IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

My primary use case would be that I use Spectrum Protect for Exchange at the moment. It is working really well. These is a little bit of a learning curve with it, but I am finding it to be good, as Exchange now is migrated into SIP versions. IBM needs to catch up somewhat, but from what I have seen, it is acting the exact way that I would want it to act.

We have an on-premise infrastructure comprised of flash storage, disk, and tape, working well together. We are not looking to move to a cloud strategy in the immediate future.

It is reliable. The backup solution is our fail safe. When we are required to recover data, it is there.

Reliability: It has never had a problem with backups or restores. If you store something, it is there.

The only thing that I would like to have a little more of is insight in reporting. I find that Spectrum Protect needs a lot of monitoring, and I have to actually log into the servers. I would rather be more proactive and send the information when things do not work the way we want.

I am hoping that the Spectrum Protect Plus supports Exchange. That is my primary wish, since Spectrum Protect Plus should be a single pane of glass where I will be able to monitor all my instances from.

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. The first part of it was very long, but once I found the terms and where to look, it became a lot easier. Then. I found another gap when troubleshooting information that I needed to have. I needed to contact support to actually find that information.

So far, from my limited experience, it is working flawlessly. 

It seems very scalable and robust. It can do what we require it to do.

I currently have eight instances of Spectrum Protect installed on the servers that I manage.

Technical support is above standard in regards to the Exchange part. In our organization, we have backup administrators taking care of the exchange, and my primary function is to monitor and setup the schedules and backup. 

When it comes down to when it actually moved to the TSM part (now Spectrum Protect), we were having problems with the backup. It seemed to go well when we contacted technical support and they seemed to be fluent. They had a good response time and solved the issue.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I would recommend Spectrum Protect. It does what we require. It is robust. The support is good. 

It is for enterprise backup and recovery. I support customers who use this product for their enterprise backup and recovery.

I have small customers with about 40 cartridge libraries, then I have others who have petabytes of data and using everything under the sun. This is another good feature of Spectrum Protect; it does it all.

I support a customer base of about 25 customers. So, I support probably 50 instances.

It provides our customers with the comfort of having reliable enterprise data protection. 

Some of the new advanced features are definitely more into cost savings, e.g., dedupe compression, so doing more with less.

Scalability: Our customers are able to grow the product without having to buy additional hardware, so it is very scalable.

For Spectrum Protect Plus, I would like to see more enhanced reporting features and integration with Spectrum Protect. 

In terms of Spectrum Protect, usually the IBM features are ahead of where the customers' demand is, so I generally do not even install the latest version for at least a year. Therefore, I think they are doing good with this product.

It really depends on the hardware that you are running it on. If you run it with the right resources, it can be up for years on end.

It scales from very small to very large. It is easily the most scalable product out there.

I use technical support quite often, calling in PMRs for customers. Support is really good, as I have never had to close a PMR with them having fixed the problem. Also, they are very responsive.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward and easy to implement.

Customers will look at other vendors in the enterprise backup space: Commvault, NetBackup, Veeam, and other similar solutions.

Most of my customers have already been Spectrum Protect customers. Therefore they are happy with the product. The new implementations that I have done, they have generally chosen Spectrum Protect for its scalability and reliability.

I would absolutely recommend Spectrum Protect.

It has a tried and true tested ability. It has been around for approximately 30 years. The roadmap is definitely aligned with where businesses are going, e.g., cloud support, virtual backup support, etc. In the eight years that I have been a business partner, I have lost one customer that switched off of the platform. This was not because they were unhappy with the product, but from an acquisition,

It is an on-premise infrastructure, not cloud, which is comprised of IBM and Oracle. In the next couple of years, we will probably look to the cloud.

Right now, we are working on send volume, IBM Controller SVC, and we also have products, like IBM Storwize V7000 and FS900 Storage.

The capacity of the storage is huge. It can be affected with all of our requirements. We also have two copies for each volumes. This makes life easier and safer for us, in cases of disasters happening and for any volume or data corruption as well.

It has increased our security, scalability, and high availability.

High availability (HA): It is one of the best features that we have.

• It needs some software upgrades to fix some of its current bugs. 
• In SVC, we need a masking view that combines with a storage group. This is collected all in terms of hosts, storage, and volume, both on the storage side and the host side. We need to combine them in one storage group in the SVC.

From a storage perspective, it is very nice. From SVC, we do have some issues with rebooting, nodes, etc. However, we are working on them. As a software-defined storage, we should face some issues like this. From storage level, it is very nice and powerful.

