Goslin, Paul [pgoslin AT CINCOM DOT COM] said:
>Being the data storage company that they are...
>They wanted to have the backup product that had the lions share of the
backup market,
>so they bought the biggest player in the field: Networker

Actually, that's not quite correct.  While NetWorker owned the world at one
point, by the time EMC purchase Legato, it had already lost most of its
market share to Veritas/NetBackup and the company was in severe financial
trouble.  It had lost its market share due to very bad support and a
stagnant product.  Sadly, since EMC bought NetWorker, that market share has
not increased.

NetBackup's market share has decreased over the last few years, and TSM's
has increased by about the same percentage (CommVault took some as well).  I
believe this is due to the Symantec acquisition and loss of focus, combined
with a very focused IBM sales team.  It certainly isn't because TSM is a
better product in any way than NetBackup.

NetWorker works.  It does what it does and it does it reasonably well.  It
handles the most common (and even some of the uncommon) operating systems
and VMware.  It has decent reporting, device sharing, disk to disk backups,
etc.  It's certainly easier to understand than NetBackup.  I would agree
with a previous poster, however, that NetBackup passed it up in overall
functionality quite a few years ago, and NetWorker has never caught up.

As to it being an "enterprise product" or not...  Well.... Let me know when
you can automate copying of its backups to multiple tapes in a large
environment without having to write scripts.  Both NetBackup and (gulp) TSM
have had this for YEARS and NetWorker STILL has nothing.

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