IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

The most valuable feature is the breadth of what it can do in an environment for backup protection of data. It's very scalable. Customers can adopt a Spectrum Protect solution at an entry level.

As their environment grows, the solution will grow with it. They don't have to worry about purchasing additional vendor solutions to meet their backup and storage needs.

With a single solution, a customer can manage all their data from a backup protection perspective. I think, single-handedly, the way that it does their backup is quite unique. It incorporates data reduction during all stages of the backup process. Customers can manage more data without incurring additional licensing costs.

I would like to see IBM take the solution more into enabling customers to work with cloud solutions. While they are making great strides to do that today, I think there are some areas for growth required in that area.

In addition to the hypervisors, whether it's VMware or Hyper-V, there are still some areas that I would like to see continued. So to sum up: Handling with the cloud and the hypervisor.

It's a very stable solution. It's been around for a very long time. Because of all that length of time it's been in use, it has become a very, very stable product.

IBM does a great job of innovating and keeping the product current with their new roll-outs and new updates to the solution to meet the ever changing needs that customers are facing today in managing and protecting their data.

It's really scalable. Great scalability.

I personally have never used support, but we work with customers who do. We find that their support, on the average, is very good.

We look for stability when first considering solutions. IBM, overall, brings the greatest set of solutions that can tackle a customer's storage needs. This is not just from a data protection perspective, but through the whole lifecycle of managing their data. IBM has a full spectrum of solutions they can bring for customers' needs.

I would definitely do the research. Part of that research should include the IBM Spectrum Protect solution.

One of the benefits they should always look at is the total cost of ownership of any solution. I think that's where Spectrum Protect really shines. You need to look past just the software costs.

There are also going to be hardware costs, training costs, and services involved with it. You'll find that with Spectrum Protect, the total cost of ownership of implementing and maintaining the solution is going to be less than other vendors.

I guess it keeps everything under one umbrella. So there are fewer products to deal with.

It covers all the different operating systems. If you need backup, it can pretty much do everything.

I would like to see it simplified. Depending on what client you're talking about, there are lots of different features. There's instant recovery that it doesn't have. For the database side, it does not have object level recovery. There are just a slew of things that are lacking feature-wise. But the biggest problem is the complexity.

The stability is lacking. From the client side, which is my focus, it's very complicated.

It doesn't have the features that a lot of other products have. It seems like they're always three to five years behind what other companies are doing.

It's very hard to use. It's not user-friendly. It's not designed with the administrator in mind.

I think from the server side, it scales very well. The client side is much more difficult to deal with. It's a lot of hands-on work with the client.

I have used tech support, and I would rather chew off my left arm than have to deal with tech support.

I was involved in the installation and it was complex in every aspect.

We are actually looking for different solutions right now.

I would do a lot of research on all the vendors before I made a decision. It's expensive, it's hard to use, and takes a long time.

The most important criteria when looking for a product is simplicity. We have a set of criteria for every client in terms of what it has to do. Being the backup window, the recovery is the most important thing. So make sure it can do the recovery the way you want it done, i.e., fast.

The basic objective of this solution is data protection, whether it's at the virtualization layer, physical layer, or database layer. This is basically a whole data protection suite for entire enterprise workloads. It includes your VMware workloads and any physical workloads, bare-metal workloads, databases, and all this, email. This solution is being used for everything for data protection.

All the useful features are valuable actually. You can't ignore any one of them. We also use Spectrum Protect Plus actually, the other product, where you can integrate the VMware Hyper-V or any other solution for the backup, data protection, and using that one, you can protect all the databases also.

Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus still have separate use cases. From the IBM side, these two products are running in parallel. But in the near future, they are combining the Spectrum Protect Plus. There will be no Spectrum Protect itself in the near future. But as both are currently separate, Spectrum Protect Plus is mostly for the virtualized workloads, whereas Spectrum Protect is for the bare metal and databases kind of thing.

This solution itself protects the data, but the solution itself should be recoverable quickly in case of disaster on the production side or something. So this solution is not mature in terms of disaster recovery and could be improved. The architecture of the solution needs more flexibility.

I have been using the solution for seven years.

It's a very stable product, and we've never had any downtime with it.

The solution is very good in terms of scalability. We are running almost a petabyte of data protection for our solution, so it's pretty stable. From a scalability point of view, it has plenty of options. The solution will work for any entry to mid-range customer.

We used to have technical support from IBM and it's good. On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it eight or nine, because we get the solution to the problem immediately.

The solution has a capacity-based licensing, front and back-end license. It's yearly with front-end capacity license or back-end capacity license per terabyte; customer's choice.

This product itself has evolved quite a lot. Before it was quite difficult for the administrator, for the end-user, whoever has to manage the product. It was not user-friendly compared to all other data protection solutions. In the last three to four years, IBM has put a lot of R&D and effort into this solution. It's very easy to use, and it has a lot of improved features. Any normal administrator can handle this one now.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We're working with different versions of this solution. We have different versions deployed for multiple clients. The latest version is 8.1.11. We have a mixture of legacy environments and new environments.

