Networker is tightly integrated with EMC’s storage platforms and solutions like Data Domain and Avamar.
Networker is well suited for storage specialists who want to focus on backup and integrate multiple storage, networking, and software components in order to stitch together a solution that meets their needs. This is the opposite of Unitrends’ value proposition, which wants you to focus on your business instead of on your backup.
Primary Disadvantages of EMC Networker:
Networker’s licensing fees tend to be expensive for growing businesses due to the licensing model – charging on a per-feature, per-client, per-operating system, and the like basis.
Networker tends to have a lower ROI (Return on Investment) and higher TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) due to higher operational expenses of putting together, managing, and monitoring servers, storage, networks, operating systems, and data protection (backup, archiving, and disaster recovery) software.
The non-integrated nature of Networker leads to finger-pointing among the server, storage, networks, operating systems, and data protection (backup, archiving, and disaster recovery) software vendors when a problem occurs.
Setting up deduplication can be difficult in terms of balancing the software requirements with the hardware and operating system requirements of the system upon which the Networker software (possibly in conjunction with Avamar) will operate.
Care must be taken when performing source-level deduplication (or for that matter, compression, and/or encryption) using Networker on systems because of the load it places on those systems.
