With apologies for the delays, I’m pleased to announce that the report following the NetWorker Usage Survey in June/July 2011 is now ready.
With two prior reports, some comparison for trending was possible, and this will continue in future reports. Some interesting results were noticed in the backup cloning section, and new questions were posed to track encryption usage within environments.
The report is available here.
It’s that semi-annual time of the year again when I ask you to take a few minutes to answer some multiple-choice questions about how you’re using NetWorker within your environment.
I’ve kept all of the questions from the previous survey, so that I can track adoption of deduplication and interest in open source modules, but I’ve now added a couple of questions about backup encryption, too.
I’d imagine the survey should take less than 5 minutes of your time, and I’d greatly appreciate you taking that time. While the survey system asks you if you want to supply an email address as you submit, you don’t have to – your responses can remain completely anonymous.
I’ll keep the survey running from June 22 2011 through to July 15 2011.
This survey is now closed.
I have to admit, I have great personal reservations towards virtualising backup servers. There’s a simple, fundamental reason for this: the backup server should have as few dependencies as possible in an environment. Therefore to me it seems completely counter-intuitive to make the backup server dependent on an entire virtualisation layer existing before it can be used.
For this reason I also have some niggling concerns with running a backup server as a blade server.
Personally, at this point in time, I would never willingly advocate deploying a NetWorker server as a virtual machine (except in a lab situation) – even when running in director mode.
Let me qualify: I consider ‘director’ mode to be where the NetWorker server acts almost like a dedicated storage node – it only backs up its own index/bootstrap information; with all other backups in the datazone being sent to storage nodes. Hence, as much as possible, all it is doing is ‘directing’ the backups.
But I’m keen to understand your thoughts on the matter.
This survey has now closed.
From around mid-November through to the start of December, our second NetWorker usage survey was run. Do you think NetWorker is an enterprise product, or a workgroup product? If you’re thinking workgroup, the survey results should correct you on that. Let’s take a look for instance at the number of clients that NetWorker sites are protecting:
That’s over 50% of NetWorker deployments being used to protect sites with more than 250 clients – clearly entrenching it in the datacentre.
For the full report, go to the Reports section on nsrd.info and retrieve the first listed report – “NetWorker Usage Survey, November 2010″. (No registration required.)
In March this year, I ran a NetWorker Usage Survey to gauge the lay of the land in terms of how and on what NetWorker is deployed within the user community. As a result of that, hundreds of people downloaded the March 2010 NetWorker Usage Survey Report.
It’s time to revisit that survey; I’ve adjusted the questions a little based on some of the responses from the previous survey results, and I’m keen for as many answers as possible to make this a worthwhile report. (Don’t forget, the report will be free to download.)
I’ll be aiming to keep the survey running until the end of November, and publish the results early in December. So please, fill out the survey below and have your say!
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The survey has now closed. The report will be posted soon.
The top article(s) for March related to the highly successful NetWorker Usage survey run. With over 200 respondents, this survey asked questions covering:
The results were quite interesting; with over 65% of respondents using open source databases in their environments, it perhaps most a clear message to EMC that support for some form of backup integration with these modules are important, something I was lucky enough to be able to speak directly to product management about last week as well.
It also spoke clearly to EMC’s competitors that FUD regarding NetWorker’s place in enterprise backup is just that. With a high percentage of respondents reporting using NetWorker to backup environments of 500+ clients, NetWorker is not (nor was it ever) a “small” backup product. It’s there in major enterprises ensuring that they stay up and running.
You can download the survey report from here.
The first NetWorker Usage Survey for the NetWorker Information Hub ran between March 11 2010 and March 20 2010. During that time there were 211 respondents to the survey, and the results of the survey are now available.
The survey focused on three primary components:
Several lessons were learned in this survey, and based on the excellent responses received, I’m looking forward to conducting more.
Click this link to download the report in PDF format. Long term, as more reports are generated from surveys an archive will be maintained on the reports page of the main site.
The NetWorker Usage Survey will be closing in 2 days, and time is starting to run out to participate.
You can take part in the usage survey here: NetWorker Usage Survey. It takes less than 2 minutes to fill in the survey, and will not only help me plan future articles, but also provide feedback to the NetWorker Mailing List and EMC themselves on basic usage patterns of the product relating to versions, operating systems, modules and features. It can be filled out totally anonymously.
Personally I’m finding the results fascinating as they come in, and can’t wait to share them with readers of the blog, the NetWorker mailing list and EMC.
[Edit, 2010-03-20]
Voting in the NetWorker Usage Survey has now closed. The results will be published on the blog in the week starting 22 March.
I’m interested in gathering a basic understanding of the NetWorker deployment profiles amongst people who are reading this blog. I’m hoping that the survey is short enough that you won’t mind quickly filling it in. My purpose in collecting this is to get an understanding of the sorts of topics I might cover in future.
Note – if you have multiple NetWorker servers, select each version of NetWorker you’re running as a server in the first question, and continue to aggregate the answers for all your datazones throughout.
I’ll be keeping this survey running until Saturday 21 March 2010, Australian time.
[Edit, 2010-03-20]
The survey has now closed. Results will be posted in the week starting 22 March 2010, and a link will be provided here once published to the survey results.
[Edit, 2010-03-27]
You can download the survey results from here.
