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Commvault Cloud vs IBM Spectrum Protect comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Commvault Cloud
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
eDiscovery (3rd), Cloud Backup (3rd), Disaster Recovery as a Service (3rd), File Archiving (2nd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (3rd), SaaS Backup (1st), Threat Deception Platforms (1st), Container Backup Software (1st)
IBM Spectrum Protect
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
17th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
149
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Commvault Cloud is 7.4%, up from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Protect is 2.2%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Cassandra Cinar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides excellent visibility and helps reduce costs and time
We use intuitive administrative tools that readily reveal the volume of backed-up data. Our Commvault CommCell servers alert us to failed backups and provide detailed information. This transparency allows our managed service provider to easily grasp our pre-established thresholds and readily scale up with new technologies. We're highly satisfied with Commvault's automated data security and management policies. They meet our stringent requirements for secure and private data storage, including anti-ransomware protection and encryption. Notably, they also ensure compliance with GDPR for backups stored in Europe and other regions, fulfilling our regulatory obligations. Threat Scan's ability to scan backup data for threats is invaluable because it proactively identifies and neutralizes certain viruses and threats that may originate from our G Suite or be reported by our security incident response team, preventing potential outages. Commvault provides excellent visibility across our entire organization's data. They perform regular health checks, informing us of areas of strength and offering recommendations for improvement. These recommendations may include upgrading to newer product versions or addressing issues identified during the checks. It is important for our organization that Commvault provides a unified platform for recovery across cloud, on-premises, and software-as-a-service workloads. This is particularly important because many of our existing cloud environments rely on basic backups that are insufficient for our needs. Commvault empowers us to address this issue. We have implemented it not only in our own operating company but also across the corporate structure, rolling it out to virtually all AWS users. This is because the standard backup methods, such as snapshot backups, fail to meet our stringent requirements for recovery, service level agreements, and crucial functionalities like threat detection and other security features. Commvault ensures a robust and comprehensive backup infrastructure that satisfies all our essential needs. It has improved our organization by ensuring we meet our infrastructure requirements, adhere to our vulnerability methodology, and achieve service level agreements for both backup and storage requirements. The quarterly risk analysis allows us to effectively manage the lifecycle of both data and backups. It also sheds light on the types of data and backups we have, providing valuable insights. Commvault's risk analysis is one of the tools we use to meet our compliance requirements and implement the necessary controls for immediate security policy action. To ensure comprehensive data protection and comply with international regulations like GDPR, we rely on Commvault alongside our established financial systems and SOC-compliant practices. Commvault has helped us reduce our organization's data management costs by 75 percent, particularly for long-term backups. We ditched tapes and virtual tapes thanks to Commvault, replacing them with a fully disk-based backup system and cloud backups in AWS and Azure. By implementing Commvault, we've significantly reduced our backup times. This is achieved through a combination of incremental backups and data aging. Aged data is then moved to cheaper disk or cloud storage, ensuring cost-effective long-term retention while still meeting our recovery SLAs. While the overall time savings may be around 10-15 percent, the main benefit is not keeping everything on expensive primary storage and efficiently aging it out. Consequently, retrieving data from the Azure bucket typically takes five days or more, reflecting our agreed-upon SLA. It has reduced our recovery point objective, allowing us to store more backups. However, new regulatory and compliance requirements mandate that some backups cannot be deleted and must be retained indefinitely. To address this while still improving efficiency, we've implemented solutions for long-term data storage and improved data management practices. Commvault has helped our organization not only decrease our threat detection time but also improve threat prevention to such an extent that we often avoid facing the full impact of a threat altogether. By preventing these incidents, we're often unsure of the precise amount of time saved, but the benefit is clear: we don't need to activate disaster recovery mechanisms. It has not only helped us reduce our recovery time objective, but it has also ensured that our backups and long-term storage are secure, thanks to its comprehensive capabilities. In terms of total cost of ownership, Commvault has enabled us to significantly reduce both hardware and media costs for storage and backup. After factoring in encryption and compression, the total savings amount to close to 80 percent. It has been able to reduce downtime, but having a quick recovery plan and policy and SLAs that are published are met regularly.
Syed Habib - PeerSpot reviewer
Manageable and comprehensive and integrates robust backup features for core banking
It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dashboard from Browser Spectrum. This is why I am searching for another solution. The product also lacks any centralized graphical user interface (GUI), such as Jarek Pod, and I am limited to using a console-based text user interface, which my local partner handles completely.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It is much more scalable and flexible than everything else in the market."
"The most valuable feature of Commvault HyperScale X is the automatic nature of its operation. We don't need to worry about sets of documents. It worked automatically, we don't need to think about it. When you set the solution up in a good way, you don't need to worry."
"Metallic is user-friendly, cost-effective, and the technical support is impressive."
"One-Pass (Archive) DataBase backup (Online Backup and Granular level restore), VM backup and restore."
"The solution is very stable and offers a good level of performance."
"In terms of the speed of backup, it operates seamlessly, so I'd rate it as excellent... with my daily use and workload, quite honestly I don't even notice when it backs up."
"The rate of duplication is great."
"We specialize in Commvault and IntelliSnap. Commvault covers all our customers' backup needs in one system, and they have complete control over their Snapshot backups. Snapshots are important to our customers because of the size of their data sets."
"It is a really scalable solution. We can scale it up. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten."
"They have recently added support tickets specifically engineered around performance. This has been very useful for us when we run into issues where customers are looking to try to squeeze a lot more horsepower out of older system."
"It helps our customers protect their data, keep it long-term, and feel pretty secure about it, basically sleeping well at night."
"The most valuable features are compression and de-duplication."
"Nothing beats this solution for file backup."
"Once it is completed properly, it is low maintenance. Most of the functions do not require much deliberation. It is all the blueprints and technologies laid out, and it is straight forward."
"A robust tool which allows us to backup pretty much any environment, virtual or physical."
"In the past, one of the most valuable features, and the biggest advantage, was the incremental forever feature. Not many other backup vendors provided that. In the pre-virtualization environment, it was very robust and simple technology, especially writing to tape."
 

