Despite the revised GUI interface in recent years, which is excellent, like most applications built on UNIX technology, everything is a file/command line underneath. This gives me the confidence of being in total control of the product. I also just like the logical way it's designed, i.e. with clients that are added to savegroups, and savegroups that are run according to a schedule. It makes it easy to control the timing of the backups of specific systems in the enterprise.

I love the mminfo command for reporting on backup clients statuses - definitely one to learn! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As Networker is an enterprise backup tool, and has a necessarily comprehensive GUI that can be quite intimidating upon first sight. Once shown/trained on how to configure a client and add it to the backup schedule, it's really quite straight forward though and everything is pretty much where you'd expect to find it. For absolute confidence, I'd recommend formal training funded by your employer and embracing the command line.. It's one product that definitely justifies knowing what you're doing end-to-end. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The support is great if you push for the assistance you need. It is just the reduction in head count in support causing delays. At one point a 5 minute delay was unacceptable. Now a five minute delay is a great day. The variety of hardware and software supported makes the product desirable. The collaboration available within EMC is excellent. CHAT is very useful to open an initial case. The best is they do not say it is not their issue without reviewing the problem and are willing to engage third party vendors to collaborate. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Support is falling behind with the reduction in head count and experience for support. I have had to call the Manager On Duty many times to get support. The adding of new "Centers of Excellence" is adding support staff, but not the collaboration and experience augmenting existing centers would have. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Networker is a good backup product. It's lightweight, and I haven't seen the client itself cause issues on any of our servers in the 11+ years I've used it. Like most enterprise products Networker needs to be setup properly and tuned for the environment it's in to be most effective. Networker does a good job, especially when using NDMP backups. While NDMP can be complex to manage and configure the performance gains are invaluable. I've also always found EMC's technical support of Networker to be relatively good.

I've noticed in some reviews people criticizing Networker's ability to backup Oracle DBs and missing files. This is a configuration issue, and not Networker's fault. This is because you can't backup live files that are constantly being written to, such as databases. The DBAs either need to write a backup to file where Networker can pick it up or you have to use a Networker Oracle Module. In fact, it's best to add directives for Networker to skip live database files for file level backups on DB servers. There are also other very beneficial tools from EMC such as Recover Point, which we use in our environment in conjunction with Networker for replicating file systems to remote sites and backing them up there. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Networker's default TCP port range is large, and can tend to conflict with some enterprise applications on rare occasions. Networker does allow you to adjust the port range, but this is an easy thing to overlook. The large port range also means having to open more ports across firewalls than what some may feel uncomfortable with. Networker also tends to need a lot of tuning and administrative intervention, but probably no more than any other enterprise backup solution. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

DDBoost using client direct (DFA) is the most recent feature that I have the most appreciation for within our NetWorker environment. The distributed processing of data deduplication greatly reduces the load on both the Storage Nodes (SN's) and the NetWorker server allowing us to reduce the number of SN's in our backup environment. This reduces the administration effort required to maintain our environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Using DDBoost there is nothing that NetWorker reports on the will let you know when a client cannot backup directly to a Data Domain appliance effectively bypassing the Storage Node and reducing the bandwidth requirements on the SN. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The interface for file-level management is easy to use and enabled us to provide a highly efficient response to requests for files pertaining to specific users and periods of time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are UNIX and Windows versions. IT managers who use the UNIX version typically see them as different enough that experience on the Windows version does not seem to be sufficient to qualify one to use the UNIX version. I don't find that to be the case at all, however. The command line interface is the key differentiator between the 2 versions. I favor the GUI. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

This product is intended for large organizations. Each Datazone supports about 2,000 clients. The standard 3 tier architecture (Master Server, Storage Node/Media Server, and clients)

The best this this product offers is simplicity and flexibility of use. Support for SAN, IP backups and agents for most of the platforms and main hypervisors (VMWare, Hyper-V). Performance is what you make of it. Configure it right and it'll work well.

Together with Data Domain and Boost, NetWorker has become much more powerful with client side dedup.

client direct also works well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The UI is a little old and needs an update. The agent deployment is messy (you need proxies for cross platform agent deployment). The reporting capabilities are poor so if you are part of a large organization, you need Data Protection Advisor (DPA) and DPA lacks some features like the ability to report on VMs that are inside Hyper-V hosts. DPA and NetWorker should be one product, or at least an "Express" version of DPA specifically for NetWorker should be part of the NetWorker software since DPA is extremely broad in the reporting capabilities and software/appliances it can report on.

