IBM Spectrum Protect Plus Reviews

We are an IT integrator and we need to have a good vision of all recovery and backup recovery solutions.

Most frequently, we use Veeam Backup. We use Cohesity. For some old workloads, we use IBM TSM. We have some clients who use Google or another MSP, Azure, or AWS too.

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is the software we work with, and the new name is IBM Storage Protect. We have implemented IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, but it is an old name with a new iteration.

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is very simple to deploy for us, but for more clients or competitors, the solution is hard to deploy and to integrate.

For our team, deployment of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus may take a couple of days and longer if you have a complex customer solution. The deployment itself is not very lengthy, but the integration in production is more complicated.

I assess the efficiency of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus's Advanced Snapshot Technology as not good because they change a lot of things. During multiple versions, we have experienced many changes in the product, and from the customer's view, it is not a good product because with each evolution, we encounter problems. We do not sell this product or advise this product.

For SLA management features with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, I utilize file level. SLA management is a good solution and a good idea, but the product does not work well, and customers do not adopt this product.

I cannot assess the integration capability of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus using RESTful API.

I cannot determine what benefit IBM Spectrum Protect Plus brings to the organization because we deployed this solution with one customer, and that customer changed the product after one or two years because the product is not stable and it changes with every version. The customer wanted to move away from this solution.

The price of the product is good, but the solution does not adapt to the market. The market in France does not adopt IBM Spectrum Protect Plus.

We have long experience with this product. We have been working with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus for more than 20 years.

We do not want to eliminate anything, but customers sometimes eliminate the solution. We now have a more simple to integrate and more modern solution.

I cannot determine what benefit IBM Spectrum Protect Plus brings to the organization because we deployed this solution with one customer, and that customer changed the product after one or two years because the product is not stable and it changes with every version. The customer wanted to move away from this solution.

When we need support, IBM is there. IBM provides corrections and patches, but we are consistently seeing some customers install the product for testing. We have just one go to production, and this customer exits the solution after one or two years. We do not have a good experience with this product.

Negative

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is very simple to deploy for us, but for more clients or competitors, the solution is hard to deploy and to integrate. However, we have long experience with this product.

For our team, deployment of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus may take a couple of days and longer if you have a complex customer solution. The deployment itself is not very lengthy, but the integration in production is more complicated.

Two or three people who work with IBM TSM full-time per year usually take part in the installation for IBM Spectrum Protect Plus.

We do not use IBM Spectrum Protect Plus agentless architecture.

The price of the product is good, but the solution does not adapt to the market. The market in France does not adopt IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. My overall review rating for this product is 4.

I handle daily backups, long-term retentions, and replications. This includes making duplicate copies, addressing disaster recoveries and restores when needed, and during outages. These are the common use cases.

Reliability, recovery features, and stability are valuable to me. There is protection against disasters with good, fast, reliable recovery options. It backs up all types of databases such as Lokesh, DB2, Oracle, ARMIN, and SQL. I appreciate the features provided, including VM snapshots. File-level backups and journal-based backups for millions of small files are valuable use cases.

With ransomware protection and cyber protection, more improvement is possible. IBM provides these through a third party, so enhancement is needed. There's significant room for improvement. They are not yet where I want them to be. It does not offer horizontal and vertical scaling. These are areas IBM can improve.

I have used the solution for 15 or 16 years.

The solution does not provide horizontal and vertical scaling. This is an area IBM can work on.

I would rate customer service at eight. There are no complaints. Their documentation, runbooks, troubleshooting articles, and support people are good. Overall, their support is satisfactory.

Positive

I have been with them for a long time, yet I am planning to switch from IBM to other products. Currently, I am conducting POCs with Cohesity.

For someone with experience, the setup is straightforward. For those with no experience, it might be complex. It's not traditional, offering both GUI and CLI-based approaches. It depends on who is working on the product. Having prior experience makes the tool easier to use.

It is probably based on the number of CPUs. They are fairly expensive.

There is a lot of difference. Cohesity is designed for modern-day workloads, offering vertical and horizontal scalability without downtime. It features cyber recovery and ransomware protection, alongside ease of upgrading and installing the solution.

Any backup tool requires daily maintenance. I have automated daily maintenance jobs, which run smoothly. These jobs ensure servers and clients are in good condition and recoverable. 

