Veritas NetBackup Appliance Reviews

We do not have a dedicated NetBackup Appliance.  Instead, we deploy through VMware.

We are actually in the process of migrating everything to the cloud and we are trying to bring our on-premises exposure down to zero. We have yet to see where we will end up with that effort.  

Our primary use of NetBackup is for backups. But there are all different types of data that are less critical in the backup requirements in any organization. We use Vertias for on-premises data backup. Gradually, we will have more need for cloud data backup.  

We are looking into appliances for running things on the Docker Container. If we do not have a large number of servers and MSDP (Multicast Source Discovery Protocol), basically we can use service tools or fixed appliances that will allow offloading or streamlining our backup solutions.  

Most organizations are going to the cloud. The on-premises backup solution is not very interesting anymore.  

In our legacy system, Veritas was the number one product for us in many ways to fill our backup requirements. If you have got something like IBM mainframes, for example, then you want to definitely use a Veritas type solution. It has been our go-to product for on-premises backup.  

If you have got a NetBackup Appliance, then you have many options. For example, you can do LTR (Long Term Retention) busted out to the cloud. If you have got longtime retentions then you can do that as an option.  

When you use appliances then you need to make the investment. They do not give it to you cheaply. So, this investment is an RTO (Recovery Time Objective). People who would like not to have this as their objective prefer to go for more of an on-demand solution, like the cloud. Most of the organizations I see are going to the cloud and they escape the physical architecture to minimize investment in their local data center as much as possible.  

So we, in turn, are currently using the VMware on an appliance, but we are planning to go through the process of decommissioning as much hardware as possible for our solutions. We would like to do that as quickly as possible.  

We have got sufficient backup windows to complete proper backup points. That is not a critical issue for us.  

Scalability is about having the data volume metrics and backup windows available to complete the process. So you need to have sufficient backup windows compared to your volume metrics. Other scalability issues may come into play when you want to just recover with a given RTO (Recovery Time Objective). But it is very uncommon in reality that you will recover from the backup. In the last three years, there was not a single case of recovery from backup. The backup and recovery end up being more for legal obligations than for reality.  

We did our own VMware-based deployment.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Veritas NetBackup Appliance well. Going from our experience and the popular reports, it is one of the top three backup solutions. But the higher ranking is also based on being an appliance and that is not a growing part of the market.  

The product itself, I think, would be nine-out-of-ten. But the future market for the product will dwindle.  

NetBackup helps system administrators and solution architects to easily replicate and back up data from one site to another site. It is very flexible and suitable for mix environments. it has many advanced features which are needed for my customer's data centers. Most of our clients are looking for stable and sustainable solutions for protecting their data.

Most of our customers are using this software. We help to implement this solution for our customers. Most often, I use this solution in private-cloud and on-premises environments.

We can create a unified solution for our customers, in many data centers.

For example, one of my customers has some important data that needs backing up, and we had to use several solutions at the same time. These included Veeam and some backup scripts for their Linux environment. This solution has allowed them to unify their backup solution. The others were removed, leaving them with a single solution that was well suited to their requirements.

Another one of my customers had experienced a virus a few years ago, and most of their services were affected. Most of their data had been encrypted by the virus, and they were unable to decrypt it. This solution helped that company to restore their data in less than one week, and they were thereafter able to continue providing their services. It was an amazing event at the time.

This solution is flexible, powerful, and fast. It is very capable of scaling and very good for heterogeneous environments.

The day-to-day operations including imaging, backup, and restore, are very easy to do.

This solution includes many good features such as:

NetBackup Accelerator
NetBackup Replication Director
Synthetic Backups
Multi-streamed Backup
OpenStorage (OST) support
Bare-metal restore, supports P2V as an option
Automatic robotic/tape drive configuration
Broad tape device support

And also replication, compression, and integration with VMware. Many of the features it has are not available in other solutions.

This solution is very expensive, which is a problem for many companies. Some of them rule out this product because of the price.

I would like to see support for databases such as MySQL and MongoDB. This solution would benefit from integration with new operating systems. 

