IBM Spectrum Protect Plus Reviews

We are deploying SP+ for validating our database related backup and strategy requiring a lot of updates when in pilot phase. Thus we can adapt the backup and recovery strategy accordingly and then push it in production for the release it has been tested.
we can easily scratch the POC and restart straight a new set of validation

It gives DBA, vMware and application teams full control over their backup and restore responsibilities. It ensure that we set correct RPO/RTO and that we are aligned to our business strategy

The solution offers a quick self-deployment. Using TDP for HANA is also very valuable. They have good integration. And if sizing requiring it, it is straightforward to offload data to spectrum protect server.

It's difficult to discuss improvements in Spectrum Protect Plus itself because it has been implemented in Spectrum Protect, and I'm using both.

It could possibly use more reporting features.

Their first level of support can be improved. Often they are too junior to understand At that scale the issues we are having, and it takes too much time to get from them to the next level of support, which is what we actually need.

I've been using the solution for 6 years.

The solution is very stable. With both SPP and SPP Plus, you have a very powerful environment.

The scalability is very good. There's no competition that's comparable.

Technical support isn't too bad. Of course, there's always room for improvement. We do have a lot more issues with first level support. As we're already advanced User in using SPP, most of the time we need the second level or third level of support. So sometimes we struggle with first level support because they don't even understand the issues we have. They're too junior. 

I didn't previously use a different solution.

The solution offers a very straightforward deployment. You click, click, click and it's done. There's not much configuration to do. It took about one hour to implement the solution.

We deployed the solution fully in-house.

Visibility over 4 to 5 years with clear roadmap from IBM.

sP+ worth the investment in regards of capabilities, scalability vs cost. With the right understanding of the administrators, the possibilities given by this tool worth any penny invested.

And it totally support automation.

We mostly use the private cloud deployment model of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus.

I recommend the solution. You don't need to go to any other product. If you want to have a strong backup for recovery and restore, you need this solution. Resilience is optimum with Spectrum Protect suite from IBM.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

We're a bank and use the solution for backup and recovery, it's a disaster recovery enterprise solution. We're partners with IBM and I'm the Senior Technical Lead Consultant.

The most valuable features are the virtual snapshots that offer incremental backups forever. 

I don't think the solution is particularly user friendly, it requires expertise. Technical support could also be improved. Now that they're in the cloud I think they'll start enhancing with their backups. They weren't very good in the virtual world but they seem to be making more of an effort in the latest version and trying to align themselves with other backup solutions. IBM's an expensive solution so if you're enterprise you'll go with them, especially if you have other IBM products in the workplace. 

I've been using this solution for 15 years.

This is a very stable solution, but it requires a spectrum protect person working with it and not a regular admin person. In that respect, it's not very user friendly. 

It's a scalable solution but not like the products we have today. Scalability depends on setup and requires planning and architecture. If you have that then it's a scalable product.

Technical support is a bit problematic, I have good technical support within the company but if I need third level support there's nobody in Australia who can take a call for that. I wouldn't call support unless it's third level but it takes a while to get a response from them. I've been trying to solve an issue for six months. They keep sending different codes and commands that don't work. Maybe now that they've designed a private cloud it might be better. 

Initial setup of the solution requires expertise in configuration and installation, a person who has a connection to IBM or knows the product. This is not an out of the box solution. If it's not set up properly it's a nightmare to try and maintain down the line. Initial setup doesn't take a long time as long as the hardware specs are aligned but you have to know your environment and have a design. It requires planning.

Given that it's an expensive product I would suggest that if you're rich go with IBM, and if you're poor go with someone else. Most enterprise companies like to show off with these products. I've been lucky to have worked in enterprise companies. 

IBM doesn't work well on a middle-ware level when you're using solutions from different companies. I've been reading about their recent virtualisation. Once they master that, they'll probably be number one again and they seem to now be aligning themselves and starting to create a compatible product with all the clouds. 

What's caused part of the problem with IBM are their ongoing support costs. It looks like they're now changing their model and aligning themselves by creating a compatible product with all the clouds. Until now, Commvault has been the only compatible solution with all the clouds, whereas IBM has only been compatible with their own solutions. It's only now they're starting to integrate. There is an arrogance about them but lately I think they've realised that they need to be more public with their stuff and to compete with Commvault.

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. 

Our primary use for this is data protection and management using various features of the product.

Virtualization has helped us increase efficiency by working against data analysis almost immediately and without interrupting performance. We have experienced about an 80% savings in effort on our backups and satisfying data safety which makes us more efficient and improves our organization.

Certainly, the data protection is the most valuable feature for using the product but the secondary functions of replication, backup and recovery, are invaluable in helping to protect the validity of the data.