We have not scaled it yet, because we already have enough storage capacity. Since the scalability will be online, I know it will be fine. There should not be any downtime. 

For time being, we have enough with the storage of IBM and SVC. At least for next three years, we have enough storage with what we have already.

IBM does not have a Kuwait entity open for calls and support, but we usually work with Dubai support. They are very nice and on the spot. If there are critical issues, they will come on spot. 

I was working with a IBM different product, DS4700. However, right now, we are in different stage of technology, which is SVC and Storwize V7000.

The initial setup is very impressive. I am a system admin, but I do love learning a lot. It is a straightforward setup, and the IBM engineers are very helpful and provide me with new information each time that they do an implementation.

During the implementation phases, technical people come over from Turkey and Dubai to Kuwait and help on the implementation. This is nice. 

It has not reached any SLA. Things are good.

We manage IBM, SVC, IBM Spectrum Control, and IBM Spectrum Storage.

I would recommend the product, because the storage is very nice, especially the FS900. It has very nice features.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They are clever. They have committed in their words, implementation, their price, and the capacity (which they already offered).

We are actually implementing our own private cloud and using Spectrum Protect to back up and replicate the backups to a secondary site.

With Spectrum Protect, you can use any type of disk to back-end the repositories. It gave us the flexibility to use whatever storage we wanted at our secondary site. On our first site, we have really high performing variable disks, and at our secondary site, we have a lower performing tier. On the cloud, we have an even slower tier.

Most valuable features are:

• Good tape integration
• The node replication to a secondary site.
• The ability to use S3 Data Store as a repository.

I would like to see integration with Copy Data Management, which is an IBM product. That would be really nice. Right now, these two products are siloed, so if these two become integrated, the product would become a bit of a powerhouse.

With stability, we have had some challenges. There have been some issues around some of the functionality around reclamation. In the reclamation jobs, there has been fighting over the backup jobs. With Spectrum Protect, you have a reclamation job that takes space back from tapes which are no longer needed, and we' are having a challenge with that right now. 

We are having a balance issue between the reclamation and the backup function. It has to take the space back from the tapes before it can record to those tapes, but sometimes those two processes are overlapping.

This is in the process of being resolved. We are currently working with IBM support and the IBM engineering teams to resolve the issues.

We have not really had a chance to properly scale it, but I imagine it should be fairly straightforward in terms of growing it out, e.g., we spec'd out a server that was really powerful.

In terms of scalability, the next thing should be adding additional storage.

We currently have one Spectrum Protect instance, but in the future, there will be at least three or more.

The support is really good. They are very responsive. There is a PMR set up, and we are working directly with the engineering team, who are actually coding the product.

The initial setup was not complex. It was really straightforward. It has been a lot easier as of late to do these implementations.

We chose IBM Spectrum Protect, because they actually have something called MSP pricing, which means managed services provider pricing. The pricing was attractive, and it seems to be a platform that IBM is totally investing on in terms of new functions and new capabilities. 

We seriously looked at Commvault. We also looked at Veeam and another third-party.

The way it works is customers can host their applications on our cloud, and we basically charge them to backup those products. We wanted something that could do that and we have the skill sets in-house. That is how it came about that we purchased Spectrum Protect. It is pretty much a function of wanting to backup primary workloads running on our cloud.

Most important criteria when selecting a backup:

• Resiliency
• Integration with tape
• Integration with cloud.

We primarily provide this solution to our customers. They mostly use the solution for backup and recovery purposes.

The solution offers very good flexibility. 

It's huge. You can do almost everything with it. It's very programmable, customizable, and automatable. It supports a lot of operating systems and a lot of applications. It's very versatile. It's maybe the most versatile on the market.

The solution is used to support newer client types for backup for cloud-based software as a service, mail as a service, things like that, and hyper-converged systems. That's what they intended Spectrum Protect Plus for. They need to make sure it continues to cater to these clients.

The solution needs to work on disaster recovery integration. Basically, VMware applications to the cloud, for example. There needs to be integration with the storage, and integration with VMware. 

I've been using the solution since 2003. That's 17 years at this point.

The scalability is huge. It's maybe the most scalable backup of all products on the market. It's in the petabytes per server. They have the best tape libraries per square meter and capacity per square meter. You can scale in the exabytes with these solutions. You will have to have multiple servers, but most of the exabyte scale projects that we've looked at are IBM.

Technical support is always very good. I have never experienced any support as good as them. I'm very happy with IBM technical support.