I have been working with this solution for more than twelve years.

This solution is really stable. It worked very well in the case of my customer who was attacked by the virus, and it is not dependent on other solutions.

This solution is designed in 3 layers Master Server, Media Server, Clients. This flexible architecture helps customers protecting their data across multiple data centers with maximum flexibility replication data across two sites also integration with the other storage such as EMC Data Domain and NetApp is very helpful for replication management, deduplication, and staging backup data.

Due to sanctions, my customers are often unable to use support from the original companies.

I have not had any experience with their technical support, although two of my colleagues have worked in Australia and have experience with their team. The level of support varies depending on the contract.

From what I understand, customers were satisfied with the support.

When it comes to the initial setup, this solution is not as easy as others when you are implementing it for the first time. You need to have experience with solutions such as Oracle, Linux, Exchange Server and the Malware Agent, otherwise, you will not be able to implement this solution at all.

This solution is easier to implement and configure than the software versions of NetBackup. You need to connect the channels, and then install the agents on your operating systems.

My customers generally implement this solution using in-house consultants.

I have implemented this solution, and it took me less than five days.

This solution is more expensive than HPE Data Protector and EMC NetWorker.

It costs more to license support for this solution, compared to others.

We routinely evaluate solutions in this area. One of them is EMC NetWorker, which is a good solution. IBM TSM and Veeam are also good solutions. However, none of these compare to Veritas in large projects.

This is a very good solution for Enterprise-level companies. One of my larger customers has been using this solution for more than five years. Because they didn't have experience with NetBackup, they preferred this appliance version. They have it deployed in their private data center.

While this is one of the best solutions in this space, the price is expensive compared to other solutions.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Over the past seven years, we have been using this backup solution. However, over the past year, we have begun to integrate Commvault, and have stopped worrying about upgrades for Veritas.

We are using an on-premises deployment and it has been used for our data center. We have various operating systems including Solaris, Windows, and Linux. Our databases include Oracle, MySQL, MongoDB, and Informix. We also have virtualization. This solution is responsible for everything in the data center.

We have good data backup coverage.

This solution has to have better integration with the cloud, as well as with other solutions such as Business Intelligence products.

They need to simplify the backup licensing model, as it is really complex at the moment. We are having problems with them because of the licensing, and this is why we are changing solutions.

It is not easy to manage the environment, and you need the expertise to do it.

The backup catalog is very complex and takes a lot of space compared to other vendors. There is an important need for a better catalog management system.

We have 99.9% completion of the backups.

At one point during our migration, we experienced a loss of all of our backups. It took approximately one week to restore all of them.

This solution is able to scale within an environment without a problem.

We back up more than two thousand servers.

Technical support for this solution is good, as long as you are paying for the high-level support. Otherwise, you will be dealing with somebody responsible for supporting many different products.

We did not use another solution prior to this one. We have used different versions of this solution over the past seven years, and we are now moving everything over to Commvault because they have a simple licensing model.

The initial setup of this solution is not simple. It is complex, and you really need a professional technician to assist. In the end, however, you have a really stable solution.

The deployment took place over time, where we have been improving things over the years.

We have perhaps twenty administrators and operators who manage this solution. It is not used by the end-users.

The price of this solution is very high compared to other solutions.

This is a really good technology, but they are missing some key, important features.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is that there is always something that can be improved.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution is to manage the backup of our very large infrastructure. We have five thousand servers on virtual machines used for several applications such as Oracle database, SAP, SharePoint, and other enterprise software. 

Our experience is in the manufacturing industry. The workload includes lifecycle management, manufacture execution, and software to support the manufacturing processes.

The most valuable feature is that the backup and restoring process is very fast. It is very resilient and it is quite easy to manage. I only have an architectural perspective, but another feature is the new multi-tenant feature available on the Flex system with the Veritas 5340 Appliance. This is a very appreciated feature, and we are required to maintain segregation between tenants.

