IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

Inside my company, we are using Spectrum Protect worldwide to back up all our server systems. We have it in use at our data centers and remote locations.

We have a cloud strategy. Our strategy now is to develop a solution for our customers to have a middleware also in place; a portal where we provide services independent if the site is internal on an external cloud. Therefore, we plan to give external cloud services to our customers.

We have a lot of IBM equipment, mainly in our SAP environment. We are using storage solutions: XIV storage solutions, all-flash solutions based on A9000, and using POWER System servers in S/4 HANA. We are now using ESS storage and power servers, and also using equipment from other companies, especially in the Intel world.

We have a long history using Spectrum Protect. We are working close together with IBM development to make solutions happen that we need and solve issues very fast.

• The product is very stable.
• Performance is mostly perfect.
• We have been very satisfied with the product.

We need everything cloud. Strong support for cloud services. S3 connectivity, which is mandatory for us in the future along with this integration of Spectrum Copy Data Management or Spectrum Protect services together with these Spectrum Protect Plus functionalities, e.g., hardware, snapshots, and Copy Data Management. They should come together in one solution.

Coming from the last issue we had, the requirement was to have snapshots in place for our fast recovery of our SharePoint environment. With the original Spectrum Protect, this was not possible. After IBM provided the product, Copy Data Management and now spectrum protect provide a solution resolving this issue to have a fast recovery in place. That was the main issue with Spectrum Protect.

We have been waiting for solutions for approximately one year.

Scalability is a given because we have solutions for our data centers, mainly in the tape area, and tape drive-based solutions. We have disk-based solutions at remote sites. We are using containers and replication for central data centers. Therefore, scalability is given, and we are completely satisfied with it. Our group manages the infrastructure for the company.

We have maybe 500 remote locations, then we have six data centers with multiple solutions. Therefore, we have maybe 600 to 800 Spectrum Protect instances.

We always grow by an average of 30-35% per year. It is not always in new server systems. It is an increase in backup storage, but very often we have to add new Spectrum Protect systems, too. We feel the product can grow with us.

We are very happy with the technical support. We work very closely together with IBM using their Support Center, but we have a strong contact in their development teams, and we have dedicated people from IBM working with us.

I think the initial setup with IBM was easier for us because we have a strong relationship with them. We have a history of working together for about 15 to 18 years using Spectrum Protect.

At the moment, we are using Spectrum Protect Plus. We already tested CDM for SharePoint though there were some issue with it, and we plan to go live with Spectrum Protect Plus at the end of May this year.

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.

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.

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.

Our primary use case is DR and backup.

The performance has been pretty good. We have installed three of the TSM large Blueprints in the past couple of years. We are continuing to scale them. It is all disk replication and we are working on eliminating our tape. We have three tape libraries across three data centers and we are continuing to reduce the reliance on tapes, as we move more things into compress, dedupe, and container pool stuff.

From a Spectrum Protect perspective, AIX has been largely our footprint for a long time with TSM, and those are the large Blueprints that we purchased, the 824s with 256GB of memory. We do F900 for the database, and a V5030 large petabyte back-end on each of those. We have gone into the new Blueprints with a Linux OS. That is a change in direction from our management team which has spun us in a little bit of a different direction than the standard stuff we have done, which is fine. Some of our new Blueprints have been built on Linux, and they are more of a medium scale.

If we back out and we start floating up to a 10,000-foot view of data centers, we have 4.5 petabytes of SVC Spectrum Virtualize. We have been using it for about 14 years and been very successful with it. We use Easy Tier with a good healthy mix of flash, in the neighborhood of 400 terabytes. Spinners, 10K drives, 15K drives are all but gone in our data center at this point. As far as server OS, we are an AIX pSeries shop for our big iron. VMware for our x86 virtualization, and hypervisor choice across UCS Dell.

It is used in two data centers in northwest Arkansas, and looked at as a single data center. We own our own dark fiber between the two. We do a stretch cluster topology across a couple of different clusters in that environment, and support everything with VDisk mirroring between the two.

The storage admins: If we are standardizing on a Blueprint spec, and it has been blessed by IBM, it helps the supportability of everything. We are not "cowboying" things. It is, "This is the spec, it will perform to this standard,” and we know what our expectations are going into it.

We have been fortunate to roll out a few of the Blueprints, and they have been successful, so supportability is one of the benefits.

Reliability: Our tape library has aged. It is an old 3584. We have had it for many years, probably 10-plus years. It is problematic at times. We have a single robot, so it gives us the ability to get away from that mechanical robot and just do disk-based replication and backup.

Performance and recoveries are better. Our clients and customers are happier with the performance of it. They can just spin something up, take off, and they don't have to say, “Hey, this tape is busted or this tape is marked write-protected.” Operators kick tapes across the floor in the data center every now and then. Now, I don't have to worry about that.

