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Dell Networker

Score5.7 out of 10

55 Reviews and Ratings

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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.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Dell Networker has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 55 ratings of Dell Networker's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Encryption

    Data encryption to ensure that data is safe while being backed-up

    Category average: 9.4

  • Deduplication and file compression

    Integrated deduplication and compression capabilities

    Category average: 8.3

  • Instant recovery

    Instant recovery is the ability to restore operations very rapidly

    Category average: 8.4

Areas for Improvement

  • Platform support

    Product supports multiple operating systems and applications

    Category average: 8.7

  • Multiple backup destinations

    Multiple backup destinations is the ability to backup data to more than one location

    Category average: 8.4

  • Flexible deployment

    Deployment on any servers with full support for all applications being used

    Category average: 8.5

Reviews

What users are saying about Dell Networker.
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High-Performing, Reliable, Flexible, Scalable --- and not for the faint of heart!

Richard MattiuzzoView profile
Senior Infrastructure Engineer - Data Protection SME in Information Technology at Teknicor Corporation (51-200 employees employees)

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

Cons

  • [Dell EMC] Networker is a not a backup software that is not for the faint of heart. It is challenging to understand, implement, and troubleshoot. Many of the errors are nondescript and undocumented, and have left many a seasoned administrator in the dust. If Networker is not implemented by an experienced professional, it will cause nothing but grief for the customer. However, if it is properly implemented and maintained, it will provide reliable, robust, flexible, and scalable data protection.
  • It really needs to transition away from Java ASAP. The HTML5 GUI is decent but still a far cry away from being ready to replace the Java interface from a functionality perspective. The Java UI is probably the weakest and most frustrating aspect of Networker, because it is clunky, resource intensive, unreliable, and just a plain eye-sore.
  • Networker support will either be a lifesaver or will dig you an early grave, depending on who takes your call. There are Networker SMEs at Dell that have been in the business for decades. If you're lucky enough to reach one, they will provide some of the best support you'll ever come across. Of course, your odds of getting to one of those people is slim, and you'll like end up getting connected to a L1 technician that just learned how to spell Networker. I know because I used to be one of those L1 technicians, and it usually just makes the customer want to find the closest bridge.

Return on Investment

  • It has kept our customers protected and confident in our services, especially in the current ransomware climate
  • As a Managed Services Provider, it has helped us reduce the man-hours involved in managing backups for many different customer environments

Other Software Used

Veeam Backup & Replication, Acronis True Image, Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery

NetWorker, better called "Not Workin'"

Incentivized
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Other Software Used

Hyper-V, VMware ESXi, Bacula Enterprise

Usability

Dell EMC: Good but not the best

Incentivized
Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Backs up data.
  • Hardware notifications.
  • Easy to use interface.

Cons

  • Support is not so easy to work with.
  • replacing drives can be difficult.
  • Our model doesn't support VMs.

Return on Investment

  • It has helped to quickly bring back deleted files.
  • Saved time from having to recreate files.
  • Machines have held up past their warranty.

Alternatives Considered

Unitrends Data Center Backup and Recovery and Unitrends MSP

A life saver for keeping your most important data safe!

Incentivized
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

  • The latest version has patched many bugs and runs well
  • The GUI is simple and straight forward but is powerful when needing to do more
  • Well priced solution among its peers

Cons

  • Documentation is lacking
  • Prior versions had many bugs and interface issues
  • Competitors have some more advanced features

Return on Investment

  • One positive thing it has done is put us at ease with our important backups
  • It has raised our backup budget however
  • Saving time doing multiple individual backups with existing system

Other Software Used

KnowBe4 PhishER, Cisco Embedded Wireless Controller, Aruba Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN)

Great tool as a supplement to your existing backup solution

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Gives us deep, granular control over our backups data.
  • Automates a lot of the hard work for us, saving much time.
  • Gives both physical and virtual environments a safe place for data to rest.

Cons

  • Dell software in general feels a bit data and can be cumbersome.
  • Upgrades, patches, and bug fixes are behind when an important security issue is found.
  • We sometimes have trouble getting answers from support.

Return on Investment

  • Having two backup systems does create more operational time needed to manage
  • License cost per server is fairly high for products in this range
  • ROI is high whenever you are saved time and money with a needed backup

Other Software Used

Snort, Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 4000), Dell EMC Avamar, Dell EMC PowerFlex (formerly VxFlex or VxRack), Cisco DNA Analytics and Assurance