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Dell Networker

Dell Networker

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.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Dell EMC Networker is a versatile backup solution that is widely used across various industries and organizations to protect critical …
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Popular Features

View all 14 features
  • Deduplication and file compression (10)
    6.9
    69%
  • Instant recovery (11)
    6.0
    60%
  • Incremental backup identification (11)
    4.8
    48%
  • Multiple backup destinations (10)
    3.0
    30%
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Pricing

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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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Carbonite Server (also replacing the former EVault products acquired from Seagate in 2016) is a full backup and discovery solution. Designed to recover anything from a single file to an entire system with the click of a button, Carbonite Server users can protect virtually any type of file on both…

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Product Demos

Dell EMC Networker: NVP-vProxy Health Check Tool Demo Using Networker Troubleshooting Tool

YouTube
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Features

Data Center Backup

Data center backup tools send data to a secure storage location after encryption and de-duplication

5
Avg 8.2
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Product Details

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

This video provides an introduction to NetWorker version changes: https://dell.to/2Q43u4l

Dell Networker Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Reviewers rate Encryption highest, with a score of 7.2.

The most common users of Dell Networker are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(54)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

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

(1-3 of 3)
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Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have been using NetWorker for the past three years for all Open Systems (Windows and Linux) backups. It has been the worst nightmare of my 40+ years in IT. We never had even one day when all of our backups completed successfully. Support was horrible. We are now in the process of completely replacing it with a different solution.
  • 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.
I would not recommend NetWorker to anyone for any reasons. It is huge, cumbersome, extremely problematic and EMC's support organization with rare exceptions is the worst in the industry. We have had nothing other than serious problems with it for three years, despite consistent attempts to get it working correctly. Every time an EMC engineer came on site (always someone different) that person would ask "Why did you do it this way? That's not the best way to do it." He/she would then change things to how they thought it should be set up (in direct contrast to what the previous EMC person had done and said). In other words, there are no consistent best practices across their support organization. This caused major issues for us, and left me extremely stressed knowing that there was no way in hell we could ever recover from a true disaster.
Data Center Backup (14)
19.285714285714285%
1.9
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/A
N/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/A
N/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.
NetWorker and CommVault are both rated in the top quadrant of Gartner's assessment of backup/recovery applications. We have used both for a number of years, and CommVault was the winner without any significant opposition technically from NetWorker. We moved from CommVault to NetWorker, not because we were having any issues with CommVault, but because management in our company had a knee-jerk reaction to an highly unreasonable cost estimate from a CommVault sales person. That was followed by a strong team of sales people from EMC coming in and "making a sweet deal" to IT management. Where it comes to protecting our company's data assets, NetWorker failed miserably. CommVault, on the other hand, passed muster multiple times during 96-hour Disaster Recovery exercises. Over a nine year period of using CommVault, the number of incidents we had were rare and very well supported. The only issue we had with CommVault was the rising cost of maintenance. NetWorker, on the other hand, had issues every single day, and support was terrible.
5
Systems administrators are the primary users of NetWorker, with two of the five being primary and secondary SMEs who had to spend 50-60 hours a week supporting the application.
2
One highly technical individual, acting as primary support, spending an average of 50-60 hours a week trying to keep NetWorker running, and wasting countless hours trying to get EMC support to provide true assistance. One secondary, less technical person acts as secondary more to help with the workload and to be the "go to guy" when the primary is not available.
  • 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.
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
Yes
We replaced CommVault with Networker. The only motivating factor there was cost: CommVault support costs were rising and the EMC sales team made a "sweet deal" to IT management to sway the decision to move to NetWorker. They essentially promised NetWorker and DPA for the cost of CommVault support.
  • Price
I was strongly opposed to replacing CommVault with NetWorker. The decision was completely political and based on the EMC Sales team making deals with our IT management in order to get their feet in the door.
Yes: force EMC to provide a complete design document and implementation plan prior to setting foot in the building. Both of these we missing. The implementation was a major failure because, without plan or design; it was brought in and people who had no knowledge, experience or training were told to implement it across al critical servers within 30 days
  • Professional services company
EMC sent an engineer to our site to assist with the initial implementation for just our critical servers. We did not have a design document or an implementation plan, and neither did they. The implementation was done on-the-fly over a 30-day window. Two months later a different engineer came on site to complete the implementation, and took a completely different approach. Each and very engineer who visited us had a different take on how it should have been done. In other words, there wasn't any consistency regarding best practices.
Yes
Phase one was done in a 30-day window for only critical servers due to time constraints. We had 30 days to get it done prior to our busy season lockdown. When we came out of lockdown phase two was started to complete the rest of our systems.
Change management was a minor issue with the implementation
We did not have an implementation plan, and the issues resulting from that were compounded by inconsistent best practices viewpoints from different EMC engineers. Our company uses ITIL change management practices which understandably slowed the process down while waiting for weekly CAB meeting approvals for agent installations and configurations on production systems.
