 90%9.0
- Snapshots
- 70%7.0
- Flexible deployment
- 20%2.0
- Management dashboard
- 10%1.0
- Platform support
- 100%10.0
- Retention options
- 40%4.0
- Encryption
- 100%10.0
- 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.
- Veeam Backup & Replication, Quest Rapid Recovery (formerly AppAssure), Veritas Backup Exec, Commvault, Data Protector (formerly HP Data Protector) and System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM)
- Price
- Product Features
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
- Details on current operations are plentiful and will satisfy the hardcore backup geek
- The UI is completely incoherent and behaves like an old Java app mimicking modern systems... because it is
- Backing up and recovering Microsoft Exchange and/or SQL is very messy and is also agent based
- Managing storage destinations is awful and hard to do from the UI
- Why do I have to open an application and then open an application again? And why is it Java based?
- Despite good recovery options they're buried in multiple clicks and windows
- Customizing the "dashboard" to show information you deem relevant is not always possible and definitely not pretty