The initial setup can be very simple. If you have a small environment, it can be extremely simple. It can be as complex as you want it to be or as you need it to be. That's the good thing about it. 

Some people get lost in it sometimes and the solution makes it too complex for their needs. I know there's criticism that it's too complex. Yes, it's true, it is complex, but it's only complex due to the fact that IBM shares the knowledge. If IBM wouldn't share the knowledge about how to solve things, or how to make things complex, then it wouldn't be complex as then you would have to call support if you have a problem with it.

That's what other vendors do. They don't share the knowledge, they don't allow you to dig into the deeper configuration of the product and you have to call support if you have a problem. That way, with IBM, you can solve it yourself basically. You can customize it to your wishes. 

However, on the other hand, the downside of that is if you have a problem and it's complex and you have to be able to solve it, or you can call support. You have the option. At least you have the option with IBM of making it as complex as you want it to be. With other vendors, you don't have that. That provides flexibility.

Deployment times vary. If you have a VMware environment, it's really fast. It can be a few hours to install the servers and install the data mover, and you're done. If you have a complex environment where you need to install a lot of clients on hardware machines or machines that need a specific backup plan, then it can take weeks.

The pricing is average. It's not expensive, it's not cheap. It's not the cheapest, it's not the most expensive. It's very good value for money I would say.

We're an IBM partner.

I would advise companies to use it for small environments that need a simple solution. I would also advise it for very large environments over a petabyte for flexibility. For the midsize company, I'm not sure if I would advise it as that's where you get into that sweat show. You need complex features, however, you don't really have the complex knowledge. For a mid-sized company, that's where the problems lie.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement. If they shift to a little more simplicity, it might help. There are other products out there that have more modern features, and IBM is not yet there. Therefore, they're not 10 out of 10. That doesn't mean that those other products are 10 out of 10 because they lack things that IBM has. There's no perfect 10 on the market.

We use IBM Spectrum Protect for data backup purposes, i.e. for people, administration, and file-level backups.

We did have a challenge with one of IBM Spectrum Protect's systems. For some funny reason, it was not coming up because of the stability. We were able to restore, but it started us thinking about improved backup services. 

Two weeks ago, we were able to restore services as quickly as possible in a production environment. We were able to kickstart and provide services on that particular server to customers, which saved us a lot of embarrassment.

Otherwise, we would have been down due to power supply issues we had in our production environment. Some of the services were misbehaving. We had to do a majority stop and IBM Spectrum Protect was a big plus for us.

The fact that we can take the backup straight onto tape is the most valuable feature. IBM Spectrum Protect is very valuable for me because you don't necessarily need storage on-prem or on a production system. 

IBM Spectrum Protect has its system for taking a backup. It has a backup option on the outside also that makes it easy for you to do a restore.

Technically, I've not used the latest version. What can be improved is the graphical interface and user-friendliness of the products. Secondly, they can make it also more available for other sub-regions so that we can pick up some courses on it. We need to improve our knowledge base on their products.

IBM Spectrum Protect needs improvement, but I'm sure they looked at some of these issues in the latest version. There are continuous improvements in the application.

IBM Spectrum Protect has been stable. On power issues, they blamed some supplier parts of the company. We had problems almost two or three times a week. It cost some of the companies to malfunction, so we labored for two or three days in repair work. 

For backups, it took us about almost a week or two weeks to fix that.

In terms of the scalability, with the latest version of IBM Spectrum Protect, now they have all these cloud features available. It makes it easier for you to plug into.

We have about 10 main users. We have three or four unrestricted users. For deployment and maintenance, about four or five guys on the ground. 

The product is very extensive. We've implemented it about three or four years ago. At the moment, the number of sellers in production increases every day, day in and day out.

We keep on spinning up new services and all we do is onboard the new servers. We've not had any complaints because of capacity. It has been able to serve our clients' purposes.

I'll give IBM Spectrum Protect customer support a seven out of 10 because I'm still not able to take the VMware environment backup. 

Commvault is very user-friendly. From one point you can do all of your restores. You can even restore a backup that was taken by a CMS. We were using Commvault previously.

The initial setup of our IBM Spectrum Protect install was not straightforward. We needed some experts to come down and do it. They could have given us the instructions so that we could have done it here ourselves.

We had some folks from outside for the implementation, which was done in three weeks. That includes implementing the backup test. 

IBM was the vendor. They did well. It's working fine.

My company is a bank. As part of meeting the auditing requirements for banks, we use IBM Spectrum Protect. It can encrypt the backups as well, which helps us to meet our legal requirements for banking. We are seeing a return on investment.

