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Commvault Cloud vs IBM Spectrum Protect Plus 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 Plus
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
22nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
30
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 Plus is 0.9%, down from 1.0% 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.
Atif Najam - PeerSpot reviewer
Has very good integration features and can quickly backup data and optimize storage
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like Commvault's immutable backups. It integrates with other solutions in our IT infrastructure very well."
"Commvault has support for backing up operating systems and servers."
"The functionality and features of Commvault were much better compared to other solutions."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"Restoring is very fast. In testing, I did a restore for a single item from a mailbox. Within a minute, I had the message back in my mailbox. So, it didn't take hours or days. Obviously, there will be a limit. If we suddenly go into DR and have to restore five terabytes of emails for people, then it will take a couple of days, which would be acceptable. For general usage, where we have to do the odd restore, we have never had issues. It happens within minutes."
"It is easy to use and stable. It delivers what has been promised. When it says it can do something, it can actually do it, as opposed to some of its competitors."
"The solution also provides me with a complete view of our data. I write scripts to report information from the Command Center daily. I report it in HTML and have the status of the last day for the whole environment."
"We can use it on-premises and in the cloud."
"The most valuable features of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus are you have many possibilities on how to use it. We use it for backups and to create secondary and third copies. It is possible to pick up Kubernetes containers and use a different cloud provider if you need to start backups on the cloud."
"This is a multi-platform backup solution where you can take a backup from AIX, Windows, or Linux servers and restore from CD, disk, or tape."
"What I like about IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is its integration, plus it has very good technical support."
"Large-scale recoveries are very straightforward."
"The support from IBM is very good."
"Reliability, recovery features, and stability are valuable to me."
"The feature I find most valuable is the offload to Spectrum Protect for long-term retention. I think the deduplication and replication are quite nice on Plus."
"With this product, we now have a reliable backup solution."
 

Cons

"The main area for improvement is that we sometimes experience negative effects from their updates. If they had a larger test area for their updates, that would help."
"The deployment process should be simplified because it is not something that just anybody can do."
"The Java interface is not great. The Command Center interface is far better and it looks nicer, but it doesn't have all the powerful features available in the CommServe/Java console. The place to improve the product is on the management interface level."
"Commvault's price is quite high."
"Commvault Complete Data Protection meets market standards, but an area for improvement is its licensing model. It would be good if it could use the subscription-based model rather than the traditional licensing model."
"They don't market their products well. They don't do a lot of marketing to enable them to move forward."
"We previously had difficulty with the support being foreign."
"The product is a bit complex."
"Instead of using the command prompt for troubleshooting and administering the backup, there should be an easy-to-use graphical user interface."
"With ransomware protection and cyber protection, more improvement is possible."
"There's significant room for improvement. They are not yet where I want them to be."
"The backup support for IBM Power Virtualization needs to be added."
"In the future, I would like to see support for global deduplication."
"There could be better integration with Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus, it should be one solution."
"I would like more integration with security. We need to show the value of the product in regards to handling security. For example, how it handles current malware or viruses. IBM should be more proactive in this direction."
"You end up needing to do a lot of troubleshooting to get things to work effectively."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have checked some other products, but we are not testing them because price-wise, Commvault is better than the other solutions."
"I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten."
"Commvault is more expensive than Veeam, which is the reason that we are changing to Veeam for cloud environments."
"We went from Veritas NetBackup to Commvault. We switched due to upfront licensing and costs. We have more visibility into what we're actually purchasing. It seemed like, overall, the cost of Commvault was cheaper."
"If budget allows using the per socket license and not the agent based with per GB counter for Dedup is the way to go."
"We work with Commvault and a partner on our environment needs according to capacity, licensing, pricing, components, modules, etc. Additional costs depend on your backup needs."
"Licensing fees are billed on a yearly basis."
"I would rate the price of Commvault Cloud seven out of ten with ten being the cheapest."
"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."
"The licensing model of Spectrum Protect Plus is more efficient and cheaper compared to the original."
"Depends on the licensing options that you choose."
"The price is lower than that of some competing products."
"Unlike some other solutions, such as Veritas NetBackup where you have to pay for different licenses to use different features, there is a single license that allows you to use all of the features."
"We have a perpetual license for the tool since it is deployed on-premise."
"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."
"The price offering from IBM is coming down because it is based on number of VM machines. So, IBM is coming to the market to show the added value of the product."
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Top Industries

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

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 do you like most about IBM Spectrum Protect Plus?
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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Protect Plus?
It is probably based on the number of CPUs. They are fairly expensive.
What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus?
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...
 

Also Known As

Commvault Complete Data Protection, Commvault Backup & Recovery, Commvault HyperScale X, Metallic, ThreatWise
No data available
 

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
PT Wings Surya, Tectrade, State of Ohio
Find out what your peers are saying about Commvault Cloud vs. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.