Our client's use cases are mainly to protect heterogeneous workloads, virtualized workloads, physical workloads, databases, SAP solutions, and ERP solutions. It's great for large, heterogeneous environments. Spectrum Protect has a lot of different agents and components that allow you to completely backup your entire environment.

I am a technical team leader for this solution. I have an implementation team who work side by side with me. From the customer-side, there is a team of roughly six people working with it. There are administrators, backup operators, and technical managers that work with us and this solution. In total, the organization has roughly 6,000 employees. It's a large organization by Colombian standards. 

IBM Spectrum Protect provides us with the scalability and growth that we need. It is suitable for very large environments. It's very robust and has been on the market for a long time.

Here's an example of how this solution has improved our client's organization: There is a customer in the banking sector here in Colombia — the private banking sector. They had two terabytes of information backed up daily, in incremental backups from a different number of file servers. Those file servers were being backed up daily. At the end of the month, the customer backed up the data completely. In short, they made a full backup of all the data  on a monthly basis. It was roughly 20 terabytes of data. To cope with this situation we implemented retention sets. Thanks to these retention sets, the customer doesn't need to back up that 20 terabytes of information monthly. They can just resort to the incremental backups that they made before, daily, to have a snapshot and an accurate picture of the end of the month. They only have to do another incremental backup for the last day of the month, and that's it; they have a complete, very robust picture for the monthly data. 

This has reduced our customers' backup time by a considerable amount. They have also reduced the amount of storage space needed as they are not repeating backups every month. The data is 90% the same, month to month, which has optimized both speed and storage capacity.

One of the more recent features that we value the most, being an influencer myself, there is feature we call retention sets. These retention sets are snapshots of previously backed-up data. This data no longer needs to be backed up again so there's no need to re-back up that information, to reinject that data. It allows us to offer, improve, and optimize the use of storage resources for our customers. We implemented this solution for a number of clients here in Colombia and throughout Latin America.

Also, Spectrum Protect has what is one of the greatest ecosystems of experts, users, forums and in general learning resources in the data protection realm.

The reporting could be better. There's not a complete solution for reporting; however, there is a solution that allows you to write SQL queries. This way, you can explore the databases with metadata and get the reports that you want. Still, that's not an out-of-the-box solution, it's just a tool that allows you to write queries as you need. There is a steep learning curve for that.

I would also love to see more agents and solutions devoted to backing up other workloads, especially in regard to non-traditional databases.

The licensing can be a pain to manage. There is a tool that can provide you with automated reports regarding how much licensing you're using, but sometimes it's not accurate. You need to contact an IBM representative in order to get the correct information. 

Traditionally, there has been a Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments module that allows you to protect virtualized environments; however, it's not easy to use. It's very complex. In this case, my advice is to leverage Spectrum Protect Plus, which is the newest addition to the portfolio to back up both virtualized and modern workloads and works very well.

I've been working with Spectrum Protect for the last 10 years.

I think that it's the most scalable solution in the market. That's the reason why the largest enterprises in Colombia use it. Speaking as an expert on these types of solutions, there is no other solution that can support the size of workloads, components, and servers required for very large environments. I don't think it's just a matter of scalability, but also performance, too.

IBM technical support has been pretty good so far. We were given a technical point of contact for every inquiry that we had during the implementation process. My team has a lot of expertise now, but every now and again, we require some support from IBM. Their support has helped us get this solution working precisely as we need. Overall, regarding IBM Spectrum Protect, IBM support has been great. 

The initial setup might be complex. There are a lot of different nuances that need to be taken into account; however, with the help from an experienced team, the product can be deployed seamlessly.

Years ago, it took us roughly three to four months to implement this solution — mainly due to the amount of maintenance and the number of components that also need to be deployed. Security concerns also need to be addressed and resolved from the client-side. All of this made it quite difficult.  Now that we leverage IBM Spectrum Protect blueprints that are available publicly, to reduce implementation time down to a couple of weeks, sometimes even a couple of days. This has allowed us to stay competitive in what is a very competitive market.

Spectrum Protect Plus, a complementary solution to Spectrum Protect, comes bundles in some licensing schemes together with Spectrum Protect. This has allowed us to reach all sorts of customers. It allows our clients to get a hold of virtualization technology, including backup and recovery, and instant restore. These are features are needed in today's rapidly changing environments.

When Spectrum Protect is not suitable for a customer's environment, we always recommend backup replication solutions. Backup replication solutions are much easier to manage as they don't require a steep learning curve. Backup replication solutions are a great fit for small to medium-sized businesses, but for large corporations, large enterprises, or large companies, my choice is Spectrum Protect.

My advice to potential users would be to follow the IBM Spectrum Protect blueprints. These documents are very valuable and informative. They'll provide you with a lot of needed advice. They'll also provide you with a forewarning regarding situations that can occur during the implementation process. Sometimes people completely skip over these blueprints and go ahead with the implementation — my take is: don't .

Make sure to leverage all of the new features that this product offers. For example, many people don't bother using the retention feature; however, this feature is great for reducing storage and also improves the backup speed regarding operations. Don't be intimidated by these features. Contact and experienced team that can help you out to get the most out of the solution.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give his solution a rating of eight — it's a proven solution.

