In July 2003, 10 years ago, EMC announced they were buying Legato for around $1.3 billion dollars (US). The acquisition was completed in October 2003, but almost immediately after it was announced, long-term partners of both Legato and EMC were seeing Legato start aligning to being an EMC company.
It took years to stop referring to NetWorker as “Legato NetWorker” … in fact, there’s many people around who still call it that. I’m too fussy on being accurate, and have been working for systems integrators all that time, where accuracy is critical in sales, to have kept using the Legato moniker. To be honest, it’s a bit of a shame it’s officially gone, but that’s just an old timer reminiscing.
After ten years, how have EMC handled the stewardship of NetWorker? Oh, to be sure, there were other Legato products – the Xtender products in particular, but they’d not been developed internally at Legato, just acquired. They weren’t the heart of the company – that was NetWorker.
EMC obviously liked what NetWorker could do (why wouldn’t they? Even ten years ago it was one of the best, and most underrated enterprise backup products around) … so much so that they quickly killed off their own backup product, EDM, to replace it with NetWorker.
It’s fair to say though that for a few years at least, the NetWorker/EMC mashup seemed to create a few headaches … at least as far as people external to the company could see. When EMC acquired Legato, Legato were preparing to release NetWorker 7.2. So over the course of ten years, we’ve seen NetWorker go from 7.2 to 7.3, 7.3 to 7.4, 7.4 to 7.5, 7.5 to 7.6, and finally 7.6 to 8.0. That’s a lot of 7s.
The funny thing is though – much as over the years those incremental jumps annoyed me at times, NetWorker 8 represents such a radical overhaul and suite of new features that in hindsight I don’t honestly think any of those previous versions really deserved a new full version number. 7.6 came closest.
That wasn’t to say they were standing still.
OK, for a while they might have been treading water, but…
…NetWorker was a product that was purchased almost ahead of its time. I’ve always said that the best backup products are frameworks, where you can almost infinitely stack permutations on around them, building and enhancing and changing to suit the needs of each environment they’re deployed in. There’s no doubt NetWorker is a framework.
Yet as a software-only stack, NetWorker had been reaching the point where it wasn’t immediately certain where it should go next. That did linger a little while at the start of the EMC acquisition, but eventually the backup message filtered through. EMC now has an entire BRS division … it was created with the acquisition of Data Domain; the need for it was created with the acquisition of Avamar, but the initial thrust for it was created with the acquisition of Legato.
Data Domain is undoubtedly an excellent tool in a backup suite, but in and of itself, it’s like using tar and mtx to achieve enterprise backups. Avamar tells a compelling story, but source based deduplication can’t tell the entire story in a world of burgeoning multimedia resources and massive databases.
EMC needed to acquire Legato because NetWorker is the tool that glues the other bits together. NetWorker gives all the automation required to allow a Data Domain to seriously transform the backup processes for organisations. Equally, couple NetWorker with Avamar and you can solve a bunch of other challenges within an environment. By itself, NetWorker offers the management framework, the operational framework, and the solid dependability of a long-term enterprise backup product. Throw in some deduplication technology on top of that and you’ve got yourself a damn good backup environment for your organisation.
While the germination of the NetWorker success story within EMC has taken a while, we’re now well and truly seeing the fruits of that endeavour.
Happy anniversary, EMC and Legato.