NetBackup is reliable but can get expensive to maintain
December 20, 2017
NetBackup is reliable but can get expensive to maintain
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Symantec NetBackup
NetBackup has been our primary backup solution for all of our organization data and servers. NetBackup backed up all of our virtual and physical servers, as well as our SANs across two different data center environments. We also use NetBackup to write our off-site backups to tape. In late 2016, we implemented deduplication with NetBackup to reduce the size of our backups since we were pulling more of them from remote data centers to our home office where the backups were administered and written to tape.
Pros
- NetBackup integrates well with Windows servers. The client is reliable.
- NetBackup does a good job of tracking tapes in the catalog, whether the tapes are still on-site in the robot or off-site at a storage facility.
- We saw a significant reduction (between 20% and sometimes as much as 80%) on backup sizes with deduplication. This was more so with things like Exchange and SharePoint, less so with images and video files.
Cons
- The upgrade process with NetBackup is very challenging, at least in our implementation. Each upgrade required a significant amount of troubleshooting, and then we would have to fix integrations with other Veritas and Microsoft products that were no longer compatible with the minor release update of NetBackup.
- NetBackup doesn't always provide, at least in our environment, the best status reports on what is working and what is not. If something didn't go right with a backup, we didn't always see it right away.
- The cost of NetBackup was increasing. We were not licensed for their multi-data center replication and high availability components, so we made the decision to move off NetBackup rather than accept a significant price jump.
- We never experienced a significant system or data loss during the time we used NetBackup. We restored individuals files and small databases based upon user mistakes, but we never had to implement a DR plan. From that aspect, it is difficult to evaluate the ROI. Backups are a commodity service. Features are very similar across multiple tools. Once you decide to stay on-prem or move to the cloud, the list of options are narrowed. Then it becomes a matter of price.
- From an administration and support perspective, the ROI is low. Vendor technical support is not always responsive. The first two tiers of support are not knowledgeable and their typical recommendation is to read the white paper. My small team spent a lot of time troubleshooting NetBackup, often without much vendor help.
We moved from NetBackup to Veeam in mid-2017 largely because of a significant data center migration. Veeam was very quick to configure, compressed the data streams to move entire servers and storage arrays quickly and without disrupting business network use, and costs significantly less than NetBackup for us. While we still backup to tape, Veeam provides a lot options for hybrid backups that include cloud and multiple colocation data center sites.
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