Veritas NetBackup Reviews

• Ease to use
• Friendly interface
• Logs are very easy to read, parse, and use for diagnostics.

Backup for over 10,000 jobs with a failure rate under 0.5%.

I am not interested in any features because I have worked with all of the backup solutions that are now available in the market.

The restore tool is not friendly to newcomers. It takes some of our storage and backup admin/support a long time to wrestle with it, but then they have enough knowledge to work even with NetBackup competitors.

We have encountered some issues when upgrading to 8.1 due to data which could not transfer in plain (non-encrypted over network). However, it has now been resolved.

Fully scalable.

Almost all issues can be resolved by experience admins, even though some really difficult problems have to be raise with vendors.

I’ve seen organisations using NetBackup efficiently improving on data protection and recovery while reducing potentially huge costs due to the features I’ve mentioned above.

• Backup compatibility with most of the existing, legacy, and emerging softwares, filesystems, databases, and technologies.
• User-friendliness.
• Ease of installing, configuring, upgrading, and troubleshooting.
• Support services.
• Features like deduplication, FlashBackup, GRT, BMR, snapshot backups for virtual machines, cloud backup integration, duplication, and AIR (Auto Image Replication) feature.

Veritas is already consistently and proactively developing the backup software to make it more compatible and efficient with the latest and emerging technologies. I feel they should stick to this development and increase the pace of this development a bit more to cope up with the current need of data protection market.

There have been issues with performance and some features. However, the support is proactive and they resolve them in a timely fashion to the best of our knowledge.

Nothing so far.

10 out of 10.

We used TSM earlier. We switched to NetBackup primarily for its valuable features (as mentioned above).

Easy in terms of setting up the three tier NetBackup domain. Challenges were encountered though while setting up other aspects like network, resiliency, firewalls, etc.

I can’t comment much as there’s not much visibility on this aspect. However, I’d advise mostly to go for a capacity based license for mid to large scale organisations.

Go for it! It’s the best available backup software in the market.

Data replication among critical DCs across regions.

AIR and duplication, overall management and troubleshooting.

DDBoost.

Not since version 7 and higher.

The number of media servers is restricted and this should be pointed out by the vendor.

Quite good. Seven out of 10.

We switched due to better scalability and overall app management.

It's pretty straightforward for a simple configuration but much more complex for a large environment, with many features and tuning required.

Acceptable if you need to implement it for larger environments, e.g. over 1000 clients. For smaller setups it might be too expensive.

IBM TSM, EMC NetWorker.

This is a mature product, one of the market leaders, so if you can afford to purchase and have significant infrastructure to be protected, then go ahead and speak to Veritas.

We are an SMB, but for our client, it is a life saver.

• TAR importing
• Scriptable scheduling
• Central catalog
• Local and remote backup
• DLO: Client for laptops
  

• Integration
• Setup implementation

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability yet. However, our largest customer barely has 100 NBU clients.

On Veritas, the response time is good.

Our customers have used a very wide variety of options. However, almost all of them switched due to better handling time, straight line backup, recover windows, integration with BD, and better archiving options.

The initial setup varies from customer to customer. Most setups are straightforward, but they tend to be complex over time, due to adding DR sites, alternative media, and tuning backup times.

Personally, I'd tell them to make an inventory of what they want to backup, how often, and the size of backup and recovery windows. After that, we talk about how their requirements weigh in on the pricing/licensing. After that, then the real thing starts.

We evaluated several solutions, including free/open source options and we ran some trials.

Always leave room for more options.

Restores individual emails simply for users when requested.
Catalog is user-friendly, and finds all important information about any media needed for a restore request.

• Wide systems could be backup/restored; multiple databases, Granular restore capabilities for individual MS-Exchange Emails and normal folders/files
• NDMP backup capability for NAS storage
• Virtual environment backup/restore capabilities
• OST backup capabilities
• Could be used for both of Physical and Virtual Environments.

The ability to use different disk appliance brands as Pure Disk (not OST), such as EMC Data Domain .

No, it is so stable.

No, it scales efficiently.

8 out of 10.

EMC Networker (Legato).

Setup of FC (Fiber) backup is complex.

It is suitable for an enterprise solution.

IBM Tivoli, EMC Data Networker (Legato).