One of the places where the product can improve is in the interface. It is a little cumbersome to interact with and not very user-friendly. If the interface could be more simple it would make using the product better.

The only other improvement I can think of — and again this has something to do with the GUI interface — is to include other features for configuration and scheduling tasks to make using the product more simple.

We have never had a problem with the product and find it to be extremely stable. It handles loads very well and this is important for data security.

When it comes to scalability, we find that we are able to add new features and scale use of features fairly easily.

We have currently deployed the solution for nine clients and hope to continue to grow from there.

IBM generally has very good technical support if we require it, but also we are supposed to be experts, so we do not need to use their services often.

We actually concurrently serve customers using more than one option and the other option we work with is Veeam. Which we deploy depends on the customer need and their preferences.

Our experience with installations and deployment is that the installation is straightforward. It did not take more than an hour to install beside additional configurations and customizations required by the clients. The troubleshooting afterward may take more time, but usually, we can have everything in place in less than a day.

As we are the reseller or vendor we do the installations and configurations ourselves.

We only use IBM Spectrum Protect Plus with yearly licensing fees. It depends on which solutions or plan that you choose for exactly how much it will cost.

As far as advice for people who are thinking about using the product, the product is excellent and it works. I can recommend using it and that you can be satisfied.

On a scale of one to ten where one is worst and ten is best, I give the product an eight. The biggest reason why this is an eight and not a ten is the same issues with the GUI interface and that it could be easier to use.

I was using this solution at my previous job, about six months ago. The company that I am with now is planning to purchase it, although, at this time, we do not have any of these products.

I have experience with the on-premises deployment model, and it was our backup solution.

This solution allows you to create a backup using any storage, and then take another one for disaster recovery. This is something that is very important for us.

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. It will restore exactly, from whatever you have. It's really comfortable.

This product has no limitations.

The user experience is very bad and the interface needs to be improved. It is not user-friendly. This is not my complaint, alone, but everybody I know who has worked with this solution. In order to perform a backup, professionally, you need to use the command-line interface. By comparison, Veritas has a backup solution with a very nice user interface that is easy to use.

This solution is difficult to troubleshoot when an error occurs. It gives you an error number that you can search for in the manual, or on the internet, to find an answer, but details are not given within the user interface. Again, it is just not user-friendly.

This solution is stable.

This is a scalable solution.

We have three backup managers who work together. I am with the Linux team, and we installed this solution, but we will be handing it over to the maintenance team. As both teams work with this solution, there are five people in total.

We are backing up approximately one hundred servers. We currently don't have any plans to expand this location, so our usage here will not increase. However, we do have branches in other cities, so in the future, we expect to use this solution in each of the branches.

I have a lot of experience with IBM Spectrum Protect, and the Plus version has extra features. It includes, for example, cloud features. After we upgraded to the plus version, I did not use many of the additional features. From my perspective, I did not really notice any difference between the two versions. We made the switch because our consultants suggested the Plus version, and our research told us that it is a really good solution to upgrade to.

We actually used multiple backup solutions, but I am unable to name them.

We did not initially install and configure the Plus version. The initial setup was for IBM Spectrum Protect, and then we performed an upgrade to the Plus version.

The initial setup is complex, for a new installation, when somebody does it for the first time. It is not too hard when you have experience with it. Our deployment took approximately one day.

I and my colleague performed the implementation in-house, with some assistance from IBM.

This solution is worth the investment.

This solution is expensive, but compared to other backup solutions, it is fair.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. 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.

This is a really strong application that I find really useful and reliable for backup, but it needs to be more user-friendly.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case would be for all our VMs. We are currently using Spectrum Protect but we're actually planning on moving everything onto Spectrum Protect Plus.

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.

The only thing that I would like to see improved is the actual schedule that you get on the policies. It does not allow for being flexible, like for weekly, just day one to five, and leave day six and seven. Especially if we're running multiple policies, like if we want to do a basic weekly incremental and then later do a monthly. 

In the next release, I want to see updates on the scheduling so that we can have more options on how you schedule stuff, like allowing you to use your everyday requirement.

So far it looks quite stable and I haven't had issues yet. It looks quite fine.

I think it is scalable because you can scale upwards as much as you want to provide for your infrastructure. We are currently running it on a POC basis, so we are probably still in a pilot phase. The workload is not heavy yet due to the infrastructure. We're actually working on procurement of storage and our usage will increase. I'm currently only running three VMs, which in fact is quite big. And our immediate goal is to move 100 large VMs across. From there, we'll continue growing. We have about 700 or 800 VMs in our environment. 

