NetWorker 25th Anniversary Celebration - Share Your Stories

That's so cool, William! Definitely a unique story.

Would you mind if I sent you a private email regarding your commemorative gift? Your email is listed as private on your community profile.

Absolutely amazing story, Carlos. It sounds like NetWorker was much more than just a backup and recovery product to you!

Would you mind if I sent you a private email regarding your commemorative gift? Your email is listed as private on your community profile.

Hello all,

Here is a brief story of my live and NetWorker.

I started back in 1999 with Legato 5 version, as many of you.

Backup world was totally new for me, and I got to learn all about it with my dear Legato Networker (then), while working with a Legato partner in Spain.

Since then I've worked with NetWorker in 3 different companies as a customer, until I landed in EMC in 2008, to join the NetWorker support team, and I cannot get away from NetWorker anymore, I love it!!

Now I'm a Critical Response Engineer for DPS products, specialist in NetWorker (of course), and dealing with customers face to face, instead of my past role in support, makes it even more funny, as I can get to gather feedback about NetWorker from many different customers, some lovers of the product, and others not that lovers, but still I have fun with anything around NetWorker.

I remember still the challenges with NetWorker 6.x, when it came out, love still the old-style console it had.

Then support teams got busy with NW 7.x, until 7.2.3, which is one of the most stable versions we have had.

I really like the evolution of NetWorker, adapting to the times and new technologies, and expecting more to come!!

NetWorker has changed my life, seriously, as thanks to my knowledge of the product, it has brought me to many countries (lived already in 5), and travelled pretty much all over Europe, some countries in Africa and US.

What can I say, I cannot live without NetWorker!!

Thank you,

Carlos

Hi John,

I've sent you an email.

Thank you,

Carlos

Quite a story Hrvoje!  Thank you so much for taking the time to share!

Sherry

johnamichettijr wrote: This is awesome, Hrvoje! Would you mind if I sent you a private email regarding your commemorative gift? Your email is listed as private on your community profile.

Sure, go ahead... as EMC guys you should have access to records (or to someone from ECN admin group who should have access to it).

Hi Hrvoje, unfortunately, since your email address is private, I am unable to access it by other means. However, if you do not feel comfortable sharing your email address, feel free to reach out to me at John.AmichettiJr@emc.com

Thanks!

As far as I remember, my first experiences date back to sometime in 1992/1993 when I was doing support for NetWorker customers at a german partner.

I think I started with NW 3.x . We did not have a UNIX system and NetWorker for Linux and Windows did not exist at that time - the only alternative to learn the product was NetWare. Yes, this was also an available solution from Legato and it was used more often than you might think, thanks to Legato's price structure. I even remember a major tobacco company which used a NetWorker/NetWare server although they already had a bunch of UNIX servers. It was a nightmare to support NetWare solutions with all these different NLMs which were almost incompatible to any other one and I was lucky I could rely on the support from Legato NL.

Unfortunately, my employer did not really see the opportunities in selling software and support - he stayed focused on his well known business selling hardware. So I quit. Some years later he went out of business ... while I have joint Legato in the meantime - back in 1996. If I now say that I soon established a 'German Support Page' and also wrote technical documents (TINs & TIDs) to explain technical facts thoroughly, some 'oldtimers' may recognize me.

From that time I would like to share the screenshots below:

Do you remember GEMS? Of course you do - it is now called NMC

Now - after more than 20 years I have to admit that I am still learning NetWorker ... and I still love it :-) . Of course, there have been some ups and downs over the year but over all I am happy to work with such a stable product which - and I mean that honestly - fed me and my wife over all that time.

Thanks, Legato and EMC.

Thanks for sharing your story!

Would you mind if I sent you a private email regarding your commemorative gift? Your email is listed as private on your community profile. Or, if you feel more comfortable, you can contact me at John.AmichettiJr@EMC.com.

My memory might be hollow, but if I remember correctly somewhere in 2001 I went to NL for training on Co-Standby Server and I think it was you bingo who was the instructor. As for TINs and TIDs, that was always very very useful material - thank you for that.

I went on one of those boat trips, too, and also got sunburned! But I did come a way with a huge respect for Tony Bullimore.

Wow, where do I start with my Networker history?

In 1998, I was a field engineer who'd had enough of being on the road all the time, and was delighted to get  a job with a now defunct UK Legato reseller (TriSys, for those that remember them) providing tech support to our customers on backup products ( I think we did Arcserve, a bit of Backup Exec and a few products whose names have faded away with the years. I'd been a bit ambivalent about working in the world of backups, because backups couldn't be that complicated, could they? (Listen out for the sound of illusions being shattered!)

I think we were around Networker 4.3 when I joined, we had only SCSI tape libraries, (DLT4000, as I recall) with the fun of single ended or differential SCSI, which I probably couldn't explain any more! In those days we normally expected 1 Mb per second throughput on a good client with 10Mb Ethernet.

Licensing of Networker was always fun in those days, things like the "Turbo Pack" enabler, without which autochangers didn't work, and the way the a lot of licenses weren't enforced at fist, then suddenly an update would enforce a license and customers would be on the phone because a feature they hadn't paid for didn't work!

There was also the dark art of "Auto Media Management", still much understood and maligned. After I spent 2 days experimenting, I became the office "expert" on the feature, and I've lost count of the hours I spent explaining it!

I moved into training at some point, teaching customers the ins and outs of Networker, which gave me a valuable insight into how people used the product, why some things drove them mad, and how some people just didn't want to do "backup stuff". during this time we went from DLT tapes to LTO, and I met my first, very early Data Domain box!

Support could lead you from the most complex software compatibility issues to an old favourite of mine on a support call, when the customer was trying to work out why backups were hanging, waiting for media. After a long call he said, "I see the issue, someone's unplugged the Data Domain "! I somehow don't see this happening in a modern data centre.........

I then moved to work for a major UK Telco, managing their huge backup  environment (If I recall correctly, 8 data zones, 12  IBM TS3200 tape libraries and about 9 Pb per month data under management. It was at this stage that Networker 7.3 arrived, complete with the new   Networker Management Console. There was so much resistance to this that a couple of Unix experts on the team worked on a scheme to restore the old NWadmin GUI-and succeeded! Around this time, backup to disk started to be discussed, as restoring some of the huge databases (around 9Tb, as I remember), would take days. This database lived on a Symmetrix array, was replicated to a DR site somewhere in Europe, and also backed up locally, all managed by scripts that did all the BCV umounting, re-mounting, synchronizing and backing up. It worked, but any issues could be "Challenging", to say the least.

Luckily we never needed to restore it from scratch.

Then, almost inevitably it seems, I ended up at "The mother lode" and joined EMC in 2010, managing customer's backup environments.

Networker has pretty much paid my bills since 1998, and kept me through 3 different jobs. It's driven me mad at times, lost me many night's sleep over the years, but it's always been interesting!

GEMS, oh, boy, I still get a nervous twitch when I hear that!

And I think you awarded me this:

AFAIR, I was the only instructor for that course ... at least in Europe. ;-)