IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

Incremental Forever backups, Enterprise management, Journal Based backups, policy based, copy storage pools, deduplication and node replication. Also the extreme flexibility and scalability the product offers – most of it done without interrupting production at all. The smallest entry level sized installation can easily grow to large enterprise usages and be migrated across platforms.The product is very client-oriented which supports a lot of different platforms and products, and only have to be upgraded approx. every five years to maintain support.

The incremental forever, TSM for Virtual Environments, deduplication and node replication, has opened up further advantages and solutions for users and customers.

There is always room for improvement. In the fast paced time we live in, unfortunately many products are released before they are complete and mature in every corner.

10 years.

Deployment is easy and simple when few rules are followed and respected. If there is difficulties, it is often caused by lack of resources like short of requirements, willingness or insight.

No, not really - as long as it is designed properly. TSM is very stable and is based on the DB2 database.

When there’s too many clients connecting at the same time, or the platform does not meet requirements.

It is easy to get support from IBM through phone or web-based support portal.

The technical support is great, and they know the product very well.

No, I did not. I have worked other places with other systems. They were all procedure oriented and still are, even though they might have improved since.

If you want a high performing flexible solution, you need some skills with the product. Name standards, design of database, policies and storage needs some decision making.

I guess I don’t qualify for this; we are consultants ourself and are experts. :)

No, none.

Consult experts, listen and follow their advices and meet the requirements.

We primarily use the solution for security purposes. We implement this solution for many of our clients.

Due to the rapidly provision new server in my organization, the backup resource needs to add more also. But IBM Spectrum Protect can help me to optimize the backup resource. 

The backup aspect of the solution is very good. The solution allows for incremental backups forever. It saves your backup files while also saving space.

The product is quite stable.

The API is simple to integrate into a custom application.

You need to use command line rather than the console. It would be better if users didn't have to use command line in order to use the solution.

Technical isn't so great. It's a bit slow in terms of response. They need to get back to their users a lot faster.

The licensing isn't very clear. They should work to simply or clarify the cost structure.

More than 10 years

We have enjoyed very good stability while using this solution. It's reliable and seems to be free of bugs and glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. We've been happy with it.

We have a pretty big setup. There are users across ten servers. I'm not sure exactly how many there are in total.

Technical support is a bit too slow. They really should be more responsive.

There is no remote support.

As long as you have a bit of experience, you shouldn't have any trouble with the initial setup. I didn't handle it directly, however. We had someone who did it and he was quite knowledgable. Due to that, the deployment was pretty quick. He had is up and running in three or four hours. 

We handled some aspects ourselves, however, we did enlist some outside help as well for the initial implementation.

The licensing process is very unclear and a bit complicated. Many of our clients have trouble figuring it out. They'll buy a license and then they find out the limits are wrong. 

We're an implementor.

Overall, we've had a good experience with the solution and I would easily recommend this product to other organizations.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it at a seven.

The primary use case for Spectrum Protect is as an enterprise back-end for companies' top database products, email, VMware, etc. We use it internally and promote that to our customers. It performs extremely well.

Our infrastructure is on-premise. 

When I help architect our customer solutions, we are primarily recommending flash for the catalog of the database, then a NL-SAS big storage bowl. We do have some tape, but we recommend going into the container bowl and replicating to a second site, whether that be a cloud container or a customer's on-premise at a second site.

I architect solutions. One of my biggest customers is managing three Spectrum Protect environments, two large footprints, and one medium footprint. Currently, they are doing two-site replication. They are experimenting with cloud containers (just in the early stages).

Data reduction definitely reduces costs, not only software costs, but from the infrastructure needed. Then, the ability to replicate second copy to cloud helps reduce their infrastructure and management costs (for that infrastructure) by being able to send encrypted, secure information over the internet.

The software-defined ability to do data reduction through deduplication and compression, as well as being able to replicate data to a cloud container.

Single store: The ability to mark an archive from my backup for long-term retention.

A lot of my customers always ask for legal holds, especially on email.

It is definitely a very robust solution. The biggest thing is follow the blueprints. IBM has done a great job documenting what the blueprints are. If you pay attention to those and follow them, you will avoid a lot of pitfalls.

The blueprints are awesome. From everything that I have see out there from competitors' products, Spectrum Protect scales significantly higher than anything else that I have seen.

Spectrum Protect will meet our customers' growth plans.

Technical support will always be a challenge. The biggest thing is you have to be very clear in defining what your needs and urgencies are. Though, they have gotten a lot better over time.

Our team was involved in the initial setup, and it was fairly complex.

The main competitors usually evaluated: EMC and Commvault. 

I would recommend Spectrum Protect.

Most important criteria for my customers when selecting a vendor: An enterprise backup solution which could cover multiple Clients, environments, and databases.

The feature I have found the most valuable is load replication.

We did not see any drawbacks to IBM Spectrum Protect before assisting a customer using Windows that wanted to migrate to using UNIX. IBM Spectrum Protect does not offer an option to migrate from other operating systems.

There are some drawbacks to load replication as well. On their site, you only have the option to restore a backup. You cannot download it. That is a limitation.

I have been working on IBM Spectrum Protect since 2006.

