Bacula Enterprise vs. Dell Networker

Well suited: - I use it for on premise and cloud backup and recovery and it is excellent for this job. - I also experiment with different hypervisors and till now Bacula seems to work with all of them - Security is really important for me as I had many bad experiences in the past and Bacula solution makes me totally confident. Less appropriate - You need to be experienced Linux user, I had to learn few more things in system to make the best use of it. - It's definitely designed for scalability and bigger companies than mine

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

• Bacula has great plugins that work very accurately
• Bacula is very simple to use, with a user-friendly web interface that facilitates operation.
• Bacula performs the backups very accurately which is clearly noticed when a restore is performed
• Its ease of use helps in training new support team members

• 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

• Our team always points out the same problems, I believe that, today, is our biggest complaint: The interface (both graphical and the CLI) still needs improvement.
• There is no mobile app to manage backups and restores from smartphones
• Manual installation is time consuming.

• 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.

Incentivized

Easy to use, proactive and effective customer support, and simple deployment method. The high configurability is what makes this tool so effective for my organization - at no point do I have any issues of trust as to the restorability of a fileset. The GUI provided gives clear actionable reports as to the effectivity of the jobs performed.

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

This is a hard question. Usability for whom? For someone who is very comfortable at the command line and willing to put in the time to learn Bacula Enterprise's configuration syntax, it's very usable. Just don't expect to be an expert immediately.

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

Bacula Enterprise is always available when we need it, both the backup solution and system support

Operation in the Bacula system has a light and fast interface and reports are generated almost instantly. Perhaps if Bacula is integrated with other solutions it may lose some performance

They're excellent, fast to respond and knowledgeable. I can't fault the support provided at all. On every occasion that we've had a need to contact them during our evaluation, installation, and use of Bacula Enterprise, they've always given us the help that we required. The responses they provide are detailed and we always feel that they've taken the time to read and understand our issue and give a full and personalized answer.

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

The professor understood the tool very well, it was a fact that he had mastery over the system and knew what he was talking about, clearing up all doubts and passing on all the necessary knowledge so that we could handle Bacula Enterprise in our organization.

Bacula Systems and especially Bacula Brazil were extremely attentive and served us very well, making all implementations or changes work perfectly

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

I used CTERA almost from the time they started up. In short, it was very easy to use but configuration was limited; and in the end the agents were troublesome and I could not restore files. They had one person on staff who was terrific with tech support, when he left support became difficult and I lost confidence. Acronis was my first experience with a bare-metal recovery operation and it was terrific. Really saved the day. I would still be using it except the licensing was difficult and expensive and the software wasn't Linux friendly.

Incentivized

EMC and Unitrends are equal at the file level and SQL backups. What makes Unitrends the better product is the ability to backup VMs as a whole. They both have the ability to email reports about failures and hardware issues. Unitrends has superior support and knowledge base and support is available 24/7.

Incentivized

Regarding contracts, negotiations were extremely accessible and clear in every sales model offered.

Bacula provides intelligent scalability by expanding backups across multiple environments, data backup, Oracle, virtual machines, Office365, cloud...

• Our Disaster Recovery policy in regards to backups and archiving is made possible because of our use of Bacula Enterprise.
• TCO is very low as the yearly subscription is very competitively priced. Management of the software is very low so we don't have to spend hours maintaining our backups.

• When you get into the deep dive of features there is quite a learning curve for those options so it's a lot to learn.
• Restores and restore verification is very fast so you save some time there.
• Costs are fairly high so an ROI may take some time vs a standard backup software.

Incentivized