Right now, I can't say exactly what the feature would be, but it would be cloud-based. Our new leadership has pushed us to go more toward the cloud, so we are definitely going to leverage anything we can in that direction (public cloud). I imagine that this is a pretty common piece of feedback for this question.

We're just not sure what the real world results will be when we get there. That is the big question mark. Ideally, I would want to spin up a host on-premise with Spectrum Protect on it and have no storage. I would have my database running locally on flash, and all the pools would be remote. However, I don't think this is realistic from a performance perspective, dumping all my data in the data center over a 40-millisecond hop to the next nearest region of whatever public cloud is available.

There are definitely some things in that area that we can address and work toward, but I don't know if they are achievable.

We have been happy with the stability. We have been going through a lot of upgrades. There are cycles of upgrades which have been a lot more frequent lately, because we are in a new compression world with the container pools, and we have hit a few APARs working with support.

Regarding the upgrades, it has been alright, though a little bit of a challenge. However, the guys on the team have been well supported by IBM in this endeavor, so that has been nice.

Out of a large Blueprint, the advertisements are for 80 terabytes of ingest a day, then there are the replication pieces, and the scalability of your database capacity, etc. We have not quite topped out any of those maximums yet, but we have hit our maximum of what the server will do. So we have starting scaling horizontally across a couple of other environments.

As far as how it scales, it maybe didn't quite meet what we thought, but everybody is different. Everybody's shop is different. Our Oracle Databases, our workloads, Exchange Servers, etc. are going to be different than others'. We understand that, which is why you get the “it depends” answer from everybody when you talk to them about how much it can do.

I want to see it work, touch it, feel it, and PoC it, then we can know how it works for us. Everybody is different. All shops are different, even though they run a lot of the same gear.

Technical support is getting better. We have given them some good feedback, and they are listening, which is nice. The guys on the team can see that. Overall, there are still areas for them to improve in, as they still have quite a bit of work to do, but they're making steps in the right direction.

This would be a good question for my team to answer. I just see the PMRs bounce back and forth. We have a local rep who is really good about helping quarterback these things and get attention where it is needed, especially if it is a high-priority deal for us.

Overall, I am satisfied with the support. There are definitely places where things could be better, but that is the same with everybody. Nobody is perfect.

Setup was pretty good. With the Blueprint design that they put out, you do the runbook, and run through it. There are a few "gotchas", but overall it was pretty straightforward. We like having a standard setup. 

We know with this pool of resources, if you dump it somewhere, it will be protected offsite. That is the mode we want to be in, rather than having to go back and double check. We do not want to say, “This one thing happened, it should have went here, and it didn't.” We are trying to get more generic with these services.

When we did this, migrated to this new disk-based footprint, we did a reclassification. We worked our licensing into a capacity model, which is nice. Now, everything is much simpler to manage from a licensing perspective.

The evolution off of tape is one that we have looked to do for a long time. We've had BTLs pitched that have never been viable solutions. We took knocks for overlooking those back then, for cost or other reasons, but it has paid off that we didn't invest in one of those platforms that we would now have to get off of. We kept tape around for a long time. 

Yet, now, we can move straight to a disk-based solution with the container pools, which is working well, and we are looking into cloud.

Overall, we are satisfied with it. Our primary table library was running 72 tape drives and that solution was busy 24/7. Now, in the past six months, since we began this journey with Blueprint, we are down to about half that amount. Those amounts average about 36 tapes now on a 24-hour basis, which is good. We are going to continue to hopefully reduce this and, eventually, get rid of the hardware.

We have taken a lot of knocks over using TSM. Our customers suggesting reasons why it does not work, but it does. It is just not an out-of-the-box solution. Our customers struggle with that, at times. For example, Microsoft SQL. The guys on that team pushed back against TSM and, finally won, over the years, to just do native database dumps and get away from the platform. However, they have come to find out that the new bed that they've made has its own problems. 

Overall, it is a well-rounded solution. It provides anything any enterprise would need. We use it. I would hang my hat on it. I'll stand on tape, even, for a lot of things. I've done numerous disaster recovery exercises in my career and done it successfully off the tape. 

When you need the data, it is there. It is reliable. It is a tool which works. I think people expect easy, and it may not be easy. However, that is what we get paid to do as admins.

This solution is a viable candidate. It depends on your environment. As a platform, we have ridden on it for many years.

The primary use case is backup and disaster recovery.

It is fantastic. We have a number of clients using the product. Everybody who uses it is very happy with it. It is cross-platform, very flexible, and a great product.

One of my primary clients has a fairly hybrid solution where they use a TS4500 Tape Library as their offsite and primary data store. They are also using directory-container pools and replicating it to a near-site location which is on the same WAN.

It is something like: How does insurance make people happier? An insurance policy of sorts. You have to spend money to protect your assets. That is what this is. It does that job. That is why people like it. However, much like insurance, I am sure people dislike it for a lot of the same reasons.