We had some problems with the backup of the physical server. With the virtual machine field, the virtual server area was very strong. We had some difficulties with the physical server, the IBM Power, and the AIX operating system. The problems were with both the server-side and the storage-side. There were also issues in doing the back up for a physical server with others, like Windows server.

This is not a very complex problem in a Virtual environment, but we are facing a Legacy infrastructure, and we had some problems with Veritas and integrating with the Legacy hardware.

The interface is very poor. Currently, they are working on implementing a new web interface that enables the multi-tenancy directly on the user. The new features that they are implementing are faster and in terms of functionalities, they cover a lot of enterprise challenges.

This solution is stable, and we haven't had any problems. We have experience with other back up solutions such as IBM, DOT rep-storage manager, now known as the IBM Spectrum Scale. These are quite similar in terms of stability. It is also very reliable and it's not difficult to implement or to deliver an availability solution or a disaster recovery solution.

This solution is scalable. We can add a storage shelf to scale the storage capability. You can scale the master server to give you more computation of resources. The management of the infrastructure is scalable. We currently have a multi-tenancy limit where you can manage a maximum of eight tenants. If you require more than eight then you have to scale out. We have not yet been faced with this issue but there is quite a bit of mutation of this product.

We have ten users as backup administrators.

We have a relationship with backup support. Any engagement with technical support is very easy and quick. I have had good experiences when I have been faced with any problems. I have never had to call the help desk directly or the support team. I have always gone through the account manager for a solution.

The setup was not complex, it was straightforward. We had a delivery team very specialized in it, so it was not at all difficult. 

The deployment took about two to three weeks from the shipment of the hardware to the release of the solution in the production system. We are currently phasing another project stream in September. We were supposed to plan two weeks of activity to set up and configure the solution. I am currently the project manager of the project.

This is an available and reliable solution, which is very good to set up for enterprise systems. We had some issues with the management of delivery where we were only provided with a technician to implement the solution, which delayed the planning of installation. However, the technician was highly qualified.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

For example, in the past, we had to upgrade the operating system and then the software, but now we have everything bundled so that there is one upgrade for everything, which is a great improvement for us in management. It saves us time.

The features that are most valuable are the ease of integration in deployment and updates. Everything is packaged when you do the upgrade, so it's quite easy to manage. 

The price could be improved.

Also, sometimes when you have multiple appliances, you have to physically manage them one by one. It's okay if you have a few, but when you have ten or more, it's a bit annoying and takes more people/time to handle the management.

The scalability isn't great. Every time you want to add storage, you can't just add a little bit, you need to add a lot.

In a future release, they should make it NetApp storage, that's something there on the roadmap that's not available now.

Compared to a homemade installation, this appliance is very stable.

The solution is not very scalable because when you want to add storage you need to add a lot of storage. You cannot just add a few discs. Every time you add storage, you must add a huge amount of storage. In the future, we do plan to add some appliances, so we will increase the usage and replace some old appliances with new ones.

For specific appliances, support is very good.

The past four years we have used dedicated appliances. Before that, we were using homemade servers.

The initial setup was straightforward. I found it very quick and easy. For maintenance, we just need two people.

We're using the on-premises deployment model.

I would recommend others to consider the solution if they're using a lot of workloads. It's a really good product.  However, if you have only a small workload, it's a huge fixture for nothing. 

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

We use the on-premises model of this solution. Our primary use case of this solution is to get backups for all of our servers and backup for our in-house programs. 

The recovery backup has been problematic. 

They need to make the licensing more clear. They should give all of the licensing details for the portals and be more clear. I have accidentally purchased the incorrect license because it's not clear.

Stability is good. We haven't had any issues when restoring backups. If you do a regular backup I would give the process a nine out of ten. But for the recovery side of this process, I would rate a four out of ten. It needs improvement. 

Scalability is good. Technical support helps us with this. 

We rarely need their help. I would give their technical support an 8.5 out of ten. We are satisfied. 

The initial setup was straightforward. 

The licensing costs are approximately 150,00 Saudi Riyals. It's a costly enterprise. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. I would recommend it to somebody considering it. 