NAS backups are terribly slow, but it's not really NetWorker's fault but NDMP itself. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Command line interface is very flexible and can be used to automate backups through cron. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The complete lack of support from EMC. We had less than 1000 servers, Windows, Unix mix. We had massive failures that EMC could NOT figure out. They kept pushing us to buy other products but we felt they would not be able to support them either. Very disappointing company. We will never do business with them again. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Managibility, since EMC bought it, my opinion, is at least 500% better now than it was. We have it writing to Data Domain now, tape is gone. I've worked with Avamar too, but the ability to find a file when the location (directory) is unknown is one of my favorite reasons. The indexes may be found to be its undoing one day, Avamar keeps the index in the saves (self referencing). But as it is now replication, cloning in NetWorker, to a hot site, works as three saves, the one at home site, the save to the hot site, and the index of the save to hot site. So, if you're thinking of implementing it, assure you test DR until you can recover at the hot site before signing off on replication functionality. Implementation of NetWorker can be completed by the client, Avamar and Data Domain require EMC or EMC partner to implement. So NetWorker is possibly more affordable, but if you get it, you'll definitely want Data Domain too, unless you don't have much data to save. NetWorker is saving over 20 petabytes at some implementations currently, and exabytes are probably less than 10 years off. With the amount of data being generated, I wouldn't trust anything but EMC NetWorker or Avamar. I think NetWorker will recover from a disaster faster than Avamar currently though, where you don't have a hot site. I've worked with NetWorker since version 4 in 1999 and Avamar 5 since 2011. I currently use NetWorker 8.2 on Data Domain and Avamar 7 on Avamar Data Store Gen4s. NetWorker and Avamar will most likely merge in the not too distant future with Data Domain or the Avamar Data Store as the storage media in the near future; no one will come close to the value in that for data protection. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Indexes in NetWorker for very large clients, where retention time is long and often. Very large indexes may be its downfall. If you're going to implement with very large servers, millions of files per server; over 5 million, go with Avamar. Indexes have to be in excess of 2.5 gb also go with Avamar. Avamar has index size solved by saving the index into the save. Even Avamar isn't designed for systems with over 10 million files per client. The presave has to look at all the files they will save and deduplication has to also for both products. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I enjoy the way Netoworker makes Me think when troubleshooting. It provides reliable and fast recovery options. I throughly enjoy how it handles virtual machines as I work daily with them. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

there isn't much I don't dislike. I would say that rebuilding a library is pretty tedious work, it's fun but time consuming, I have found. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As a three tier product, NetWorker can scale to large enterprises. Quite flexible. This ranges from traditional tape backup, where storage nodes (aka media servers) offline IO movement from the backup server, either direct to tape for large servers, or to add more lan backup capacity.

As with other enterprise products, NetWorker has a lot of flexibility.

Product management continues to add both big and small features that extend functionality. For instance, they recently added an "auto-select storage node" feature, which helps automate load balancing of lan backups among storage nodes.

Data Domain integration is where most efforts have gone recently. From client-side dedup ("hash checking") to DDBoost (NetWorker's version of OST) over both LAN and FC, and virtual synthetic fulls, NetWorker is leveraging Data Domain features to reduce backup windows.

Other items to note:

--Very strong command line. Advanced scripting (backups, recoveries, and reporting) can be done via CLI. IMHO, most powerful command line of any enterprise product.

--Wide client and database support.

--Good backward compatibility, even for systems and versions that are no longer supported. For instance, NetWorker client from 2009 can be used to back up Windows 2000. While not officially supported, it works, and provides an option for outliers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Easy and useful reporting tends to be a constant battle. While great strides have been made, both within NetWorker and by leveraging EMC's DPA product, it is still difficult to get a handle on when things run, and where backup bottlenecks are.

I find that the (shareware) NetWorker Reporting Utility (http://users.skynet.be/networker_reporter/) offers better reporting for optimization purposes than the build in reporting. The gantt charts, for instance, visualize run times quite well.

Integration with other EMC products is a double edged sword. The addition of client-side dedup for Data Domain is truly amazing, but sites that don't have a Data Domain lose out on a lot of functionality; if a site wants to back up VMware 6 to tape, they are out of luck--VMware backups require the VBR module, which requires Data Domain. (If tape is not needed, it can be backed up to other disk, but that does not support tape for offsiting purposes).

Another example is the block level backup feature: it is a great feature, solving the problem of backing up dense filesystems that standard backup agents cannot do quickly. But it requires backup to disk, and realistically backup to Data Domain.

Some of the newer modules are really difficult to troubleshoot. This is not unique to EMC--the more complexity an application has, the more complex it is to back up. And by building in a lot of functionality to the application modules, they become more and more difficult to troubleshoot.

(I'm specifically looking at NetWorker Module for Microsoft Applications and VMware Backup and Recovery)

As with most enterprise products, licensing is tricky. EMC offers traditional feature based licensing (where tracking what is used can be difficult) or capacity based licensing (where increases in protected data require purchasing additional capacity each year). NetWorker is neither worse nor better than the other products, IMHO.

Bare metal restores for Windows are good. They are essentially non-existent for other platforms. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.