We plan to upgrade to Spectrum Protect and for us it's moving forward. Firstly, backing up something on an archival level that is running on the same archival level is better. Secondly, the cost of Spectrum Protect Plus versus Spectrum Protect is much better, because I think you get around 10 VMs per terabyte licensing that you use. That will definitely be a huge gain for us.

The plugin on VMware of Spectrum Protect is totally different. So, with Spectrum Protect Plus you don't see the actual backup within the vCenter. The only thing that you see is that it creates a snap and then the backup runs totally outside of it.

The initial setup was quite straightforward and it was easy to actually set it up and start using it. The architecture is totally different from Spectrum Protect. I would like to see the commands and what's happening in the background, so it would nice to see a view of that.

The deployment was subject to the availability on the VMware side. We needed to go seek approvals and changes and things like that but the environment that I am currently using, I could deploy in a day.

Because we've got Spectrum Protect, we're going to use some of that licensing and convert it to Plus. One additional cost is obviously going to be the infrastructure that we need to buy for the solution.

The sooner you can do it and get going, the better. I rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using this as a backup solution in our on-premises environment.

With this product, we now have a reliable backup solution.

The administration is not user-friendly and needs to be improved. It is more suited to a technical person. Instead of using the command prompt for troubleshooting and administering the backup, there should be an easy-to-use graphical user interface.

The reporting should be improved. This solution would benefit from reports that included more aggregated data from the databases.

We had an incident where we were unable to recover our data, and it was very bad. The solution was already implemented, but for technical reasons and a misunderstanding, we were not able to recover our data. This detracts from their credibility.

In terms of stability, we have not seen many challenges aside from the one incident that we had, where we could not recover our data.

This solution seems scalable. We plan on adding more services and backing up more servers with it. We currently are backing up four physical servers, and twenty virtual machines. We have five administrators.

We've had many problems with technical support, and I would rate them a five out of ten. There was a lot of bureaucracy before they would send engineers to our site.

Prior to this solution, we were performing manual backups.

We downloaded the software from the vendor's website.

The initial setup was complex. Most of the work was done by an engineer from IBM. We really tried to follow the process so that we could understand it and troubleshoot if we encounter en error, but it was quite complex to follow. It is not a straightforward implementation.

The deployment took approximately two months, and there is a training period.

An IBM engineer assisted us with the deployment, and they are good at their work.

We have not yet seen ROI because we are still early in the project, but maybe we will, with time.

The licensing fees are on a yearly basis. In addition to the standard licensing fees, we paid for implementation and training. 

We did evaluate other products before choosing this solution. We had a look at Veritas and another solution that works with VMware. We chose this solution because the price is lower than that of the other two. Also, we already had their hardware, including the server and tape libraries.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to be open-minded when checking the infrastructure and technology, and then see whether this solution will be the best one for them.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from this solution is that project planning is key. You have to plan ahead for all of the various scenarios.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use this solution to back up our client's nodes on a schedule. Our deployment is in an on-premises environment that includes an IBM server and the Lenovo TS3200 Tape Library.

This solution is very stable and has good support available online.

The virtual tape library needs to be improved.

We have trouble with the administration of this solution. We need to update the volumes in the tape, but it first has to be transferred from tape to disk. The administration needs to be improved and made simpler to use.

The time required for backup should be optimized.

The verification process needs to be performed daily, so this should be more automated.

The volume of the database grows every day.

In the next release of this solution, I would like support for replication between the primary and secondary data centers. The duplicate backup date should be automatically eliminated.

This solution is very stable.

We have two users for this solution. One is a backup administrator and the other is the operator.

We have not used technical support for this solution. When we receive an error code, we search online and find the answer immediately.

We have been using this solution since it was named the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (IBM TSM) and did not use another solution prior.

With my experience, I don't have a problem with the installation of this solution. However, it is very difficult to install, configure, and administer with the AIX system and virtual environments.

We pay a monthly licensing fee.

At this time, I do not recommend using this solution and suggest that people choose another one. It is difficult to install, configure, and administer.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution is for backup within the customer's environment.

Currently, we are doing all of the PDP for VMware environments, and it seems to have been assisting us in a great way and making our backup more efficient.

The most valuable features are the API features because it allows you to integrate with your Microsoft SQL, your Oracle, and your IBM Db2.

The new functionality with the retention policy, where you can push it down from H2 Plus down to the Normal Spectrum Protect needs improvement.

There is an individual file-level restore. I would like integration into where the VMware guys can do their own restores.

At the moment, the stability of this solution seems to be extremely good. We just have to start putting more data on it and see what is going to happen with our VMware environment.

This is a scalable solution. I am aware that there are other users in South Africa using this solution. We currently only have one customer but we do plan to increase usage.