For a stable backup environment, this solution is valuable; however, for ransomware and cyber protection capabilities, it is still evolving. 

I would rate it seven out of ten, partly due to the GUI that can be improved.

I have been using it for our own organization.

We are using IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. The experience with technical support could be improved.

Technical support could be improved significantly.

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus could be made more lightweight and user-friendly in terms of GUI features to make it closer to a perfect score.

I have been working with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus for close to 10 years.

It has been a while since I completed the initial setup, but generally IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is quite complex.

I have definitely seen return on investment.

Pricing is good; it is reasonable and more reasonable than any other vendors.

I have browsed other solutions but am not actively looking for any alternatives.

I am running short on time, but can answer one or two questions now.

I have been generally satisfied with the product.

The technical support rates as a six out of ten.

I work for Merck Group but would prefer not to quote my company name.

I would recommend IBM Spectrum Protect Plus to all types of companies.

I have been a customer of IBM.

I rate IBM Spectrum Protect Plus as eight out of ten overall.

The main use case for IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is backup. The essence of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is that it's easy to use, straightforward, and web-based. It doesn't have agents similar to Veeam. It was designed to compete against Veeam.

The biggest benefit of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is that it's an agentless backup product which is very easy to configure and use.

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is straightforward for deployment.

The ability to scale the backup process is a key point for improvement.

The initial setup for IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is easy.

I used IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, but IBM is now replacing it with IBM Data Protect, which is a giant product now in common development with a well-known company in backup solutions.

I worked with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus from the very first day.

It's a very stable solution.

I would rate it as a three for scalability. IBM Data Protect is the scalable solution, not IBM Spectrum Protect Plus.

IBM support is always very good.

Positive

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is straightforward for deployment. The initial setup for IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is easy.

I don't work with ROI, but my point is that it was always competitive at that time with Veeam and other products in terms of money.

It was very reasonable, and it's now based with Data Protect, which is again very competitive.

It's similar to Veeam, but IBM Data Protect is now the solution replacing both products. They still use the old products for the old customer base, but in new greenfield areas, IBM is going with IBM Data Protect.

There is reporting in IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, but I'm not very familiar with this area. I always concentrated on getting the customer to do the backup, restore, and related tasks, but there is reporting.

IBM has made a decision to withdraw the product and replace it with IBM Data Protect.

The correct direction is Data Protect, which includes ransomware detection. With IBM Data Protect, you can add more servers for backup. It's scalable, which is a key feature over Storage Protect and Storage Protect Plus, even more capable than Veritas, because Veritas has an option to make different media servers. You can scale the backup process regardless of the load of the customer. This speeds up the backup and restore process for a complete data center, which cannot be done with any other product.

I rate IBM Spectrum Protect Plus 9 out of 10.

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is a backup solution. We can schedule our backups.

The solution provides different backup policies. We can configure any policy according to the policy followed in our organization. We can also define the retention period, the number of copies we want, and the backup schedule. We recently recovered all our primary sites using the tool. It was not a challenge. Large-scale recoveries are very straightforward.

The security must be improved. We face a lot of cyber threats like ransomware. It impacts data availability and protection. The tool must provide a mechanism to make resilient backups. The tool must ensure that the recent backups have no ransomware. The backup must be immutable. They must be cyber-resilient backups. Finding a good resource person for IBM Spectrum in Pakistan is difficult. We have to rely on the support team. Resource availability is a challenge.

I have been using the solution for three to four years.

We have no issues with scalability. I rate the scalability a seven to eight out of ten. We have around 1200 users in our organization. We have a team of three people to maintain the product. They work on other tools, too. We need half a day of a full-time resource for maintenance.

The tool has hardware and software support teams. The software support team is pretty good. We have faced no challenges.

The setup is not a big task. It's a pretty straightforward mechanism after the hardware and storage setup and ensuring the storage tools are available. If we have well-defined policies, it should not take more than three to four hours to set it up. To deploy the solution, we configure IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, install agents on the machines we want to backup, add the host to IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, define policies, and assign policies to different hosts. It's not a very complex procedure.

We saw an ROI in two to three years.

We have a perpetual license for the tool since it is deployed on-premise. We pay a fixed fee per year for support.

