Last month I ran a birthday giveaway competition – tell me a NetWorker success story, and go in the running for a signed copy of my book, Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability. Since then, it’s been a bit quiet on the NetWorker Hub, and I apologise for that: my time has been considerably occupied with either work or much needed downtime of late. Sometimes it really does seem that every month gets busier for me than the last. (And by “sometimes”, I sort of mean “every month”).
One of the original symbols for NetWorker was a knight in shining armour – very much reflective of its purpose to protect the most valuable asset in your castle: your data. So it seems fitting that as I share some of the success stories I received, I use a knight as the image for the post. So let’s have at it.
Success Story #1:
With the book and blog it make me clear where lots of thing confusing on the Data Protection and helps me to present buying Data protection suite over TSM.
Hey, it may not specifically be a NetWorker success story, but I’m chuffed, regardless!
Success Story #2:
NetWorker gave me a career to be honest. I have come across multiple situations where a critical recovery or ad-hoc backup has saved someone’s job.
This is a story I can really identify with – NetWorker definitely gave me a career, too!
Success Story #3:
Had the experience recently where senior management was amazed with the fact that we managed to recover data up to last 24 hours with no loss otherwise for 7 file servers that were part of a BCP triggered to recover from bad weather in Houston. Came down to the team sharing with management on how the environment is backed up and how validation is done as a check and balance. Awesome experience when you realise that the investment on a good backup strategy and the governed implementation of the same does pay off during business continuity efforts.
Backup is good, but recovery is great. Being able to pull backup systems in to help provide business continuity is a great example of planning.
Success Story #4:
Saved my customers a lot of times when files has been deleted.
Again, I can agree with this one. That’s why NetWorker has been so important to me over the years – it’s helped so many customers in so many challenging situations.
Success Story #5:
Working with NetWorker since 7.6, I would say NetWorker and I are growing up together. I’m getting a better engineer year by year and NetWorker did the same. Today I’m doing things (like cluster backups and VM backups) I couldn’t imagine years ago.
My first NetWorker server really was called mars (you’ll get what I mean if you read enough NetWorker man pages), and we’ve both grown a lot since my earlier career as a Unix system administrator. My first server was v4.1, and I had v3 clients back then on a variety of systems. (I think the last time I used a v3 client was in 2000 to backup Banyan Vines systems.) File type devices, advanced file type devices, storage nodes, cluster support, Windows support, Linux support … the list goes on for things I’ve seen added to NetWorker over the years!
Success Story #6:
It does what it says on the tin.
Backs up and recovers servers.
What more can you ask for?
Succinct and true.
Success Story #7:
BMR recovery during a virus attack in environment really helped to tackle and restore multiple servers quickly.
(I hear great stories regularly about backups saving businesses during virus and ransomware attacks. Snapshots can help in those situations, of course, too, but the problem with snapshots is that a potent virus or ransomware attack can overwhelm your snapshot storage space, making a bad situation worse.)
Success Story #8:
When looking for a suitable replacement for IBM TSM 5.5/DataDomain VTL. We started to look Networker 8/DataDomain. We were blown away how it’s was so flexible and a powerfull integration with ESX. We have better backup performance/restore and VM backup was so easy that management couldn’t believe I could backup 800 VM without deploying an agent on each server.
Here’s the thing: Data Domain will boost (no pun intended) a lot of average backup products, but you get the true power of that platform when you’re using a fully integrated product like NetWorker or Avamar.
Success Story #9:
We do BAU backup and restore with Networker and not much surprises there, but one capability/feature that saved us a lot of time/money was migrating from legacy DataDomain VTLs to NEW Datadomain Boost Target by just Cloning legacy VTLs.That gave us the opportunity to de-comm old system and still have access to legacy backups without requiring keeping the old devices and servers.
This is a great architectural story. Data Domain is by far the best VTL you can get on the market, but if you want to switch from VTL into true disk based backups, you can handle that easily with NetWorker. NetWorker makes moving backup data around supremely easy – and it’s great at ‘set and forget’ cloning or migration operations, too.
Success Story #10:
Restoring an entire environment of servers with Windows BMR special ISO.