Cons

"The solution requires constant attention. Commvault is very complex. We are constantly making adjustments and working through hotfixes, updates, and issues."
"When we started using Commvault, we felt that there were some technical issues with managing it, but we are comfortable enough with managing it now. There were many issues, like index corrupting, when we first started, but all those issues were resolved by the Commvault tech team."
"Its competitor, Veeam, includes backup and replication in the same product. I don't know if Commvault has it or not, but they should if they don't."
"I would like to see more customizable reports. I have reports going right now, but the daily report, for example, shows something like 40 jobs that ran when there are just a few endpoints on there. I'd like to just know if the endpoint was successfully backed up, not how many times. More customizable reports would be nice to have."
"The local support could be improved."
"They can improve the VMware recovery and VMware backup. There is an improvement area on the VMware infrastructure. They can make available what they call a VSA proxy. They can have an appliance-type setup to deploy VSA backups and help recover quicker. They can have an appliance ready. Instead of having to have a server dedicated to that and installing software on a server, they can just provide an actual appliance for that."
"Commvault could make the product more cost-effective on the public cloud side. We are using this solution to back up whatever is still on-prem. We are not using it to back up what is on the public cloud because we have a native backup solution for that, which is provided by the vendor. As our footprint gets bigger, we will continue to evaluate this, but the last time that we did a cost analysis, the cost was not comparable to the solution that public clouds are offering."
"The tool should revise its licensing."
"There needs to be a bit more automation."
"I would not recommend the tool to others because it is a really complex product."
"I would like to see more technical training online. Sometimes, it is a little bit difficult to find, or that I do not really know what I am looking for as somebody who is starting off finding their learning curve."
"Technical support could be improved."
"For Spectrum Protect Plus, I would like to see more enhanced reporting features and integration with Spectrum Protect."
"Integration with Windows environments needs improvement. It should be more "assisted", both at the application and database level. It remains a product that fits better in Unix/Linux environments than in Windows environments, given its configuration procedures."
"The Hyper-V and SQL Server backup could be improved. In the 2016 version there was a significant improvement, but I think IBM has a big challenge with these technologies."
"We would like to see cloud integration."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Commvault is more expensive than Veeam, which is the reason that we are changing to Veeam for cloud environments."
"Our cost is around $20,000 per month. The previous year, it was around $30,000 per month. It now costs less because Commvault changed the licensing type for providers."
"Commvault is quite high in terms of pricing and licensing."
"It is cheaper than Veeam."
"The product is very competitive for pricing in some countries because it is possible to set up Commvault hardware with other vendors using its certification."
"HyperScale X is expensive."
"Everyone else offers the subscription-based model nowadays, while Commvault Complete Data Protection still has the traditional license model, where you must buy a set of licenses. You pay for one hundred licenses even if you only use fifty virtual machines, so the licensing model needs improvement."
"Using a subscription-based license has been advantageous."
"Spectrum Protect is not a cheap option."
"Spectrum Protect is not expensive, and it is simple to use."
"We worked our licensing into a capacity model, which is nice. Now, everything is much simpler to manage from a licensing perspective.​"
"License-wise regarding IBM, it's licensed per terabyte. And that is after compression and deduplication."
"The product is not cheap."
"The most important feature which I wish to be added involves the GUI, the user interface."
"Customers need to pay for licensing in order to use IBM Spectrum Protect. The customers that have been using it for a long time are okay and happy with it. From a cost point of view, it's better for them to renew their licenses than to go through the difficult process of changing a backup product in their environment, and migrate from one product to another."
"Regarding retro-compatibility of the product between versions, your data is always available and the ROI is unquestionable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Commvault?
The tool is affordable. I rate the pricing a six out of ten. Implementation requires additional costs because we need Commvault Professional Services.
What needs improvement with Commvault?
Data center backup must be improved. We also want the product to provide us with a cloud-based backup. If we use Microsoft Exchange Online for email services, we want to know how to get a backup in...
What do you like most about Commvault Complete Data Protection?
IntelliSnap and file system backups are valuable features.
What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Protect?
It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dash...
 

Also Known As

Commvault Complete Data Protection, Commvault Backup & Recovery, Commvault HyperScale X, Metallic, ThreatWise
IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Aberdeenshire Council, Acxiom, BAM Group Ireland, Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta, CI Investments, Clifford Chance, American Municipal Power, American Pacific Mortgage, AstraZeneca, Dongbu Steel, Denver Health, Dow Jones, Emirates Steel, Penn State Health, Prime Healthcare, Sonic Healthcare, Sony Network Communications, TiVO, UCONN Health, The Weitz Company
CERN, Einstein Healthcare, Nyherji, Allianz Australia, TZM, ABT Online, NCT, Kindred Healthcare Inc., Cobalt Iron, TransGrid, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Cash America, Piedmont Healthcare, RWGV, Arkansas Tech University, British Columbia Institute of Technology
Find out what your peers are saying about Commvault Cloud vs. IBM Spectrum Protect and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.