Networker

[Networker] Moving away from Networker

2006-06-22 18:32:28
Subject: [Networker] Moving away from Networker
From: Dave Mussulman <mussulma AT UIUC DOT EDU>
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2006 17:30:14 -0500
There's a general feeling of disatisfaction with EMC/Legato in terms of
their products, their vision, their customer notification and
involvement, their technical support, and their cost/value ratio.  These
factors have made my group decide to not renew our support and
transition to new backups software in the fall.

I'm a little disappointed to come to that, since I have 5 years of
experience as a daily Networker admin.  We've built a substantial
secondary system of scripts to ease operational duties and generate
reports.  Given our relatively simple client/server data model, I'm
really comfortable with my level of how to get things done with
Networker.  But recently, and I think that means about three years ago
when they raised their support/maintenance costs, there's been a real
split between Networker not giving me what I want, and charging me more
for what I don't want.  I'll try to enumerate here.

* Since I mentioned it, I feel their basic, entry level
maintenance/support costs are really expensive.  Legato dropped their
9-5 support for 24x7, and hiked the price up to justify it.  They
claimed most of their customers wanted 24x7 anyway and didn't like the
per incident charges.  That's not true in our environment, but we had to
pay the price.  And because that price was so high, getting it through
purchasing every year is a pain.  My last support renewal was $35,000
for one server and 400 clients.  And we're not doing anything really
fancy -- I'm sure with storage servers or NDMP, it'd be more.

* I'd like to add D2D backups in our environment.  At one time, that was
included, but now it's an extra addon we'd have to buy.  Additionally, I
understand there are still concurrency issues with adv_file types that
makes their inclusion seem unnatural.  Really, it's the irk that it's
yet something else I need to buy when it's standard now in so many other
packages (and backups designs.)

* Making copies of data for offsite use is another complicated task in
Networker -- one that people find their own homebrew ways of executing.
Various threads on this list, some even very recently, show some of the
quirks to getting commands and flags into and out of Networker to assist
this process.  I am not comfortable that my offsite DR operations are
written outside of Networker -- with self-written, potentially invalid,
verification scripts that the offsite copies are complete. Moving data
through backups and making copies of it should be complete, fluid and
easy.  It isn't in Networker.  I'm not sure it's ever gotten any better
in the 5 years I've been using it.

* Our support experiences have not been good, and certainly not worth
what we paid in maintenance.  This list has gone further to answer some
the questions and enhance my understanding of Networker than anything
EMC/Legato has done.  Support seems to answer the quick questions very
quickly, but after the first years I quit asking those -- and my hard
questions (about MSCS backups, or oddities relating to index restores,
or quirks moving server platforms,) either stalled on for longer than
I'd liked, or were resolved but in ways that left me dissatisfied.  For
example, some of them involved deleting temp directories and restarting
the server.  Others involved putting oddly named files in certain
places.  I never got a good reason for why that solved my issues, or how
it got into the bad state in the first place, or what the side effect of
those special files were, or when I could remove them (perhaps after
something changed, or an upgrade.)  It's not because I didn't ask.
Support didn't know, and didn't try to figure out.  The support people
were nice, but I would have liked to see them more knowledgeable (or
allow customers to talk with the product specialists/developers) to get
answers.

* VSS backups.  This bothered me in a few ways.  First, VSS only works
for applications, not for files on file systems that are snapshotted via
VSS.  So I could backup Oracle via VSS, but not a large file share local
to the system (which still use the normal file APIs.)  That still
doesn't seem right to me.  Second, it's another new license that needs
to be purchased -- and it's per client, when everything else I have is a
clientpak that works globally.  When I tried the evaluation code for VSS
support, "it was a bug" that happened to make that single license work
server-wide.  When we decided not to purchase it, and deleted the
license, we get odd failure messages for VSS-capable clients -- the
solution to that is to turn VSS off, per client, which also doesn't seem
right to me when I'm not licensed for it at all anyway.

* CustomerNet, while in some ways was an improvement in terms of online
knowledge bases, was problematic for us.  There were always issues
getting accounts associated with the right support contract, and when we
did get a successful login, it was slow and akward to use.  The recent
email from EMC looks like they're phasing that out for the next
generation of online crappy CRM software.

