IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

Most of our customers use it for backup. It performs very well.

Most of my customers are still doing the traditional disk storage backed by primarily tape storage on on-premise infrastructure environments. A few are doing disk only, and that will probably continue to grow, but most of our customers use tape. For their use cases, they find it suits their needs.

We currently manage dozens of Spectrum Protect instances.

For most of our customers, it is more efficient than most traditional backup solutions. It can also scale from a very small environment to a very large, multiple-tenant environment.

The incremental forever backup, which makes it more efficient than any other solution that does not use this scheme.

Continue the incremental improvements that they have been doing all along. There is not any one big thing right now that my customers can think to do. 

The Spectral Protect Plus addresses the VM inside of things and is a huge improvement. This is the main thing everyone has been seeing.

It has always been very stable.

It is scalable beyond anything my customers ever aspire to.

We expect the product to meet our growth needs.

For the most part, once you get them the right information, technical support is very effective. Getting them all the necessary diagnostic information is still very painful.

I do the initial setups of the solution. The initial setups are complex still. This is maybe the one weak point, getting it setup, but this is where I help.

Most of my customers are coming from old NetBackup type of environments. What I see a lot more now is Commvault, and these two being the other two main competitors.

I would recommend Spectrum Protect.

Pay attention to the backup, because it does matter in terms of the efficiency and scalability of the solution. A lot of other approaches are not as effective.

Customers main criteria for choosing Spectrum Protect:

• Efficiency
• Scalability.

It is our enterprise backup system.

Our on-premise infrastructure is comprised of Windows VM, AIX, and SUSE Linux for SAP HANA. We currently do not have a cloud strategy.

The product has been there ever since I have been there; the enterprise system along with the hierarchical system. It is pretty easy to use and maintain. I do not run it all the time, but I can get in and do what needs to be done. When I have to do disaster recoveries, I can do it with this tool.

That it backs up everything, except Linux.

I should be able to backup Linux. I would like SUSE for Linux on POWER. Right now, we have to use Storex, which is a pain to use.

It seems to be fine. We don't have any problems.

We are well under what the capability of it is. We are a mid-sized shop with hundreds of servers, not thousands. We could do more, it just depends on how much money we want to spend.

We will probably grow in data, but not in numbers of systems. I am sure it is going to go more towards VMs and SUSE Linux. The servers are getting smaller, holding more data. Also, I am hoping we get off of tapes. 

Technical support seems pretty good. I have not had any problems with them. They seem to know what they are doing when I get a hold of them, because there are times that our admin is not there and I have to take care of things that I do not know about.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I have used HPE. 

I have also used NetBackup. NetBackup seemed a little more intuitive, but it did not do near as much. This will do a lot more.

I have found that the most valuable feature is useful documentation and troubleshooting.

I want a better user interface, support, and integrations.

I have been working with IBM Spectrum Protect for four or five years.

The stability of IBM Spectrum Protect is excellent.

We definitely are experiencing scalability.

I would rate technical support with high marks for their service.

Positive

The initial setup had some complexities.

We have found that the pricing is high in our country.

I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect an eight out of ten.

We implement this product for our clients and customers. We configure this solution for the requirement of the customers. 

We have hybrid deployments. It is deployed in the cloud and on-premises, and we are using the latest version.

It is good in terms of functionality. My clients are very satisfied with this solution.

Its price can be better. It is very expensive. 

Its interface is very old and not user friendly. They can improve its interface.

Their support can also be better. My clients are not very satisfied with the support because they are not really quick. 

I have been using IBM Spectrum Protect for three years.

It has good stability.

It has medium scalability. Most of our clients are medium-sized companies.

My clients are not very satisfied with the support because they are not really quick. Sometimes, you get good support, and sometimes, you don't.

It has medium complexity. We have a lot of experience in implementing this solution, and that's why it is easy for us, but the other partners of IBM say that it is not easy to set up.

The deployment duration depends on the clients and their setup. Generally, it takes one to two months.

It is really expensive. Its price is not good for Latin America. Its price is good for the United States or Europe.

I would recommend this solution to others. It is a perfect solution for medium and big companies, but it is not a good solution for a small company because of its scalability, support, and prices. It is perfect for bigger industries and banks and financial institutions.

