Dell Networker vs. Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365

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.

Incentivized

Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 is well suited for medium-size companies who have a significant amount of free storage and want to keep their own copies for retention/legal reasons. It is also a great way to back up SharePoint sites in the event of something being lost or incorrectly changed by a user. It is not great for deep visibility into your backups and exact sizing. There is no good way to truly view which items are taking up storage without digging into PowerShell commands.

Incentivized

• Networker has a UI and set that is relatively easy to use. It has a policy-based backup system that is straightforward as far as configuration.
• Networker has fairly robust reporting on current save sets and easily exportable pdfs and spreadsheets of statistics and metrics
• Networker has a monitoring dialogue which allows you to find out quickly what has succeeded or failed.

Incentivized

• My CFO seemed to have lost a whole year of important emails. I simply restored them to his mailbox in a matter of minutes.
• An employee left the company but an issue came up with a quote this person sent out. I could search his mailbox and got the quote as well as all communications from that customer.
• It is nice to be able to search emails in various mailboxes without disturbing the user.
• It is also nice to go back in time. Say they deleted those emails last month I can go back years if needed.

Incentivized

• Networker terminology is awful. My favorite example is that many required-to-function configuration changes need to occur with the advanced configuration enabled. To make this worse, the 'advanced configuration' I am speaking of is actually called 'Debug Mode'. That's right, you must use debug mode in order to have a functional administrator interface.
• Errors are common and to resolve you often must go to support. You really need to be an expert to fix many errors, the steps usually involve being really knowledgeable in the CLI tools, which I am getting good at, but the public documentation is seriously lacking for troubleshooting these issues. That said, support (through emc) is really good at handling the common issues, friendly, generally knowledgeable, and quick to respond.
• It runs on Java, and sometimes I need to clear java cache to fix interface bugs. Generally this isn't an issue, but it is additional software you must worry about.

Incentivized

• Backing Up "Public Folders" is quite a hassle, but this is not the "fault" of Veeam but the way Microsoft exposes this data.
• No option to integrate the product into their other solution, it would be great to access M365 backup in the Backup & Replication application.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 just works so well and is so easy to use. I researched multiple options for Office 365 backup and none seemed to be as easy to setup and use as Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 and the pricing was very comfortable to us. I can't imagine any reason why we would change away from Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Veeam Data Cloud has an easy and user-friendly interface, easy integration with Microsoft 365 cloud, strong backup and recovery functionality, and robust security features. It is one of the few solutions that can export to .pst files and also has a very simple opt-out because the data is stored on the Microsoft cloud.

Incentivized

I have yet to need it during any of their scheduled maintenance windows. It's always online.

Incentivized

We have a lot of data, and pulling backups out of the store sometimes takes a bit of time - but this is within acceptable tolerances. I don't expect restores to be instantaneous, and I can't quantify if the speed is software or data repository.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Support for all Veeam products is pretty good. While documentation sometimes is written for someone who's already an expert on the platform, their support portal is easy enough to use, and they are very responsive once a support need is documented. I have never had a problem with Veeam that could not be resolved in fairly short order.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Would have marked a 10 but the storage in AWS was very complicated. Would be nice to have more help/guidance connecting to external storage.

Incentivized

Our trust in DataDomain as a premier deduplication technology naturally leads to [Dell EMC] Networker being the appropriate backup application to integrate with. Networker provides the most favorable dedup with DataDomain when compared to other backup technologies, and provides the highest combination of protection flexibility and performance that most other applications cannot provide. For example, Veeam provides excellent VM backup capability, but is unable to protect Meditech. If you go down the list of backup applications, you'll find that Networker is unique in what it is able to protect and in its backup performance.

My familiarity with Veeam Data Cloud specifically is what drew me to the product. They both seem equally capable, but when you know a product you generally tend to go that direction. I believe the other provider could back up our environment, but I am not familiar with it and as I have stated when you need to get up and going quick it is best to be very familiar with the product you are utilizing.

Incentivized

I have had no issues scaling this software as my organisation or data estate has grown. It always does exaclty what it says on the box.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The only real impact is from a compliance standpoint. Our company is expected at a regulatory level to be protecting our data and even though the tenant has little traffic there could still be some regulated data in there. We have to be able to tell an auditor that it's being backed up by an enterprise grade solution, and that's what VDC was intended for.

Incentivized