Understanding NetWorker licensing options

There are now three types of licensing options you can consider with NetWorker, and it’s helpful to understand the difference between them – particularly if you’re approaching your maintenance/support renewal time.

The three types are:

  • Traditional
  • NetWorker Capacity
  • Data Protection Solutions (DPS) Capacity

Traditional licensing is the ‘classic’ approach where specific features in NetWorker require a license. You start with a base enabler for the NetWorker server (usually Network Edition or Power Edition), then you stack on particular features as required. That might include Data Domain licensing, NetWorker Microsoft Module Licensing (NMM), Standard client licenses, Virtual Client licensing, and so on.

Depending on the number of individual features, you could have to buy multiple instances of particular licenses. For instance, NMM is licensed per server it runs on – so if you have 3 Exchange hosts running a 3-way DAG, and then say, 2 Microsoft SQL databases running on individual servers, you’ll need 5 x NMM licenses.

Traditional licensing is extremely exact in what you get – you get precisely what you pay for, no more – but it’s also a wee bit fiddly and you’re left with no room for changes in your environment. In the world of rapidly changing IT environments, traditional licensing make it difficult for you to adapt to changing circumstances. If someone needs to run up a few extra SQL databases, or deploy an Oracle database, or provide backups for another 100 virtual machines, or … whatever, you have to acquire each necessary license. Then if those requirements change, you’re potentially left with a bunch of licenses you don’t need any more.

Squirrel

NetWorker Capacity licensing is a way of consolidating all your licenses down to a simple question:

If you do a full backup of everything you need to protect, how many TB does that come to?

That’s it. That’s all there is to it. If that number comes to say, 20TB, then you add around 5% (or whatever you believe your growth rate for a year will come to) and you get yourself NetWorker Capacity Licensed to say, 21TB. At that point you can go and do a full backup every day of every system if you wanted and your licenses are still covered. It’s not about the amount of back-end space you utilise for your backups, but simply the front-end space of a single full backup of everything.

The big advantage – no, the huge advantage – here is that once you’ve got that license, you can pretty much work with any NetWorker feature you want. If someone comes up and says they need to backup an Oracle database but forgot to ask for licensing, you can languidly sit back and say “sure”. If someone comes up and says they’re about to virtualise 100 traditional clients and turn them all into virtual clients, you can languidly sit back and say “sure”. If someone decides the business needs to deploy a dozen storage nodes, one for each security zone in a DMZ, you can languidly sit back … well, you get the picture.

NetWorker capacity licensing grants you flexibility to adjust what you backup based on changes to the business requirements. In a world where IT has to adapt faster and faster, NetWorker capacity licensing gives you the power to change.

And then there’s DPS licensing. This is the awesome-sauce licensing model because it gives you more than just NetWorker. DPS licensing is capacity based as well: if a full backup of everything in your environment you want to protect is 200TB, then you again look at say, 5% for growth and get a DPS capacity license for say, 210TB and then…

…you can back it up with NetWorker

or

…you can back it up with Avamar and NetWorker

or

…you can back it up with NetWorker and Data Domain Enterprise Applications

or

…you can back it up with NetWorker, Avamar, and Data Domain Enterprise Applications

or

…you can back it up with NetWorker, Avamar, and Data Domain Enterprise Applications and report on it using DPA.

DPS licensing for backup is the ultimate flexibility for a data protection environment. If you’re licensed for 200TB and your company acquires another business that’s got a bunch of remote offices, you can just go right ahead and deploy some Avamar Virtual Edition systems to look after those. If you want to have centralised monitoring and reporting for your data protection activities and provide chargeback pricing to business units, you can do it by folding Data Protection Advisor in. If you want to give your DBAs the option of backing up to your Data Domain systems but they want to use their own scheduling system, you can just point them at the Data Domain Boost plugin and let them get to work.

DPS is the Swiss Army Knife of data protection licensing. What’s more, it’s the landing place for new features in the EMC data protection universe as they come out. For instance, EMC CloudBoost and EMC Data Protection Search were both added automatically into the licensing options for existing DPS customers at no extra charge. So suddenly those customers can, if they want, provide a central search system for all their backups, or push long term retention backups out to the Cloud without having to adjust their licensing.

Good (Traditional) – Better (NetWorker Capacity) – Best (DPS Capacity). They’re the three licensing options for NetWorker. And there’s a model that suits everyone.

____

Why the squirrel? I wanted a photo in the article and it’s pretty cute.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.