02Apr EMC Networker 7.3.2 Evaluation

It’s time to evaluate the latest data security offering from EMC - Networker 7.3.2, their flagship backup solution. This product was originally developed and intended for UNIX systems although it’s been ported for use on Windows for some time now.

It’s probably … no … wait … it IS the most configurable backup product I’ve ever used. It’s obviously a product that is intended for people that know what they’re doing. The main reason for saying this is that the product guesses nothing for you. You have to configure everything, something that any administrator out there will tell you is the way things should be.

Anyway, the Networker Administration Console DOES work with IE7, despite the manual saying the console is only supported on IE 5.5+ and IE 6.x - nice.

The first thing I noticed after the configuration is that it’s FAST. For the Exchange database I was testing on the backup job ran 10 minutes quicker than the same database backed up with the same hardware only using a different backup software solution (Backup Exec by Symantec, formerly Veritas). For the size of the database this is quite a difference. For a huge Exchange organisation with many thousands of users I can only assume that these differences would be significant across the board (network latency/hardware differences etc excluded).

During the course of my testing I’ve talked with a guy named Andy Hood, one of the Senior Systems Engineers at EMC in Australia. The support from Andy has been nothing short of excellent and to me that’s a big reason to go with a product like this. It doesn’t matter how good YOU are, eventually you’re probably going to need support of some sort. So thanks Andy, I’ll keep this in mind when the buying decision is made.

Despite the slightly more difficult configuration of Networker compared to the other products I’ve tested, the results have been very promising.