I am a consultant that provides DR backup solutions for cloud-based and hybrid environments. I assist my clients with choosing solutions, and this is one of the solutions that I recommend.

My experience with this solution is in both on-premises and public-cloud environments.

The interface is ok, but not the best. Newer solutions have more flexible interfaces. This interface provides more detail but is not as friendly for the non-technical user. I would like to see a product that requires less expertise to manage it. Companies are struggling with getting people who are experts, so a product with less knowledge-intensive requirements would be better.

Having more templates that help to accomplish things based on best practices for vertical solutions are needed. For example, more support for virtual environments.

I would like to see support for different cloud providers with specific features for each one. If I'm working with Amazon, I would expect it to support the specific features of Amazon. If I was to migrate my solution, my systems, or applications from cloud-to-cloud, I want to be able to do it easily and transparently. Similarly, if I want to migrate from on-premise to cloud, it should be easy. The same should be true for hybrid-cloud environments because there are intensive knowledge requirements.

I don't think that there is a problem with the scalability of this solution, but you need to deal with cloud intensiveness when you deal with Big Data. I don't think that Veritas is doing this with Big Data.

I don't deal with technical support myself, but from what I have heard from my current customers, they haven't had any trouble. This is a plus for a big company like Veritas.

I find that the mature products in this space are supporting the cloud only partially. The main products that really support the cloud are coming from startups, rather than from mature companies.

Choosing a solution depends on the usage and the environment. There are different solutions for different scenarios. You can do backups by copying disks, or you can do logical backups, such as of a database.

I like Veritas. They are a large company with good best practices, and they give good support. They can invest in knowledge-intensive features to make their solution more user-friendly. They need to work more on their R&D, be more innovative, and take more risks in providing solutions for the hybrid cloud and for migrations.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The intelligent policies feature is used in order to protect the VMware infrastructure. One of the things that makes a big difference for our company is the usage of these intelligent policies. The system automatically provides extra protection for any VMware server application or service. From a backup administrator's point of view, this is what we call peace of mind. It reduces the workload and therefore reduces resources needed from the company.

The backup administrator always tends to be combined with all other administrators and tries to find if there is any new application, service, or server. With intelligent policies, this has been resolved. I create one policy for VMware because it has a very good integration when we pair it up with the API. With this intelligent policy, anything that is changed into the VMware is automatically led back to NetBackup protection and NetBackup covers it.

The other great thing for the company is that this kind of application is fully encrypted so it gives us full compliance for issues. That's the greatest benefit.

One of the best features is the VMware integration with NetBackup.

The cloud-based backup is also an excellent feature. 

The ability to establish many plans for long term retention, especially using some of their appliances is very helpful. We're not using paid backups for long term retention. It's our business procedure. Instead, we use new apps for storage. There is a type of storage they offer in which they give us member shared space and we can establish a parent point of the primary appliances in order to comply with the long term retention.

One of the other features of NetBackup is that it gives you Granular Recovery Technology for three major applications, or services: SQL, SharePoint, and Exchange. That means that you don't have to deploy an agent on Exchange servers or a DAG server. It also supports Office 365, and Cloud-based services. You don't have to deploy agents in a SharePoint environment, a SharePoint file, and you don't have to deploy an agent in SQL because when you create the VMware policy and you activate Granular Recovery Technology, the VMware technology that is used gives you the ability to restore with GRT, without the obligations which have an agent on the server. That is a great feature.

The only drawback for NetBackup, and of course for Veritas, is that they have stuck to the same environment and to the same user interface. This needs to be improved in future releases. It needs to be more dynamic.

I would like to see more prepared, pre-configured reports and higher integration with other leading-edge products. I'm not talking about backup solutions. I'm talking about other services like ticketing systems such as ServiceNow. 

They need to offer more integrations because of the convergence of the demands on the system these days.

The solution is very stable when there is no major change that actually requires corresponding changes to the policies of the NetBackup protection environment. If there are no more major changes from protected areas, like the VMware infrastructure, like the application of services, the solution is stable.

It's even stable with the patches that Microsoft releases from time to time, that can cause so many problems.

