Bacula Enterprise vs IBM Spectrum Protect comparison

"The solution has extensive documentation and a very active community."

"It works great and it provides you with several standard tools to restore your backup, even after a big failure."

"It is easy to scale Bacula Enterprise even if your system is growing tremendously in data and servers."

"It brought many advantages - such as the learning curve being very light."

"Bacula is pretty stable."

"Bacula is very solid, very stable, and very scalable."

"The most valuable features are the special plugins such as SAP HANA databases, Microsoft SQL, and various types of virtualization."

"It can be used in virtually any environment we have onsite."

"Our performance is better."

"The MN backup for a cluster is most valuable because it has made backing up the GSF as a zero-file system easier. I like its stability a lot. Over the years, I very rarely had a problem with it."

"IBM Spectrum Protect is stable."

"Traditional archiving. One of our revenue streams involves maintaining archives of our customers' data for very long periods of time."

"This solution has improved our organization through better file and database recovery."

"It scales well. We have grown here in the last year or two, and it has been relatively easy."

"The addition of the retention set feature provides a reduction in storage costs. It also reduces RTO and RPO so that you can respond quickly to your clients and services in case of data loss."

"The technical support for Spectrum Protect is very mature. It is very committed to giving a top-notch support experience."

"A more user-friendly interface (GUI) can be developed."

"We would like to see an improvement in the functionality of the GUI."

"It could improve its interface or offer a specific screen for the manager of the company."

"Bacula needs a graphical user interface because, for administrators, the command-line interface is okay, but for the average user it is not very easy."

"The initial setup could be a bit easier."

"Easier setup and configuration, perhaps including a GUI, would be an improvement."

"We are looking for a unique interface that can rule both enterprise and open source editions. Such a thing does not yet exist."

"Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability."

"Probably educating the virtual group who are not as used to the product. Most of our expertise is with AIX servers and virtual server backups."

"We need better protection from ransomware or the ability to identify ways we can protect ourselves from ransomware. Having backups is one thing, but specifically, we need methods to recover if we have a ransomware attack."

"A lot of my customers always ask for legal holds, especially on email."

"It is not easy to manage like other products in the market. It is okay only if you are command-line driven. Even though the operation center is there, it doesn't provide a single view of everything. You have to, for example, use TSMManager on top of it, which gives you a far better management capability, but it is a third-party product. Its management needs to be improved. There should be an HTML or graphical interface. It is a very difficult product. For example, you have a backup policy where you want a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly policy standard. It is an old kind of system where you have to keep retention for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups, which is very difficult in IBM Spectrum Protect. In other products, in a matter of five minutes, you can configure such a policy. In TSM, it takes you one, two, or three days because you need to configure a node for each of them. If you have 250 nodes, you have to configure each node for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly retention. If you have 1,000 nodes, it is going to take you ages just to configure and register the nodes. You need to configure the schedule and the CAD daemons or services, depending on whether it is a Unix or Windows OS. Unfortunately, it is a very long and drawn-out process. You have to stop and start the services for changes to take effect. This is a very difficult part of TSM in IBM Spectrum Protect. To configure a backup policy, I should be able to select the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly options in one screen and finish it. After that, everything should happen in the background. All the backup products in the market already do that, and they are very simple to manage. This particular part of this solution has really been a major pain area for us, and unfortunately, we could not find a workaround. There is nobody at IBM who can give us a way to configure all this easily through a GUI or even scripts."

"It seems like they are a little behind on the integration to Azure Cloud as well as Amazon."

"We would like to see cloud integration."

"We are still using TSM Manager for many of our projects to administer our platform because the gap was not resolved with the new Operations Center."

"It could use single store. The ability to mark an archive from my backup for long-term retention."

"This is an open-source solution."

"We have a perpetual license."

"The different license models can give good benefits to the end customer."

"IBM provides an open license policy, which is more like a gentlemen's agreement."

"We have found that the pricing is high in our country."

"Spectrum Protect is not expensive, and it is simple to use."

"The solution is expensive."

"Regarding retro-compatibility of the product between versions, your data is always available and the ROI is unquestionable."

"The solution is not cheap."

"For my company, the tool is affordable and reasonable...I don't think most people know that when a company has large systems in place, the TCO is a lot lower."