IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

The primary use case is backing up Oracle Databases, SQL databases, Exchange, and all documents which are produced by my company.

Our on-premise infrastructure is comprised of disks on data domain and tape. We do not have a cloud strategy at the moment, but we are looking into it.

Right now, we have six Spectrum Protect instances with three of them in full production.

We have better, faster backup times, and it has improved efficiency in the backups.

• The ease of use
• Being able to set it up and configure it.

We have had issues, but everybody is going to have them. Overall, it seems to be stable. We have run into some periods where we have found some tape issues which were causing us problems, but we resolved them. For some reason, we had a bunch of drives go offline on our disk storage (our virtual library).

It scales well. We have grown here in the last year or two, and it has been relatively easy.

I have used their technical support. It has mostly been good. There has been some times where Level 1 tried to hit at things which I had already looked at, but once we got passed that, then they were able to either send me to the next Level or resolve the issue.

The additional features that I am looking to see in the future are already in the roadmap.

We are using it for backing up corporate data.

It helps you protect your data with various retention policies, as required by the business. It would help the company maintain a disaster recovery plan and be able to recover from a failure.

Its incremental forever approach is valuable, so we don't have to load tapes to do a restore.

It does what we need it to do, but it could be better with VM backups. It could be better integrated with virtual machines or VM backups, but that's why they have their Plus out now. Plus version is more geared toward VM backups. The regular version is more for endpoint clients. 

Its licensing and pricing could be improved. Its licensing is complicated, and it is an expensive solution.

I have been using this solution for over 20 years.

Its stability is pretty good.

It is very scalable.

They're decent. They're fine. I would rate them an eight out of 10.

Positive

I have only been with IBM. I'm a consultant, so that's basically what I've worked on.

Its initial setup can be complicated. You would need a certified deployment expert to configure it and install it properly upfront. It isn't for a novice to be able to set up.

The deployment duration depends on the environment, but it typically takes about a week or two. Its maintenance also depends on the size of the company. If it is a small-sized or a medium-sized company, you could get away with one admin, but if it is larger, you might have more than one Spectrum Protect server, so you'd have multiple admins.

I am a consultant, so I would be the one who does the implementation.

Its licensing is complicated. It goes by CPUs, and it is pretty expensive as well.

I would advise others to do proper planning beforehand. You should know the retention policies that you want. You should know what policies you want to set before you go into it, and you should know how much data you're going to be backing up and then make sure it is sized properly.

I'll give it a nine out of 10. It is a good product.

Our primary use case for IBM Spectrum Protect is backup. 

The IBM Spectrum Protect feature I find the most valuable is how fast it is. 

They should introduce more features for virtualization platforms and backing up IBMs. Backup speeds should also be improved. 

I have been using this solution for about a decade. 

IBM Spectrum Protect is stable. 

IBM Spectrum Protect is scalable. 

Technical support is okay. We have not had many issues with them. 

The initial setup at a new sight is straightforward. It takes about a week. 

IBM Spectrum Protect is expensive. 

We primarily use the solution in order to back up VMware, Hyper V, SQL, and Oracle. We also do Linux, AIX, and solutions that Cisco has as well.

We also do voice logging.

The solution has excellent performance overall. 

The product's initial setup is pretty straightforward. They offer good documentation that helps with the process.

The stability of the solution is very good.

In general, the solution is quite user-friendly. The GUI is very nice.

The solution requires organizations to purchase an extra license to go to the cloud. I've got a limitation of going to the cloud. I don't want to pay more. It gets expensive.

There needs to be a bit more automation.

We've been using the solution for the last five years or so. It's been a while at this point.

The solution is quite stable. We're actually in the process of doing a POC for a sister company to make sure the stability holds and it's doing very well. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's good.

We had to look at the scalability as we wanted to expand. You need to purchases extra licenses if you want to expand. 

I'd rate the technical support at a nine out of ten. Every time they change some aspect of the product, we need to call them to get clarity and they are always very helpful. We're extremely satisfied with the level of support they provide to our organiztion.