I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect a seven out of ten. It is a good solution, but it is expensive.

It is an enterprise product.  

We can gain benefit from any advance features (incremental forever, deduplication, compression, etc.).

• Incremental forever: This feature helps us reduce backup time and backup storage space.
• Deduplication and compression: This feature helps us move away from physical tape by using disk.
• Replication: This feature help us to offsite backup data without tape. Data replication is incremental and will send only non-duplicate data.

The user interface (UI) for the admin is still not good. It is way too complicated to manage the product, as we still need to use command line. IBM launched the Operations Center (OC), but there are still functions lacking, especially since we cannot manage all our scheduled tasks by using the GUI. 

There have been stability issues. The product does not exactly have a high availability (HA) solution.

There have been scalability issues. The core product does not support scale out. We needed to create a new system and manage resources separate from the existing one.

I would rate the technical support as a seven out of 10.

We did not use a previous solution.

The initial setup is complex. The solution needs a designer who knows the product in-depth.

The product is low cost. It is very cool when we design it to using licensing based on post capacity.

We compared it to NetBackup. In the end, for design and cost optimization, we chose IBM Spectrum Protect.

The product may look difficult to manage, but if you need enterprise backup software which supports cross platform and you have good design and skills transfer, this product will help reduce costs.

Our customers have a more traditional infrastructure, less related to snapshot technology. We have a couple customers trending towards cloud, but they are not there yet.

Most of the customers that I work with today tend to use more disk-based solutions. Therefore, we apply the new dedupe and compression technology, using maintenance and time to give more time for the backup window and less time for the overhead related to the daily housekeeping.

• Performance
• Scalability
• Backing up virtual environments
  

Most customers still struggle with the reporting piece, especially trending and generating reports. I think it needs some improvements in this area.

It is famous for its complexity, which is a big challenge for the customers to accept. Customers are still scared about some of the history related to Command One. These are some of the challenges that customer usually complain about.

Stability depends on how well it was implemented. In most cases, we depend on the movement reference models, so we rely on the recommendations coming from the IBM development team. That is our way to success.

This depends on size and how big the environment is. If this size good, there are no issues to scale out.

I have positive opinion about support, but my customers are not always happy with the Level 1 support. Sometimes, it just takes too long for the response to come, which is probably something that needs to be addressed.

With the initial setup, if you follow the blueprint rules, there are no issues.

Our customers also look at Commvault and Veeam.

I would recommend using Spectrum Protect.

Main criteria when selecting a vendor: loyalty.

Our primary use case is to have tape back ups of our open system environments.

It has performed decently. There are certain gaps with the technology where we have issues, such as with our PO and our TO. 

Our infrastructure is on-premise. It is comprised of a tape library (TS3500), tape cartridges, tape drives, and then Spectrum Protect. 

We have three Spectrum Protect servers.

The scheduled backups ensure we meet the requirements for our business, and we keep backups of certain environments.

We have scheduled backups whenever we want.

I am not the one that manages stability on a day-to-day basis on my team, but from what I have seen, it is pretty stable overall. We do encounter issues every once and awhile, just with any product. 

Scalability is poor. As you get to bigger environments, this is where our gaps have been introduced. As we have grown over the past couple of years, the gaps have become more apparent. For example, RTO is a huge gap for us. If we had a disaster scenario and had to recover a bunch of stuff from tape, the RTO would be too long for us.

The more we grow, our gaps will become more apparent. For future needs, as we grow, Spectrum Protect will become a less viable solution for us.

Technical support through IBM whenever we have issues is always pretty good.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

For similar sized companies, I would probably recommend they look at different solutions. For a smaller company, it is probably a viable solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Check to see if it meets certain business requirements.

1. Disaster Recovery module
2. Incremental backup
3. Flahcopy manager
4. VTL support
5. IBM Spectrum Protect Operation Center
6. Deduplication
7. Node replication

Using LTO6 technology you can store up to 10TB of compressed data.

Very good performance with Virtual Tape Library technology

Reporting via Operation Center.

5 years.

No problems.

No problems.

No problems.

Excellent.

Very good.

No.

A little bit complex.

Through a vendor team and the level was not very high.

No.

Go ahead because this solution is very good.