Some jobs may fail, but it reports back to the Backup administrator. An extensive loss gives the opportunity to find out what was changed and what is going on and proceed and make all the necessary adjustments to get back on track.

It's very stable also as an environment. After one and a half years we've never had a failure in a hard disk startup and we've never had a failure of NetBackup services. We never had any kind of corruption or any kind of failure, generally speaking.

There are some small issues, as with any product. However, the backup administrator continues reporting daily and checking to see if everything is working fine.

The solution is very scalable.

There are different types of technical support. They offer Gold and 24/7 monitoring, for example. The also offer support where they take the responsibility of monitoring the appliances. Even in cases where the backup administrator is not aware of an imminent hard disk failure, they know about it and send the replacement.

We decided to go with the Essential Support because my knowledge is very good on this product, so we try to eliminate the costs of more premium offerings. Even with Essential Support, their response time is very, very satisfactory. There was no situation where I had to call them or open on the technical support portal and chase them to get answers. Usually, they respond within 4 hours. That's really good especially because it's merely Essential Support, not Platinum or Gold. 

There was one case where we had a problem that needed escalation. The escalation happens after the second or the third action from their side. Usually, they request some logs to provide immediate feedback. They didn't spend too much time investigating the logs, and they responded immediately. They can escalate it as well if they need to.

We used to use Symantec, but it was a very smooth transition because Symantec and Veritas were part of the same company.

We looked at Veeam, which was very competitive in the process but was only software.  

Veritas won out because it offered a solution that also had native hardware and we didn't want to use space from our core storage.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. We use a Linux based backup, and we chose the solution because we are using Veritas appliances as well; it was recommended by Veritas.

It's quite easy for someone who is experienced with backup administration. It might not be as easy for someone implementing for the first time, but for someone who is already experienced, it's very easy.

There is only one server you have to prepare. The configuration is very easy and the integration with VMware was a piece of cake. It's not a complex ATI that you need to strip down, connect, stream, send, etc. It's very, very easy.

Thre are initially only four or five policies that NetBackup uses with Microsoft Windows, SQL, Oracle, VMware and Check Point. That means that you don't have to deploy agents everywhere.

The correlation between the amount that the company spends to start with the infrastructure and the gain that it has seen in terms of work components has been good. For example, the deduplication ratio that NetBackup performs is highly competitive. It's a very, very good thing because we don't have to buy extra storage that creates an extra cost for the company. 

We use the on-premises deployment model.

We've been very happy with this solution. The correlation of NetBackup with a Veritas solution, which gave us the opportunity to dynamically capture the protected data in the two different styles, was helpful. Another Veritas webpage solution works perfectly with NetBackup and gives us a dynamic picture of protected data.

One other improvement we've seen since implementation, from a business' point of view, is that the usage of the new popular technology of Veritas, like the access storage, where the initial configuration is 700 terabytes, gives us long term retention. The company avoids paying for quite expensive robotic libraries. The access storage is outside the company but the backup and the reach hold times are working in tandem. The speed on daily operation, in terms of cataloging, restoring operations, and related things are very good.

The DR (Disaster Recovery) in RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) has also improved. Everybody is looking for the best solution that actually gives a balance RPO or RTO. And these two terms are highly related to the DR, the disaster recovery plans. From that point of view, they are a great improvement in contrast with the previous solution that we had. The previous solution was a backup exit. Again, it was the very best, before it was Symantec. We had it for more than five years but when we moved to NetBackup we discovered a whole new world of possibilities and capabilities.

I would advise anyone to use NetBackup. I know the solution well, and I know that they offer very good implication ratio. Of course, I have this opinion because we are also using their appliances, which are pre-configured specifically for this operation.

I don't know if these ratios will be sustained if a customer buys just the software, and uses a third-party storage option to keep the backup. In our case, I would suggest sharing the POC with NetBackup, and even if the POC is without an appliance, I think they can expect to see a big difference. It's very fast.

I would rate the solution ten out of ten. If you would ask me about the software alone I would give it 9, but with the appliance, it deserves a 10.