The initial setup is not complex. It's pretty straightforward overall. They have very helpful documentation and assistance from the engineers. It's a smooth process. A company shouldn't have any issues with the implementation.

The solution does have engineers that can help with the initial setup.

The solution can get pretty expensive. They also charge an extra license if you would like to go to the cloud.

The solution charges companies a licensing fee on a yearly basis on the front-end. You pay at the beginning of the year.

We are customers and end-users.

Our contract is coming to an end and the way that the budget is going, we've decided that we going with peer storage at this stage. We're going to change the way we are doing things, both on-premises and in the cloud.

Whether this solution makes sense for a company depends on their environment and their overall goals.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We were mostly happy with the product, however, there were some limitations around the licensing that's making us rethink our commitment to it.

We use it for backup.

Support of the IBM X platform and the backup data replication to DR are the most valuable features.

It has a lot of areas for improvement. Its reporting for job completion or incompletion can be improved. It should also provide a granular recovery, ease of operation, data life cycle management, and media management. 

It should support a backup in such a format that in case of a disaster, one can start the virtual machine out of the backup itself. Its reliability can also be better. It is also expensive, and their support is also poor. 

I have been using this solution for the past five to six years.

From a security point of view, there are fewer concerns about the backup as long as you encrypt the data.

It is scalable. The scalability also depends on your network architecture, etc.

Their technical support is very poor. We are not very happy with them.

Its initial setup is complex. It took three to four days.

My team members handle the deployment. The number of people required depends on the number of IT assets that we are trying to protect.

It is expensive.

I would recommend it depending on the use cases, but it is better to avoid IBM now. It is a new era of other solutions. IBM should catch up or allow itself to become extinct.

I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect a five out of ten.

Spectrum Protect provided a steady state in my backup operations and confidence in restores procedures with 99% assurance.

It is the only backup software which gives retro-compatibility, resilience, and enterprise agents.

This product should be more user-friendly for newcomers.

It is very stable after deployment and will perform in a steady state.

Scalability in not an issue for this product. It is a real enterprise class backup software.

Customer service is a plus, always giving an answer with skillful personnel.

There is really good technical support.

I had different backup products. Each one is really good with similar backup needs, but with Spectrum Protect, I could get a holistic product for heterogeneity environments.

In the beginning, the product was sometimes difficult to deploy. Then, there were improvements by IBM, giving more confidence to customers.

Now, setup is really straight forward.

Implementation was made in-house for many clients, which provided me with quite good expertise and autonomy for the future deployments.

Regarding retro-compatibility of the product between versions, your data is always available and the ROI is unquestionable. Also, the different license models can give good benefits to the end customer.

Licenses have to be studied regarding a client's need. However, with Entry License, Front End Capacity or Back End Capacity, there are many choices.

I tried other products, but some of them were not suitable for enterprise class.

The product is always getting better, and it is still the most reliable backup product in the market.

• Backup
• Archive
• Restore

We currently backup about 400 clients using traditional incrementals forever as well as another 350 using VE incremental forever.

IBM Spectrum Protect is a robust tool which allows us to backup pretty much any environment, virtual or physical, and create offsite copies of all our data for security and recovery purposes.

• Incrementals forever
• SnapDiff functionality
• VE

The ability to do dedupe in the product is nice to have. We currently have a VTL appliance with dedupe functionality. We will be exploring the SP features in this area shortly.

Easier configuration of some of the products, e.g., VE comes to mind. 

Perhaps some better documentation, which I believe was better in the past.

An area for improvement would be the ease of use - the GUI is not up to the mark compared to other products in the market. IBM should also move on from the mainframe mindset and evolve so that configuration does not need to be done via the command line.

I have been using this solution for eight to nine years.

I've had no problems with the stability of this solution.

Technical support for this product is pathetic - whenever we tried to raise support, it took a long time, so we had to resolve the problems on our own, especially in the production environment. 

The initial setup was complex due to the lack of a proper GUI.

This product is very versatile. However, we have now switched to EMC NetWorker as it is much easier to use and does better with data domain. I would rate this solution as five out of ten.