We follow some backup rules. The backup should be isolated. It should be available even if the data is encrypted. We must be able to identify whether our most recent backup has any changes that we can recover. We evaluated other options but chose IBM Spectrum because it suited our use cases. Cyber Vault would be a better option, considering the current need for cyber-resilient backups. An appliance-based tool will better suit our needs. Overall, I rate the product a six out of ten.

We use this solution to do backups quickly because we have a smaller window for backups. For instance, if there's a database of 10 terabytes and it usually takes three hours to backup we wanted to reduce it down to an hour or 33% of the actual time. So, the solution is deduplication enabled, with regard to storage as well. We also needed to make sure our backup infrastructure is being used properly.

If the system were to go down, we needed to make sure that the system could be recovered and available as soon as possible. Spectrum Protect provides you access to directly bind the backup volume to the server and make the system available instead of restoring it and copying the system.

When we do backups daily, we usually end up having a lot of storage being stuck with the backups and not being used. This solution optimizes storage and has very good integration features. We were using IBM Power Systems, so IBM Spectrum Protect Plus integrates well with it.

I would like to see continuous data protection (CDP). If there is 
machine failure, you don't have to go to the backup copy that you took 12 hours ago. You can actually go back to the backup copy made half an hour ago. That is, it would be good to have certain-point-in-time recovery.

I would like them to add global deduplication. With deduplicate backups, deduplication will work only with the data of a certain machine or a certain backup set. Usually, the data is repeated across the data of the backup sets. However, if IBM Spectrum Protect Plus provides a global deduplication option it will ultimately result in better storage savings.

I've been using it for two years.

It is a very stable product.

It can scale up and down according to our needs. We have 350 endpoints that are being backed up, and on top of that, we have around 50 servers that are being backed up through this solution.

The users include our supply chain department, the procurement and warehouse team, our finance division, the managerial accounting system, our director and other top management staff, and the auditor.

We have two types of support that we get from IBM: local support and IT support. If I were to rate the local support from one to ten, one being the worst and ten being very good, I would rate it at seven.

IT support is very good, and I would give them a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was not easy, but it was not very difficult either. It took about 15 to 20 minutes to have it all up.

The initial setup is not as straightforward as that for other backup solutions, so I would rate it at five out of ten.

IBM services helped with the deployment.

The price is perpetual, but the maintenance cost is annual. That is, we pay once for the product and pay annually for the maintenance and support. The price was much cheaper than what we would have had to pay for EMC or Veritas. The pricing is competitive, and I would rate it at four out of five.

We evaluated Veritas and Dell's EMC with the main appliance and network. One reason for going with IBM was the integration with IBM systems which make up our major landscape. Another reason has to do with the time it takes to restore the system. IBM won the POC for restoring and backing up as quickly as possible.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect Plus at nine.

We use IBM Spectrum Protect Plus as our primary backup solution. Our supply chain department, including procurement, uses it. Also, our finance and managerial divisions are using it. Our top management uses it, along with the auditing department.

The speed of restoring from a system backup is very quick. Their ability to restore a system very quickly, within a backup window, is one of the reasons that we chose this product.

In the future, I would like to see support for global deduplication. The limitation with IBM Spectrum Protect is that if you take backups, the deduplication works only for data in a certain machine, or a certain backup set. However, data is often repeated across the data backup set. So, if they provide a global deduplication option, it will provide better storage savings ultimately.

We use this product on a daily basis.

We have approximately 350 users in head office and we have around 50 servers that are being backed up.

There are two types of support that we get from IBM. There is local support, which I would rate a seven or eight out of ten, and there is support from IBM itself, which I would rate a ten out of ten.

The support from IBM is very good.

Positive

The initial cost of the product is perpetual but the support fees are billed annually. This pricing is something that can be negotiated.

The price of this product is cheaper than some of the others that we evaluated. Price-wise, I would rate IBM competitively, at an eight out of ten.

We have evaluated other backup solutions from three or four vendors. Two that I can recall are Veeam and Veritas. Veritas Backup and Replication is a very popular one.

We also evaluated the Data Domain Appliance and NetWorker from Dell EMC.

