IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

I found the restore operations feature the most valuable.

• A legacy backup (daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly) would be good, this means a backup plan (native in TSM Server) that would include the following points:

One incremental daily backup with a retention of 15 days, one full weekly backup (Sunday?) with a 5 week retention, one monthly backup (the last day of each month?) with a 13-month retention), one annual backup with a 10 year retention (every January 1st? or last day of each year?).

This backup plan would be integrated into TSM Server, and it would then suffice to associate the nodes with the start times.

• A Hardware Security Module (HSM) --

Have multiple predefined queries for HSM activity, such as migrate, recall, pre-migrate activity, and performances of these activities.

In its various forms, I have used it for over twenty years.

I did not encounter any deployment issues.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give local customer service a rating of 4/10.

I would give central customer service a rating of 9/10.

I would give local technical support a rating of 4/10.

I would give central technical support a rating of 9/10.

We used NetBackup and eVault because of the stability, the possible evolutions, and the available capacities.

Setup has always been straightforward. We always start with a simple and solid installation. We then extend the functions when the base is very stable and meets our expectations.

Implementation was always performed by an internal team. The team has knowledge of configuration and local operation and is not dependent on external entities.

We think we are seeing an ROI after 24 months.

The product has always been too expensive and not very easy to negotiate.

We previously evaluated NetBackup , eVault, and ArcServe.

Follow all the documentation and do the simple things initially. Do not define complex processes. During periods of crisis, it will be necessary to be simple and fast.

The solution is primarily used for backing up all of our servers and data. We also use it for a lot of driving data.

I'm new to the company, so I don't know if I can answer how the solution has improved the organization.

The archiving feature is the most valuable aspect of the solution.

Although I am not a technical user, I would say the cloud integration features could be improved.

I'm fairly new to the company, however, I've been using the solution for probably just over five years now.

The solution is very stable. We haven't faced any bugs or glitches. There haven't been system crashes. It's reliable. An organization won't have to worry about stability.

The solution is highly scalable. An organization that needs to expand the services should be able to do so without any issues.

The solution doesn't have a high user count. Rather, it is used by our IT department to protect our organizations' data. No end users would have access to it. About 10-15 people from our storage and data protection team have access to it currently.

Technical support is great. they're very knowledgable and technical people. We've been satisfied with the level of support they've provided. It's been very good. We've had cases in the past where they've been able to help us overcome issues effectively.

I wasn't at the company at the time the solution was implemented, so I don't have knowledge as to if the solution is difficult or straightforward to set up.

I don't have any information about the pricing of the solution other than to say it's a little bit higher than we would like.

We are always looking at different solutions. For example, we are looking at Cloud Work, Cohesity, and Rubrik. We're very early in the process of evaluating them, so we don't have clear differentiators yet. It's too early to discuss a comparison of features.

We're not partners with IBM. We're just customers. We have a good relationship with the company, however, we are not reseller partners.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's a great solution, and we've been very happy with it, but it does lack cloud integration features. If it offered that, I'd rate it higher.

I use it for the disaster recovery backup archive. It is performing very well.

Spectrum Protect is running under AIX on a Power system. We have a SAN volume controller in front of two generation three XIVs and two IBM tape libraries (all Fibre Channel attached). We have two sites. 

It protects our data. That is what it is there for.

We cannot live without it, since it gives us the confidence to move forward knowing our data is safe.

The most valuable features are reliability, capacity, and performance.

I'm sure there are some areas of improvement, because no product is perfect- but I can't think of any right now.

Regarding stability, it's been rock solid; very stable. I've never had a problem with it.

I've never had issues with scalability. It scales very well.

It has scaled with us over the last 25 years. We are a community college with about 40,000 students and roughly 5000 to 6000 employees. It is growing, though not as much right now. The economy is good, and we grow when the economy is bad. The exact opposite of everybody else!

Technical support is pretty good. It is doing fine, but you pay for it.

We have been using it for a long time. I don't know what we had before.