  • 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.
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.
EMC's support of NetWorker, with rare exceptions, was a nightmare. Their "follow the Sun" approach was a good concept, but did not work well for us. We spend huge amounts of time waiting for someone to get back to us after opening support tickets. When someone would get around to responding, English was usually not their first language. Consequently there was a lot of time spent saying, "Please repeat that. I didn't understand you." Initial responses were almost alway from someone who just wanted to email a link to a document to read--usually one that had nothing to do with the issue at hand--or would promise to contact us but would not follow through for days on end. Almost every time we had a serious issue it required phone calls and emails to support managers before a technician would even be assigned to a ticket. Horrible, horrible support experiences.
Yes
We require 24/7/365 support. When our critical systems are down the financial impact is huge. I must say that NetWorker really dropped the ball with their support.
Yes
Very rare were the times that we received timely and lasting resolution to such issues over three years of constant problems. Most of the time it took days to get anyone with half a brain to respond. Most of the time the technician did not speak English well at all, which made for huge communications breakdowns. These same people generally seemed to be reading from scripts, asking the same questions that had been answered multiple times already. More often than not issues required companies to EMC support managers before anything of substance was done to resolve the issue at hand.
We did have once exceptional support experience. EMC sent an engineer on site for a number of weeks to help iron out some rather serious issues. He was very knowledgeable, personable, and went out of his way to ensure we understood the what and why of what he was doing, and ensured that it was all well documented.
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.
  • 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.
Yes
Being Java based, it sucks. Sure, the web interface will work, but only if you're on a platform with an OS and version of Java that NetWorker likes. It locks up often.
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Networker is being used in conjuncture with Dell DataDomain to facilitate the backup and restores of a large number of VMs as well as a number of Databases. We are using it as a department and not across the entire enterprise. It provides data recovery in the event of user or hardware error. That being said, it has been hard to work with, is not user friendly and tends to fail backups at a regular basis. We've been looking for an alternative.
  • Works with other Dell EMC products.
  • Works with VMware.
  • UX is just horrible.
  • Workflow is hard to easily understand.
  • Does not feel seamless.
If you are already a strong Dell EMC shop and they give you a screaming deal on Networker, it may be worth it. Dell has been promoting new backup and recovery products, but they seem to be being lapped by the startups in the space.
Data Center Backup (14)
30%
3.0
Universal recovery
30%
3.0
Instant recovery
30%
3.0
Recovery verification
40%
4.0
Business application protection
40%
4.0
Multiple backup destinations
30%
3.0
Incremental backup identification
30%
3.0
Backup to the cloud
30%
3.0
Deduplication and file compression
60%
6.0
Snapshots
40%
4.0
Flexible deployment
10%
1.0
Management dashboard
10%
1.0
Platform support
20%
2.0
Retention options
30%
3.0
Encryption
20%
2.0
  • The negatives are how much time we have to devote to the product.
  • The plus is that when we needed to pull the backups out of Networker, we were able to.
We've been actively looking at other products such as Rubrik or Cohesity in order to get a better experience as well as lower our overall time invested in running backups. Dell EMC Networker fails to stand up to these products in most ways. In our evaluations it was both easier to understand the different systems as well as talk to the software/hardware via APIs.
Truthfully, the support was ok. I had no real issues with the support.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Dell EMC Networker to protect about 90 virtual machines and a handful of physical servers across two AD domains. We had been looking for dedicated backup hardware and settled on Data Domain as the solution. At the time we were using Acronis as the software side of our DR strategy and were aware we needed something more robust, but this was secondary to having dedicated storage appliances. Dell offered to bundle Networker with this hardware and the price/feature set seemed to be a good fit.
  • 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.
Networker is only suited for one thing: being a front end for good hardware. We love our Data Domains, the dedupe is insane and they ingest data rapidly. You'd be better off using Veeam, which can talk to the Data Domains natively (that's what we're doing now).
Data Center Backup (14)
47.857142857142854%
4.8
Universal recovery
N/A
N/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/A
N/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.
I've used many DR platforms over the years: HP Data Protector, Veritas (formerly Symantec) Backup Exec, Acronis Backup Advanced, AppAssure (another Dell product), Commvault, and a few others. We selected Networker based on its integration with the Data Domain hardware we wanted and the agreeable price point. I should have demanded more time to work with the product before buying but there really isn't a demo outside of a tightly controlled sales pitch that hides a lot of warts. We've since partially moved on to Veeam in one of our two AD domains. Veeam talks to the Data Domains natively and is a far better product that doesn't require nearly as much administration. I occasionally have issues with Networker as it relates to stability - and I will never fully trust it as I've been let down in some very creative ways when attempting restores.
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.
Veeam Backup & Replication
Yes
Networker supplanted HP Data Protector. Our licensing for DP had expired and was extremely costly to renew and the product was so far out of date that a new implementation would have been required.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
The promised deduplication features and integration with Data Domain were key points. The promise of leaning out the amount of data transferred over the wire was alluring.
I'd definitely have made sure to get more hands on or multiple visual demos. The UI is just that bad. Now that I'm more familiar with the CLI, it's not as bad but I think its true power lies in its scriptable nature. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or resources to build a custom solution particularly when I'm paying for it. I just need it to be reliable and straightforward to implement.
  • 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
No
Use this, and then use Veeam. Or literally just about anything else. It's a powerful engine with a crappy paint job and a rusty frame.
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