IBM Spectrum Protect is a stable solution.

IBM Spectrum Protect is a scalable solution.

How good the technical support is depends on the severity level of your problem. We solve most issues ourselves. But, when we have to escalate an issue and contact IMB's tech support, it can take a long time to get in touch with them because you have to go through Passport Advantage Online.

Prior to 2006, I worked with the 7TECH backup system. However, I did not work on a large scale. We had it deployed on a single machine on a single server.

The initial setup was easy but it does require focus. You have to have experience with IBM Spectrum Protect to deploy. However, if you do have the experience, it is easy.

The price of IBM Spectrum Protect is a bit higher than other products.

My first use case was a big company with 16 subsidiaries. We implemented the TSM Server, v6.1, with Exchange, VMware, Oracle, File System backup, and DRM. Today, this company uses IBM Spectrum Protect 8.1 with all items mentioned plus cloud backup with cloud containers. It's about seven years of partnership.

With IBM Spectrum Protect, we optimize our costs of media and storage use, thanks to the Incremental Forever backup. The TDP software provides us many ways to protect our data, so we don't need to use monstrous scripts for doing backups now. My life is easier and the environment administration is simple.

All features help me meet my requirements, but I love the TDP for VMware because of the web interface and the possibilities provided by this tool. It's amazing.

In my opinion, the Hyper-V and SQL Server backup could be improved. In the 2016 version there was a significant improvement, but I think IBM has a big challenge with these technologies.

In some small clients, we worked with Veritas Backup Exec, but just for small environments as a low cost option.

I provide architecture consultation, mission expertise, installation, upgrade, migration and, sometimes, official Spectrum Protect education for IBM.

I have a lot of examples of how it has improved different clients' organizations, but the greatest value is with a dual-site infrastructure and container storage pools.

• Forever incremental - allows TSM to optimize storage needs.
• The way it covers backup and archive needs. The flexibility of backup copy group always allows me to cover the customer's requests.
• Replication processes with container storage pools allow reduction of storage space and network bandwidth, using deduplication and compression.

The administration interface:

• should implement more functionalities that exist only in the command line
• needs improvement in how some reports are created.

Also, it needs agents that take into account more databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.).

It depends on the infrastructure and the requirements, but from an overall viewpoint, and in light of my experience of 15 years with TSM, I rate Spectrum Protect at eight out of 10.

We sell and implement it for customers. It performs very well, though every product has room for improvement.

Our customer's on-premise infrastructure is comprised of flash storage, spinning disks, tape, virtual tape, virtual servers, and snapshots. For storage, we see SAN, iSCSI, NAS, flash, slower disk, SATA, and Near Line (NL) SAS. Some customers use virtual libraries.

• It helps our customers protect their data, especially with stuff like ransomware, compliance, and regulatory requirements. 
• It helps them protect their data, keep it long-term, and feel pretty secure about it, basically sleeping well at night.

It is a proven product. It has a lot of features and capabilities. That is its pro and its con. It makes it a very capable product, but somewhat difficult to use.

Our customers would like to see metadata replication, tearing to tape, and more cloud capabilities.

Stability is great.

Scalability is excellent. It is a solution which needs to be designed. For example, when you design something, you usually have a more scalable solution, because you are building it into the initial plan. Therefore, it is very scalable, but the downside is that it costs money.

The product can scale. I have seen 20 to 40 percent growth per year for my customers for the next three to five years.

My customers do use the technical support, and it's getting less effective, because it is not coming from North America anymore as it used to. Now, it comes from Egypt. The English is not as good, and the support is definitely getting worse.

We live and breathe the initial setup, so the process is good.

Vendors who tend to appear on customers shortlists are Veeam, NetBackup, and Commvault.

I would definitely recommend this product, unless it is pure VMware virtualization backup.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Reputation
• Reliability
• Cost.

However, cost is probably the biggest factor for most customers.

Incremental forever philosophy.

The benefits are that it's an efficient, scalable, and reliable product that provides what it is supposed to provide.

I would like to see better cloud integration. The big thing is the ability to better integrate with the cloud.

The current cloud integration is good and improving. The conference provided insight to some interesting and useful cloud directions that I was not aware of when we spoke. But in response to your question, I would like to see more (is better - right?) functionality. One notion is to provide self describing backup data which can be picked up by a second Spectrum Protect server in an ad-hoc manner. This could provide a simple means of DR recovery without requiring a DB Restore or existing replication configuration.

Another, similar notion would be an ability to create cloud based backup sets or client images which could be retrieved directly to a client without a Spectrum Protect server. There would be some serious security considerations for both of these ideas and their use case may be too small to realistically consider. I would like to say that I did meet some sharp folks who work in Spectrum Protect Development and they do like to think outside the box and they seriously consider input from their user community.

Stability is very good.

Scalability is excellent.

I've used tech support. Tech support is usually pretty good. Sometimes it takes a while to get past the first level, but once you do, know that they're just doing their job. They are very knowledgeable people who will do everything they can to reach out to you and make sure that they resolve the problem.

Understand how the incremental approach can be better than other solutions. It's a very good solution. It has some improvement to go, but compared to anything else out there, it's the top of the pack.