The setup was straightforward, but it is a complicated product. It was a lot more complex to set up so long ago. There were just a lot of moving parts with a lot of pieces to it.

For vendors, I want good technical support, but I also want honest sales people. I want somebody who is going to tell me the straight truth, and whether or not it's a product that I should buy. I don't want it similar to selling me a car or something. I want somebody who will be honest with me.

I would also like a product that scales and is reliable. It should be able to handle the amount of data that we backup every night. I go back to being reliable.

I would highly recommend it to anybody that would like to buy something like this.

If it fits them, I would say "Get it." It is not the right product for everybody. No product is for everybody. However, this is a very good product. If they have a need, like I did, then it is the right solution.

The product has helped our organization recover and restore data faster.

The most valuable features of the product are data deduplication and disaster recovery.

The solution should improve the ability to monitor backup failure. There should be proactive monitoring to provide early warning. The solution should also improve its dashboard.

The next release should include automated DR.

I have been using the solution for almost two years.

I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

The solution’s scalability is good. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten. Almost 20 employees in our organization use the solution, including IT specialists, backup engineers, and senior backup engineers. We will most probably increase the number of users in the future. However, it depends on our customers’ feedback.

We have used Veritas NetBackup and HP Data Protector. We switched to IBM Spectrum Protect because we wanted a more stable solution, and our customers liked IBM Spectrum Protect.

I rate the ease of initial setup an eight out of ten.

The deployment did not take long. We deployed the product in-house in one month.

The solution is not cheap. We do not have to pay additional costs apart from the licensing fee. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten.

IBM is a good option for any organization seeking a stable and steady solution. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use it for our enterprise backups. By enterprise, I mean Oracle, SAP, and all other business-critical applications.

Initially, we started using Spectrum for backing up our business-critical applications, such as SAP running on AIX, and then we had Oracle RAC clusters. We also had Veeam for VMware, but then IBM Spectrum came up with their version of the virtual environment. IBM was initially not into the virtual environment, but over a period of time, they got into this.

IBM is providing us a good and cost-effective solution. We also get more robustness for daily backup where we can restore a virtual machine, just like Commvault and Veeam. 

We have been using it for several years, and it is quite reliable and predictable. We are quite comfortable with this solution. They're coming up with new features as well. 

It has good scalability, and it provides good integrations with business-critical applications or databases, such as SAP HANA. It works as expected, and we don't see any issues.

Its management part can be better and simplified. It is kind of a beast as compared to Commvault or Veeam, but they are more user-friendly. They are also easier to learn, whereas Spectrum Protect definitely takes time. They should simplify it. Our teams are pretty comfortable with it because we have been using it for a long time, but from the perspective of a new user who is evaluating or using this solution, it is definitely more complex in terms of manageability.

Its monitoring could be improved so that it can even monitor the jobs that are scheduled by external schedulers. There are situations where a database team might decide to use their own schedulers, but currently, Spectrum Protect is not able to catch those jobs in the Operation Manager console.

I have been using this solution for more than ten years.

We have been using it for several years now, and it is very good in terms of stability and reliability.

It is scalable.

We don't have any issues with technical support. They're okay, and we're fine with their support.

We also use Veeam, which is mainly for the virtual environment. IBM Spectrum covers everything. It covers virtual and physical environments and heavy databases and applications such as SAP HANA. We are using Veeam only for a subset of our environment. 

Its initial setup is complex and not very easy. The deployment duration depends on a lot of factors, but generally, one week should be enough.

It is not very intuitive, and you can't do it all by yourself. You need someone for initial deployment. We have a seller who helps us out. This solution has been here with us for years, so our team is now comfortable implementing it, but it is still not that intuitive that you can do it all by yourself.

Its licensing is complex, and its price is not really reasonable. It is on the expensive side. IBM, in general, is slightly expensive, but with IBM Spectrum for the virtual environment, they are looking into the aspect of helping customers with the cost and providing a cost-effective solution.

It is a reliable tool. It has been there for so many years. It is a good solution that provides many options. I would recommend this solution for large-scale environments with mission-critical applications running on complex hardware, such as AIX.