Our primary use for this solution is Backup & Recovery.

We have worked with old fashioned tape media hierarchies, completely disk-based backup using Data Domain, and now a mixed tape and directory container pool environment.

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

The most valuable features are scripting to control daily processing, scripting to integrate special client backups, and scripting to develop enhanced reporting (primarily using SQL).

The deduplication must be perfect, and thus should be improved. It costs us too much when we hit corruption in a backup and cannot recover.  

Spectrum Protect is a primary backup product that is used for physical and virtual servers in the open systems world.

One of our customers is using a cloud strategy, but it is on-prem cloud. So, it is cloud object storage.

Some of our customers are going to VTL (IBM and non-IBM). I have one customer who will be going to a Spectrum Scale environment for their backup. The Spectrum Scale environment is doing spinning disk, and they migrated off of a VTL product onto it. These are major two infrastructure environments that I have seen.

Most of my clients have been running Spectrum Protect for a long time, so they have been running it for years. If they have migrated off of it, they migrated off of it because of its lack of virtual environment functions.

• The speed of backup
• The amount of data that it protects with very little storage by doing incremental forever.

Its availability has been excellent.

Scalability is pretty much unlimited.

One client with a distributing environment has 130 to 140 instances. Another client has probably somewhere between 10 to 15.

I have not personally used technical support. The feedback from my clients has been pretty positive. 

I do have one customer who does not tend to stay current, and that causes issues. Anytime you are not very current and call in with an issue, it is hard to get it resolved. It will depend on how far back you go though.

I was involved in a migration setup. When one of our customers was moving from a VTL to Spectrum scale for their target storage, we had to go through some migrations because we switched from VTL doing the replication to using Spectrum Protect for node replication, using compression, etc. It was pretty straightforward.

We use it for our backup and recovery services.

Our environment is on-premise. We also do tape. However, we do not have any cloud infrastructure at this point. We have a cloud strategy in the works.

We have six Spectrum Protect instances: Three of them are disaster recovery (DR) and three of them are in production. We have grown out the three in production and are looking to add two more in the future. Spectrum Protect should have no issues accommodating this growth.

With the new features that we have added, it has made a difference as far as faster recovery and speed.

• The server application - the features in it.
• The replication part of it.
• The dedupe piece of it, which is a huge help, especially in our environment.
  

I would like a little more ease with the virtual platforms, because it is a huge thing that is coming up. We have a huge virtual environment, but it seems like it is convoluted as far as the process of planning it, then integrating Spectrum Protect. There are a lot of moving pieces, so I am looking forward to Spectrum Protect Plus. There seems to be less moving parts to it, so hopefully it will be quicker.

It is a very solid product.

The scalability is solid, provided we setup the infrastructure as needed.

If I have an issue, I will call support. I am not really impressed with the Level 1 support, but once I get past that and go to Level 2, then we will usually get some type of resolution. 

We do have really good support through our IBM rep, who will jump on it as soon as something is out there.

I was not part of the initial setup.

I have seen a lot of other backup products out there, and they are good. However, Spectrum Protect seems to encompass a broad range of things, and you can pretty much put it anywhere. You can tie it into your backup network or backup needs.

We do have primary storage, which is a mix between IBM, EMC and Infinidat. We also use VMware and IBM Power servers. That is our infrastructure setup. We do not have a cloud strategy.

We have five instances of the Spectrum Protect.

We use it for our backups. That is our main use for it. So far, it has been quick to restore, and we have never had any issues. Every time we go and try to get a file, we can get it. Restores are quick and the data is always there.

• It is very robust. 
• It has been in the market for many years. 
• We can use it with any storage for the back-end to save data. 
• It supports tape, which is something that we like as a hospital.

We would like to see capabilities of long-term archiving and more support for hardware platforms.

It is very stable. We have had it for over 15 years and never really had an issue.

We are now looking at the new product. Before, it did not have a lot of options for Exchange, SharePoint, etc. With the new Spectrum Protect Plus, it seems like there will be more options and they are catching up with the market, and that is a good thing.

The technical support seems good. Sometimes you get people who are not knowledgeable, but overall, it is good. You get the issues resolved.

We were not previously using a different solution. We were looking for a solution which was robust, and the company behind it was a good, big company. We had other IBM solutions at the time, so we wanted to make sure that we stuck with the same organization. I had used a Spectrum Protect, which used to be called TSM, in other places before, and it was stable and robust. That is how we decided to go with it.

The initial setup was not difficult at all; it was very straightforward. Even though Spectrum Protect is not the easiest to use, it was not a big deal to set it up.

We will probably use it in the future since we have already invested in it, even though we are looking at other options. Financially, it makes sense to go with Spectrum Protect rather than changing to another platform.

A long time ago, we also evaluated Legato NetWorker (now EMC NetWorker).

Right now, we are going to have to look at investing in a new solution because of the change that IBM is making to a Spectrum Protect Plus. Otherwise, we probably would not have looked at changing it from the legacy one.