Vembu BDR Suite is a universal backup solution catering to the backup, recovery, and disaster recovery needs of diverse IT environments. It is also optimized for service providers who deliver BaaS and DRaaS to their customers.
$12
per year per endpoint
Dell Networker
Score 5.7 out of 10
N/A
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.
We tried to use Altaro first of all but found it to be very big, take up a lot of resources and found the features we needed hard to use. When we compared Vembu we just found everything was so much easier and as it was also free this ticked nearly all of our boxes and the …
I used to recommend Aconis, but it gets super-expensive when you get to the server and hypervisor level stuff, and I'm finding myself to not like the latest user interface and options. I also used BackupAssist, which is actually a great product for Windows Servers, but Vembu …
I have used almost all Vembu products—BDR, VMbackup, Network Backup, Image Backup, and OffsiteDR. I haven't used the 360 for easy management of all the BDR servers but I'll probably eventually use it as I build out my VembuBDR servers.
If you are looking for an enterprise capable backup suite that quickly does the job without hassles then you will quickly look past the freebee software like Microsoft NT Backup or the overly complex of the like such as Acronis.
The reason for choosing Vembu was that the free version's limits were very reasonable, the installation could be performed on a Linux based operating system, and management could be done using a web UI.
Although not available to select, I've used the VMWare vDP product. Vembu stacks up really well, feature for feature, and even comes out cheaper. That's why I went with it.
Value for money. Veeam is a good backup solution but it's very complicated and expensive. On other the hand, Altaro was not so reliable as it crashed the storage many times. It lacks a few important features.
I tested Vembu against Veeam and for the price, Vembu was the better option. I also had a great support experience as I had to contact Vembu twice after mistakes I made. While using Veeam the software was not as intuitive and support responses were not as swift and accurate.
The primary alternative to Vembu would be Veeam. This would be my second choice in a close race. If I remember correctly, Veeam only supported virtualized environments until just after my decision to go with Vembu. We had also previously tried Microsoft System Center Data …
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 …
Senior Infrastructure Engineer - Data Protection SME
Chose Dell Networker
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 …
We've been actively looking at other products such as Rubrik or Cohesity in order to get a better experience as well as lower our overall time invested in running backups. Dell EMC Networker fails to stand up to these products in most ways. In our evaluations it was both …
I've used many DR platforms over the years: HP Data Protector, Veritas (formerly Symantec) Backup Exec, Acronis Backup Advanced, AppAssure (another Dell product), CommVault, and a few others. We selected Networker based on its integration with the Data Domain hardware we wanted …
Networker appears to be decent against NetBackup and Backup Exec as far as policy-based backup solutions are concerned and for stability. But it isn't as close to the virtualization layer as Veeam is and is not as feature rich as Commvault is, especially as it relates to …
Previously I have used MS DPM and Symantec Backup Exec. I think they all have similar strengths and drawbacks actually. In general, BE/DPN have slightly better interfaces and terminology but slightly worse backup and recovery reliability. I would recommend Networker over them …
NetWorker and CommVault are both rated in the top quadrant of Gartner's assessment of backup/recovery applications. We have used both for a number of years, and CommVault was the winner without any significant opposition technically from NetWorker. We moved from CommVault to …
First of all Web UI makes it so much easier to manage, with few clicks you can schedule a backup, you can see the progress and you can instantly recover it. There is a multiple environment support which is great for hybrid environments. Pricing is more reasonable than other high priced backup solutions
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.
Bare metal system images. These are incredibly flexible, enabling you to do dissimilar hardware restores, local or online backups and restore to VHD
Full, differential and transaction log backups for SQL server, ensuring rapid backup and restore, with maximum storage efficiency.
Incremental backups for files, meaning only the changes which have been made to a file are backed up, dramatically reducing time to backup and increasing storage efficiency.
User interface on the servers do not have enough tools to better monitor the systems and finding information is difficult.
User interface at portal is difficult to navigate and confusing
Support documentation is too generic and rarely answers my questions.
Licensing and acquisition. As a reseller and partner the licensing model is confusing and the portal interface to manage licensing should be scrapped and rebuilt. It is difficult to navigate and the available information is too vague.
Recently, communication with new channel contact. My previous contact was articulate and answered my questions.
Did I mention licensing? This is the most confusing and difficult process I've dealt with in 25 years. Makes Microsoft look simple.
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.
I think the product will remain useful for us and as the company keeps improving features it will continue to be relevant and useful. We don't like switching technology much and BDR solutions shouldn't be something that a company replaces every few years., that's why most likely we will keep using it.
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
As outlined in are parts of this review, I have various issues with the way their KB center is structured and how error codes aren't documented or KBs for a specific error provide steps for older versions of the software and aren't applicable to the current version because of a design layout change. "Go here and select Y" where the "here" has been removed and doesn't exist anymore. Or they release a new version without any supporting documentation even though they restructured a lot of the interface and updated the error messages.
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.
It often takes a very long time to get an issue fixed. the support folks seem committed to getting it fixed but they often seem to be trying different things and hoping something works. I did not get the sense that they had a clear idea what was wrong.
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.
Overall the implementation was not complicated. The linux version installation is rather easy step by step process. It's just when you do something for the first time, it always take a bit longer because it's new and you just need to be more focused to configure everything properly
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.
I tested Vembu against Veeam and for the price, Vembu was the better option. I also had a great support experience as I had to contact Vembu twice after mistakes I made. While using Veeam the software was not as intuitive and support responses were not as swift and accurate.
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.
Backups complete quickly each night saving me time from always having to modify client backups to fit within their backup windows.
Money: We are saving hundreds of dollars per year for us and our clients by switching to this product.
I no longer spend significant time managing backups, checking their status, etc. Alerts are consistent and warn me if there's a problem. It just works. I rarely have to touch it other than when I do random restore tests (as I do with any backup product) and the instant recovery feature works well for that.
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.