The whole idea of buying from IBM was integration with the landscape. Also, the time used to restore a system from backup is very quick. During our POC, IBM won in this aspect.

The price that we paid for IBM was much cheaper than it would have been for the EMC or Veritas products.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use IBM Spectrum Protect Plus for normal backup and restore purposes. We currently have VM which are getting backed up and we are in the process of deploying OCP. We use container support to back up the OCP environment and direct Open Shift environment.

We have to do a tech refresh, during the migration process and it doesn't allow a straightforward pathway. If I have to do a tech refresh of the server or the storage, the only option for me is to build a new server.

I attach the new storage, create new policy, and then start migrating, slowly removing the old one. That is one area of improvement.

When IBM will have NFSv4 available that is something we could use that solution.

I have been working with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus for two years now.

IBM  Spectrum Protect Plus is stable. We have been using this solution for quite some time. Initially there were a few problems, but they were related to resource constraints. From an IBM Spectrum Protect Plus perspective, we never encountered any problem. 

We have a big environment that we are working in. We are backing up close to two thousand machines.

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is scalable. You continue adding the backup repository and vSnap component. The more you add, the more it scales. You can distribute the load. We have VMware and multiple clusters. Our configuration takes place in such a way that this particular cluster goes to one particular vSnap. We have done this kind of configuration. vSnap is the physical server that can act as the backup repository. A disk is attached and you can continue adding. 

I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect Plus as a three. Technically they are good, but sometimes the response is delayed. If you raise a case with IBM they take two to three days to respond.  There are two products supported. One is related to Spectrum Protect and one is related to Spectrum Protect Plus. There are different teams who support IBM Protect Plus and IBM Spectrum Protect.

Negative

The initial setup of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is simple and not complex.

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is simple to deploy. It comes as a virtual machine, or it comes as an Enter Container application. You deploy the ISO image and then you can have the backup repository in a physical and virtual location. There is no complex planning involved. You just deploy it and you are ready to use IBM Protect Plus.
We did it ourselves. There are sizing tools, user guide, and blueprint available.  IBM Spectrum Protect Plus takes very little time to deploy.

When it comes to licenses, we have capacity-based license for IBM Spectrum Protect Plus and we are covered as a part of capacity license. They have a different license based on the number of VM you have protected. The license covers everything.

The one issue we are facing is related to file restores. We have Unix and Spectrum Protect. We installed the agent because we have a very complex environment with multi-department firewalls. Whenever we require support from the Unix team to do file-level restore because it has AIX we had to look those complexities and decided to have an agent on all the Unix machines. That allows us to restore any files or directory with an agent-based restore. If it requires the entire complete machine to be restored, we use VM restore.

I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect Plus a seven on a scale of one to ten.

I use IBM Spectrum Protect Plus in my company for backup purposes.

The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that the product works and helps with restoration areas whenever there is a need to restore something.

I think the graphical reports are a shortcoming of the tool since it fails to provide my company with what we want in terms of reporting. Due to the product's inability to take care of its reporting part, we have to use third-party software. In future releases of the product, I wish to see the tool offer better reporting features.

I have been using IBM Spectrum Protect Plus for ten years. I use the solution's latest version. My company is a customer of the product.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Around four engineers in my organization use the solution.

The solution's technical support is helpful and responsive since my issues used to get resolved whenever I called the support team after facing a problem. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with IBM System i Navigator. I use IBM System i Navigator and IBM Spectrum Protect Plus in my company.

The product's initial setup phase was complex, but I am accustomed to it since I have ten years of experience with the product.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution can be deployed in a couple of hours.

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is an expensive solution since it is mostly used for corporate-level projects. I rate the price of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus a one on a scale of one to ten, where one is extremely expensive, and ten is very cheap.

I take care of the maintenance phase of the product with the help of a technical team consisting of ten administrators.

I recommend the solution to those who plan to use it.

Owing to some of the missing features in the product, I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.

The tool needs to increase the number of threats. 

I have been working with the solution for ten years. 

I rate the tool's stability a nine out of ten. 

I rate IBM Spectrum Protect Plus' scalability a nine out of ten. 

The tool has enough documentation; you don't need to contact the support team. 

You need experience to install the product. The installation depends on the organization's size.  

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is a little expensive. 

I rate the product a nine out of ten.