We have not used any technical support yet.

We used the original Spectrum Protect with TDP for VMware. 

We changed to the Spectrum Protect Plus because of the licensing.

The initial setup is straightforward if you follow the book. It only needs one person to deploy it and maintain it, with a maximum of two. Should one get sick, the other could take over.  We have a back-up team.

Our deployment was internally cloud-connected. At the moment, we are not using it as a public or private cloud. The deployment took less than a day because we had to wait on the VMware guys to build the OVA for us.

We started to deploy it more into existing VMware environments in our environment. We have deployed it in only two of our environments and we have another six to do.

We implemented this solution ourselves.

At the moment we have not seen a return on our investment.

The licensing model of Spectrum Protect Plus is more efficient and cheaper compared to the original. It is much more efficient because of the cost. There are no additional set up costs that I am aware of.

They charge you for every terabyte of licensing that you can back up. We have a contract with IBM that includes maintenance for three or five years.

If they are using the existing System Protect they should convert to Spectrum Protect Plus. It will save them a lot of money from a cost perspective.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

My primary use case for this solution is for virtual machine backup.  I have multiple environments including public-cloud, private-cloud, and an internal infrastructure.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the integration with Oracle.

The backup support for IBM Power Virtualization needs to be added. This would be a pretty good plus for this solution because no product at this moment, as I know, offers this feature.

It seems stable. I don't have much experience with this solution in a production environment, but it seems pretty stable.

I did not use this solution extensively during the trial period.

The solution can be scaled easily.

I was the only person using this solution during our trial period.

I did not contact technical support during the trial period.

I know their other product, IBM Spectrum Protect Server, very well. I tried this solution, IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, to see what is different. I wanted to know what the advantages were to using this version.

Given that we are an integrator, our environment is one such that we will not be switching, at least for the moment.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. The deployment took approximately one day.

I took care of the deployment myself.

Our primary use case for this solution is for backup and recovery.

The first advantage of using this solution is that it saves us money. Because with this product, we basically use this solution for data management or the backup management we are using. It reduces our multiple copies of data. If you do a daily backup on Spectrum Protect, you will get a longer retention feature.

I also like the speed of the duplication copy of the storage pool under IBM TSM libraries that this solution offers. You can make multiple copies of the same storage for and across multiple tape libraries, while in other solutions it's not easy to do.

Some of the features we find very valuable and use a lot are retention sets. There is a lot of content validation of the data that we use, and that is very helpful. Apart from this data retention technology, Spectrum Protect duplicates things which is useful.
We have an environment that is not only the raw file system, but the databases also. Different Exchange, SQL and all these kind of different applications are integrated with the Spectrum Protect. So it's a free functional kind of environment. Other features like centralization, data retention technologies, and retention sets are the very useful in our environment.

An area that needs improvement is data validation. We currently use another product that gives us immediate validation, information about when the last backup was, and no risk of corruption happening. TSM in IBM Spectrum is not mature so that you can validate on the spot.

There is no doubt that the solution is really stable. When I was working for IBM a few years ago, I have been involved in implementing it at a couple of places. Once implemented, you don't need to worry about it. Other solutions have to be updated regularly, but that is not the case here. 

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is fully scalable. Whenever I interact with a customer I tell him that this is not only a backup solution, it is a total data management solution where you get protection, data protection, plus archiving and many other things. This is quite a huge portfolio so I do believe it is a scalable product.

The technical support is very good. A customer can just raise a support ticket online and IBM will be available and check in to give support - either by getting in contact or by sending a solution email. When I used their technical support a while back, a technical engineer came back to me within a day. 

I worked with a net backup solution (EMC) at the previous organization where I worked. They offered specific benefits in terms of a user interface that was easy to use. They also have a very good graphical interface and users could easily perform tasks, do backups and do data retention. That was easy in those products.

At that time IBM Spectrum Protect was not that easy to use. It was only in 2014 that IBM Spectrum Protect mad their user interface easier and then this product became more popular. Today IBM Spectrum Protect is easier to use than other products. Other products are still at the same level of use as they were 7 or 8 years ago.

IBM Spectrum is also fully integrated with IBM products and that is why we went for the IBM Spectrum Protect. We liked that they were integrated with existing middle-ware and other products they are using. 

Five or six years ago it would have been complex. But now it's no trouble and not that much complex at all. It is user-friendly - from the interface point and from the intelligence point of view. So now it's not that much difficult.

I would recommend this solution for others who are looking at buying a data recovery and backup solution. But this product is not just for backup and recovery. This is far bigger than that. Backup and recovery is only one component of this product, as it also offers data to life-cycle management. I rate this a nine out of ten.