* A minor point, but it's a little disturbing I had LTO3 drives online
for a long time before LTO3 media options were available.  Afterwards,
I'm not sure what the impact would be of changing my drive types, so
I've left it be.

* I'm more than a little surprised with the lack of
concern/communication EMC/Legato has with its customers.  If I even
think about letting my Consumer Reports magazine subscription relapse, I
get 30 renewal letters and about as many emails.  For my annual
Networker maintenance, I always had to remember to call to get the quote
(and finding the right person to talk to wasn't always easy,) and then
follow up on the processing of it.  You'd think for $35k/year, my
support rep could contact me.  When we decided not to renew, we didn't
hear anything from them.  I guess they didn't miss us.  When I do get an
email from EMC, it's almost always on their other products (Xtender, or
Documentum, or whatever.)  In terms of innovation, it looks like they've
put Networker on the back burner.

* Except when they do decide to upgrade Networker, it's a doozy.  These
are old rants we're all familiar with.  The big ones I have about this
are some of the ones that have come up in conversation today -- the fact
they broke their previous release rules.  This should have been an 8.0
instead of a .3 release, and the impacts of what an upgrade would have
brought should have been more defined.  I'm not faulting them for trying
to modernize the product, but woe to the admin who doesn't subscribe to
this list to know what the jump from 7.2.1 to 7.3 means.  Also, if it
weren't for this list I wouldn't know about most of the patches and
upgrades that are available.  That's a great resource -- it's just too
bad it needs to come from outside EMC.  Inside EMC, it's hard finding
anything on their website.

* And there are countless other quirks that I have about Networker that
I've just internalized and don't even stick out anymore.  Hostname based
client assignments, ad hoc backups not integrated with the server
scheduled backups, the green/brown classic GUI which has terrible UI
pieces that I've just gotten used to (as one example, Cancel meaning
close even after the process has finished.)  The inability to easily see
media dependencies to tell why a tape hasn't recycled, etc.  If you only
looked at what the GUIs allowed (Windows or Unix,) you'd miss out on
some of the best functionality of the product - yet most people look at
the command line last.

Really, the best thing about running Networker is this listserv.  The
talented, passionate, helpful souls on this list go quite a ways to
making up for a product with lackluster support and a divergent vision
of where things should be going and how.  But, if I may, I'd even go so
far as to notice a change in attitude in some of the pillars of this
list -- those dedicated few who leave no list message unanswered
(Theirry, Stan, Carter, Teresa, Terry, Tim, Darren, Joel, Davina,
Maarten, George - others I'm sure I'm missing -- you know who you are,
and you're all great.)  There's less of a feeling of empowerment and
capability and more uncertainty and discontent than ever.  As always,
EMC/Legato is noticably missing from these discussions.

So it's not any one of these issues, but all of them, that made the
decision for us not to continue using Networker.  Right now, TSM is the
contender for the replacement.  It's initial cost is cheap (thanks to
state contracts with IBM), and its maintenance costs are marginal
(compared to EMC.)  The differential style is different than the levels
we'd been using, (most notably the full separation between backups and
archives) but probably works better for our diverse client model.  The
feature set I need is there -- data migration, duplication, reclaimation
(what a concept!), the split between hostname and client definition
allowing mobile clients, as good as Networker user restore tools, etc.
Support for all supported OSes and D2D backups comes with the core
product.  TSM has a few user support lists, at least one of which has
active participation by IBM developers.  If anyone has any comments
about transitioning from Networker to TSM, I'd like to hear them.

I apologize for the long post, and other than me venting it doesn't
really do or help anything.  (Okay, maybe I feel a little bit better.) I
don't expect everyone here to agree with me, but I do think I'm not
alone and my swan song rant is a decent Zeitgeist of problems with
Networker in 2006.

Dave

-- 
David Mussulman                                 mussulma AT cs.uiuc DOT edu
TSG Research Programmer / Sys Admin
Department of Computer Science                  office: 217.333.6231
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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