Networker 7.6.x EOL at end of Feb 2014

Well, the NW8 is not so bad.  Changes made there certainly had to affect code overall stability, but I have seen worse than that.  It was necessary change and with NW8 I finally see EMC taking necessary steps with NW code since they bought it from Legato.  Now, AFTD - what makes you think you must empty AFTD when these are converted? As for responses from support, my experience in past 10 years was that you can get and bad responses and that may entirely depend on person and his/her experience which might be spot on or not.  Too many maybes.

If you know NW, then you know they always keep alive 2 code trees in parallel.  Right now NW7 (development wise) will be replaced with 8.1SP1 and its patches  That is also the release which will see latest features inside so from upgrade point of view you wish to focus on 8.0SP3 and its patches (at this time of writing).

What EMC (and Legato prior to that) are missing is overall upgrade plan.  That means I do not care about procedure generator which will state what can be found elsewhere anyway (it might be quick cheat list for lame people eventually), but if you have this and that, what is the best practice.  Can you update server and storage nodes and leave clients on NW7 if you have this and that module?  Compatibility guides will for most of such question say yes, but reality is somewhat different and it comes essential to be familiar with different builds and similar which us unknown to most of the folks.  That is the only thing I really miss - some document which makes sense out of it so customer can plan upgrades and not do catch ups later on with support.

Last, but not least, if you wish to reach ears and eyes of their PM, you should not post this type of rant in support forum, but rather NetWorker Online. Or you can chat with them at EMC World   But most seriously, if you have account manager, engage it and have someone from BRS division visit you and address your queries (along with upgrade path).

Thanks for the input and good advice Hrvoje! I'll place my comments in the Networker Online forum and end this thread here.

I'm in the process of talking to the maintenance rep to get pricing for extended support and see what I can do as far as talking to the account manager and the support staff regarding the upgrade.

I was told by the support staff that you had to copy off the savesets from the NW7 AFTD volumes, re-create the AFTD devices in NW8, label them and copy the savesets back to be scanned in by NW8. Maybe they were mistaken, but sounds reasonable to me. I just don't have the space and time to do this easily, especially in the next month!

I'll bring up these points with support and the Networker Online forum.

AFTD architecture change during the NW8 upgrade is transparent to you. Please feel free.