I don’t see much call for BMR these days given the rise of virtualisation in the midrange market, but it’s still an option if you really need it.
Success Story #11:
I was able to take our backup tapes to a remote site in a different city and was able to recover the production servers, including the database servers, in less time than was planned for, thus proving that DR is possible using NetWorker.
NetWorker isn’t all about deduplication. It started at a time when deduplication didn’t exist, and it can still solve problems when you don’t have deduplication in your environment.
Success Story #12:
There are many however let me speak about latest. Guest level backups would put hell lot of load on underlying hypervisor on VM infrastructure. So we deployed NVP and moved all our file systems to it . The blazing speed and FLR helped us to achieve our SLA. Integration with NVP was seamless with 98% deduplication.
NVP really is an awesome success story. The centres of excellence have run high scale backups showing thousands of virtual machines backed up per hour. It really is game changing for most businesses. (Check at the end of the blog article for a fantastic real customer success story that one of the global data protection presales team shared recently.)
Success Story #13:
Have worked on multiple NMDA, NMSAP and DDBEA cases and have resolved them and the customer appreciates the DELL EMC support team.
Success stories come from customers and the people sitting on the other side of the fence, too. There’s some amazingly dedicated people in the DellEMC NetWorker (and more broadly, data protection) support teams … some of them I’ve known for over 15 years, in fact. These are people who take the call when you’re having a bad day, and they’re determined to make sure your day improves.
Success Story #14:
I believe to understand the difference between Networking and Networker was the biggest challenge as I was completely from the networking background.
There are a lot of success stories but I think to state or iterarte success in terms of networker is something which has been set by you and the bench mark for which is very high, so no success stories.
Hopefully I can replicate 5% of your success then probably I would be successful in terms of me.
I remember after I’d been using NetWorker for about 3 years, I managed to get into my first NetWorker training course. There was someone in the course who thought he was going into a generic networking course. And any enterprise backup product like NetWorker really well help you understand your business network a lot more, so this is a pretty accurate story, I think.
Success Story #15:
My success story is simple … every time I restore data for the company/users. Either it may be whole NetWorker server restore or Database (SAP,SQL,ORACLE etc) or file/folder or maybe a BMR.
Every “Thank You” Message I receive from end user gives me immense happiness when I restore data and I am privileged to help others by doing Data Protection. Highly satisfied with my work as its like a game for me. every time I restore Something i treat it as win (Winning the Game).
Big or small, every recovery is important!
Success Story #16:
This story comes from Daniel Itzhak in the DPS Presales team. Dan recently shared a fantastic overview of a customer who’d made the switch to NVP backups with NetWorker. Dan didn’t share it for the competition, but it’s such a great view that I wanted to share it as part of this anyway. Here’s the numbers:
- 1,124 Virtual Machines across multiple sites and vCenter clusters
- 30 days of backups – Average 350 TB per day front end data being protected, 10.2PB logical data protected after 30 days.
- Largest client in the environment – 302 TB. (That is one seriously big virtual machine!)
- Overall deduplication ratio: 35x (to put that in perspective, 350TB per day at 35x deduplication ratio would mean on average 10TB stored per day)
- More than 34,700 jobs processed in that time (VM environments tend to have lower job counts) … 99% of backups finish in under 2 hours every day.
That sounds impressive, right? Well, that’s not the only thing that’s impressive about it. Let’s think back to the NetWorker and Data Domain architecture … optimised data path, source based deduplication, minimum data hops, and storage nodes relegated to device access negotiation only. Competitive products would require big, expensive physical storage nodes/media servers to process that sort of data – I know, I’ve seen those environments. Instead, what did Dan’s customer need to run their environment? Let’s review:
- 1 x RHEL v7.3 NetWorker Server, 9.2.0.3 – 4 vCPUs with 16GB of RAM
- 3 x Storage Nodes (1 remote, 2 local), each with: 4 vCPU and 32GB of RAM
- 2 x NVP – Which you might recall, requires 8 GB of RAM and 4 vCPU
You want to backup 1000+ VMs in under 2 hours every night at 35x deduplication? Look no further than NetWorker and Data Domain.
I’ve contacted the winner – thanks to everyone who entered!