I was with a different organization. We were using Symantec products.

I hope that all users go in for the latest version of IBM Spectrum Protect, which is cloud-based. They should equally ensure that everything comes together well. This should help in case they have all of these challenges like ours, i.e. where power is a major issue.

I rate IBM Spectrum Protect with a seven out of 10 because of our inability to pick a backup of a trusted VMware environment. When the VMware environment is collected, we cannot take a backup. We cannot take VMware backups for that environment.

The primary use case is for pure file backup. We have used it from back in the Tivoli Storage Manager days. Primarily, backing up Spectrum Scale would be our most common use, but we do use it as the main backup client that we use. Therefore, whatever storage that we are supplying, it is generally the backup solution that we put in along with it.

We are largely HPC focused as a company, so it is still very much focused on hardware. Although, we are starting to see more questions asked about how to utilize the cloud and how to involve it. So, it is coming, but traditionally, we are still sticking with the hardware solutions, such as traditional tape libraries. Larger deployments would be the TS3500s and the TS4500s. Then, there are the smaller products along the same lines where you have got a number of drives and a number of tapes. At whatever scales the client is setting it, we will match the size to their requirements.

It is hard to say because we tend to go in with a specific project and deploy that project. Therefore, we do not always have visibility on what the impact is. Just that it is a positive experience and it integrates well with the solution that we have provided. However, we do not tend to get to see the before and after of the impact for our specific client.

Integration with Spectrum Scale is a large part of it. 

We sometimes use different pools of storage (policy engine in it) in terms of retention. 

There is always a balance between the power of the product and the usability of it. There is learning curve to learn how to use it, but it is a very powerful product.

We have our issues with Fibre Channel. but that is the hardware which underlies it. In terms of Spectrum Protect, it runs very well. We have ran it in certain clients for the best part of 10 years, and it runs very well for us. We do not have stability problems with Spectrum Protect. The issues that we do have, it is with the hardware underneath.

High availability (HA) is a challenge, but we do deploy it in certain situations. We tend to stick to a more traditional scale up model rather than a scale out model, but we have managed to meet our requirements for this, so scalability has not been a problem other than when people ask for HA solutions. Generally, we have managed to meet our requirements.

When I used them a number of years ago, the experience was positive. They were always helpful when we had issues and managed to explain what the circumstances were around the issues and how to resolve them. Therefore, the experience then was positive. I have not personally been dealing with the support side for over a year now.

The setup is not too bad. Once you know what you are doing, it tends to be fine. The part we always struggle with is the onboarding process, getting people used to how it works, the specific nuances of the product, the fact that it is always incremental, their retention policies, and the commands to use when you're interacting with it. That is more the challenge that we have with it: The onboarding of new people whether they are internal people to us or clients.

There is quite a steep learning curve to your initial interactions with Protect. Then, once you kind of get into it and get into that intermediate level, the documentation is really good and the resources out there are also good. Thus, once you get over that initial hump, then it is pretty good.

Our clients tend to have an in-house team that at least do the daily check side of it, then back off the support to us. If they are having any problems, any errors coming up, or if the backups haven't run, etc., that is when they involve us. From a day-to-day point of view, we do not tend to be hands-on.

Our clients tend to compare it with NetBackup.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It is often around meeting certain requirements. Our business is usually won on other parts of the project than Protect. While Protect is a vital part of it, the difference is usually around Spectrum Scale, the compute cluster, or other products that Protect is looking after.

Our primary use case is supporting DB2 environment. We have about a couple hundred servers that we support for our SAP environment. It is one of the most critical applications that we have.

IBM Spectrum Protect has improved my organization with its total support of IBM products.

It is an IBM product. With SAP, you are using IBM software to protect it. DB2 and AIX servers are both IBM. Therefore, it is a total IBM solution, which helps.

At the moment, it meets DB2's needs sufficiently.

Stability is very good. It used to be rocky years ago. It has been a very good solution, and very rarely do we have problems with it.

I have worked with it for 20 years now. It scales well for the amount of clients that we use with it. The clients have been very good about keeping up with the technology changes.

It should meet our future needs. We do not plan to grow it at this time as we just use it for SAP. 

Their technical support is very good. They are very good about getting back to you and trying to help you work through issues. I generally contact support online versus calling in, but that is just my preference.

It was easy to set up/rebuild.

This was before my time with the company.

We have a cloud strategy using Amazon. 

For leveraging cloud, we are in the beginning stages. Therefore, we are using Avamar.

Our non-cloud/on-premise infrastructure consists of servers.