Backup using Fiber Optical connections.
Use Veritas Disk Appliance for deduplication and other valuable benefits.

It helped us to:

• Improve the backup success and recovery rate.
• Reduce the window to backup.
• Automate database backups.
• Automate the disk-based offsite to the other location as part of the disaster recovery plan.

The Replication Director, Auto Image Replication, Accelerator, Oracle Intelligent Policy, synthetic and VADP backups are the most valuable features.

The virtual environment, cloud integration, copy data management features need improvement.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent.

Initially, we were using IBM TSM and Legato Networker (now EMC NetWorker). However, due to the support and legacy of the product features, we switched over to this solution.

The setup was straightforward, it is easy to configure and user-friendly to administer.

Pricing is pretty costly as compared to the other products but worth investing for the long term and high ROI.

We looked at HPE Data Protector and Commvault.

It is an excellent product, i.e., if you are looking for a stable and performance oriented backup infrastructure with improved RPO and RTO.

It enabled Telecom Fiji Ltd to backup the Unix-based OS. Backup Exec 12.0 was only able to backup the Windows platform.

Deduplication is the most valuable feature as it reduces the backup time and provides backup of a single copy of data as opposed to multiple versions of the same file.

GUI needs to be more user-friendly.

The product has been stable from day one. The only issue was on Telecom Fiji Ltd's side, i.e., when the tapes are not rotated per cycle and the data is not transferred to it for clearing the storage pool. This caused the pool to fill up and affect the backup jobs.

We did encounter some stability issues. We could not read the LT04 media on the LT05 drives. The majority of our old data was on LT04 and we could not transfer/read it. There should be interoperability on these drives.

Technical support is excellent.

Previously, we were using the Veritas Backup Exec 12.0. We changed to this solution because we needed a backup solution that could back-up the Unix-based OS.

The setup was complex, considering that we have never worked on an Unix-based OS before.

The software and license are very expensive.

We looked at CommVault and Veeam.

This product is very robust. Be prepared for the cost.

Six months ago, I recovered several dozen TBs of production data after our storage failed. I recovered Enterprise Vault, Exchange, Oracle, and SQL DBs and VMs. We did not lose any production data and immediately after recovery, the business ran smoothly.

You can construct a comprehensive robust backup solution based on NetBackup. Management of such a solution will not be an ultimate challenge. I can rely on this product if I need a restore.

The last releases introduced a simplified backup of MS SQL and Oracle. I'd like to have a more user-friendly interface for recovering MS SQL. It would be nice to have native support for MySQL and PostgreSQL. Veritas should increase the number of supported storage options.

To be more specific, NetBackup has the user interface and if you need to restore DB instead of failed one - it's OK. But if you need to restore DB to different location or another server you need: find required backup copy via the user interface, create *.bch file with restore parameters, edit this file to adopt it for the new DB destination, open this file in the user interface. For beginners, these steps are not something obvious.

Netbackup can backup MySQL via Oracle policy, to be honest, this is not completely native support and this method has a few limitations. In fact, you can buy from Veritas (or Zmanda) clients for MySQL or PostgerSQL from Zmanda to backup MySQL or PostgreSQL on Linux. But sometimes this is not convenient.

Currently, as far as I know, for Replication Director has support snapshots and replication only for Netapp storage (ONTAP) and support of snapshots for EMC VNX and EMC Celerra. Despite the fact that for my environment this functionality was enough, I think that Veritas should develop Replication Director and add more storage devices. I believe that now, as data grows really fast, backup software should not only copy data in a classic way, but should be able to manage snapshots and replication between storage devices. In fact, this applies to any enterprise backup software.

Any large products have their issues. I cannot say that the stability issues were unacceptable in comparison with TSM, Commvault, or Veeam, for example.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10. They are good.

In the organization where I was previously, NetBackup replaced Backup Exec because Backup Exec did not have enough flexibility/scalability for the current environment.

I've implemented several NetBackup installations and all of them run smoothly. However, if you are going to implement it for the first time, I really recommend you run some tests before doing so.

If you have a complex environment with dozens of different servers and apps, I recommend you look for TB licensing. We decided to convert our per server licenses to simplify the license management.

We did not evaluate other options.

My recommendation is the same for any product. Decide what options you really need, and then test the required options. If the required options work fine, then implement the solution.