There is a laundry list of valuable features: scalability, performance, mass platform coverage, etc. It is one of the few backup products on the market right now which an organization can bring in and it will serve all of their backup needs. It is a completely centralized solution and one of the three largest, market share wise, in the world (I believe).

It is a strong, mature product, which a lot of people are using, and there is a ton of support for it.

This is more something that I would have to go over with the IBM guys. There is probably a small laundry list. 

Ease of use. This has got to be the one thing that I routinely hear from clients and customers. It is a bit more difficult than it should be. What I find is that IBM has heard this issue, and they are responding with updated interfaces.

Usually, after the initial rollout, there are a few kinks to iron out, and from then on it's almost a self-maintaining system. It's generally very stable. Only when you introduce new features, options, or massive changes in your workload do you really find a major problem with the backup infrastructure. It tends to be very stable.

It scales infinitely. I have customers that are protecting less than 100 terabytes of data versus customers that are protecting petabytes of data. Provided you size your hardware solution properly, it will work with any organization.

IBM support is great. It is world-class support. They have a great system in place and they generally get the problem solved. It can take some time. If a problem requires it, we escalate it. They have to dive a bit deeper than you normally would, reading through logs, but they are always there with the next step to fix a problem.

If I'm being completely honest, setup is not easy. It's a more complex setup, but with great flexibility comes great complexity. If you want something to do things which are very complex, you have to be mindful of that in the setup process. It is not trivial, but it is very workable and the documentation is out there to get it done.

The competitors are Commvault, Veeam, or any of the other major backup players who are out there right now. It is a zero sum market. Everybody is bidding for the same customers.

In terms of why my customers go with Spectrum Protect, it is usually cost. The second most common is platform readiness. It can support multiple types of clients. It can back up your Exchange database for your email, at the same time that it can back up your user's file shares, and at the same time you can back up your virtual machines. It meets everybody's needs and that is often why IBM wins out when there is a competitive bid process.

I recommend a conversation where we sit down and spec out what the requirements are. I will always recommend Spectrum Protect. From my perspective, it is the best one on the market. That is the reason I have gone in this direction. I am fully onboard.

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.

We use Spectrum Protect as our core product for backup and recovery of all our servers, and has started to use this for our office workstations too.

IBM is a partner-friendly company which has open API that one can use. In our case, we have built solutions which have helped many customers who use API to protect databases and applications with Spectrum Protect that IBM doesn't protect today. For example, MongoDB , MariaDB , MySQL , PostgreSQL, Firebird, Progress OpenEdge , SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise , and SAP IQ Server. See www.ligtas.org.

Space efficient data reduction, using progressive incremental forever in combination with deduplication and compression. IBM philosophy is to not backup data that has not been changed

I would like to see a way to have "always on" implemented. In this way, if an error happened on the primary backup server, there would be a way to continue to protect the data without any disturbance. This is partly implemented today, but only in the purpose of restore.

There are normal and known limitations with stability.

It can scale from very low to very big using one instance. One can use StorageNodes (a media server) to further extend its capacity by avoiding sending data traffic to the backup server.

I have experience of many different solutions, and some of them do not exist anymore.

REELbackup was the best at it time, but was based on periodically full backups. The database was local on each server which has fantastic scalability. This product doesn't exist anymore, and would not be the best today because of periodically full backups, etc.

Networker is great with its many integrations to databases. But requires at the time when I used it periodically full backups. Newer version of the product has a way to overcome this, but requires more resources in the back-end. The database wiz in the system didn't respond sometimes which causes the backup to fail frequently. Networker seams also to not be a product that EMC and DELL see as strategic for the future.

Netbackup is great with its way to balance the data streams to get a good throughput, but requires periodically full backups at least when I used it. It has integrations to many databases.

IBM Spectrum Protect is the best of them. This solution is the best way to store backups with its space efficient data reduction technologies. In the past when tape was the main media for backup; it was very difficult to improve restore performance as the data was spread on many tapes, and collocation improves only a bit; but far from its competitors.

Today when most customers use disk or VTL this is no longer an issue. It is better than the competitors today, as only one restore is needed compared to if you have periodically full backups where you have to restore firstly it's full and all its incremental backups.

With help from partners ('LIGTAS') to IBM you can also have block level incremental forever for databases. Another great function is incremental restore which restores only the data that has been changed to the point in time selected. This also exists for databases with help from partners to IBM ('LIGTAS')

In the past, it was complex to set up the solution. But today, it is easier with its graphical interface.

We can now be sure that we have a valid insurance, and has used this several time to restore individual objects which help our implementation of new products etc..

Use capacity licensing. It's easier and cheaper.

• Commvault
• NetBackup
• Networker

Be sure you follow the blueprint guidelines.