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

Our clients use it for consolidated backup and mostly for guests on the VM.

The solution significantly improves a client's restoration times. They also do complete backups now. Some of the things clients used before couldn't really provide complete backups. In that sense, it's been great for organizations.

The solution actually does a lot. It's really powerful. The value of Spectrum Protect is it does everything. It does tape and it does disk. It's easy to migrate. You don't need any other software. It's basically an all-in-one solution, which is its most valuable aspect.

Their GUI has improved quite a bit. It's made the solution a lot simpler and less complex.

The solution has a Spectrum Protect Plus product, which is more for Windows-only VM. However, it doesn't really do tape. It requires IBM to do things to the Cloud, which adds costs. They're starting to integrate the products together. That said, right now, it's like two implementations, it's not one product.

We've tried to sell Protect Plus from time to time, however, then you need Protect if you want to do tape. It's kind of clunky. Once they integrate the products, it will be pretty powerful.

Spectrum Protect is still an industry-leading product across multiple operating systems. It still runs best on an AIX server and does remember Windows or Linux. The install base is more AIX as far as hosts because the AIX server is more powerful.

They should be able to integrate the products so that you don't have to do two system installs.

The solution should have a better way to deal with the system state files in Windows. They should do that better where it doesn't try to walk the file system and you have to use in image mode.

The experienced people still use the CLI. You shouldn't have to use a CLI to use this product.

They took some of the funding off of it for a while. Therefore, instead of being a market leader, they took their position for granted. Then some competitors developed new bells and whistles that they advertise, and due to that lag a few years ago, there are not the resources to explain the differences.

They're outsold. IBM is outsold because people do not understand the product and it had a reputation of being complex.  That said, with the new GUIs and other improvements, it's really pretty easy. The problem is they've got to deal with their old reputation of being difficult and complex. Still the GUI could still be more robust.

I've been using the solution for 20 years now. It's been two decades.

The solution is extremely stable. There are no issues with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or fail. It's reliable.

We work with all sizes of businesses from Fortune 100 insurance companies to small colleges and universities. We have all sorts of customers.

The scaling potential of the solution is huge. This is an enterprise solution compared to some of the smaller options. It also scales down when you do less than 100 terabytes. It has very favorable pricing. It's competitive with other products.

Technical support is not as good as it could be. It's not as good as some of the competitors. IBM has put more resources into it recently. However, they had a stage about two years ago where they kind-of stopped spending as much money on Protect due to the fact that they had so many other IBM products. 

Overall, I'd rate their technical services at seven out of ten. It's not too bad, however, it could be better. They are quite responsive. Now that IBM is more focused on improving the product it may improve as well.

I have some experience with Veeam as well. I really like it compared to Veeam. You don't have to have media servers. It's nice compared to Veeam that ­clients don't have to do a media server.

We've had customers who have used other solutions, however, they've been weak and not as scalable as IBM.

The initial setup is not complex. It's straightforward. It's easy.

The pricing is quite good and very competitive in the market.

I'm a reseller and a system architect. I'm not really a user. I'm a project manager and architect. However, we have people on our team that use and install it.

We're using the current version of the solution.

I'd advise other companies to not forget tape. With ransomware and everything else, it's hard. People forget tape is cheap. Tape gives you an air-gap, and, if you properly use it, you get a good hybrid solution.

Many people think it's disk only, and that's just for yesterday's restore, however, for a long-term solution, tape is so much more cost-effective.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's a full-feature product. It's hard to be perfect with full-featured products. There are compromises due to the fact that they do so much.

Our primary use case is for little backups, such as our exchange databases.

It helps insomuch as that it is a run solution. The issues that I've had with IBM are few and far between. Every time it restores, even though it may use tapes, there are no issues.

We really like that it just works and haven't had any problem with it, whatsoever.

It is very flexible in terms of schedules for different types of retentions. We have different policies for images, for audio files, and for user files. We have policies set up for something lasts for 15 years, or five years, or some for only two years. It can put up many, many schedules for different types of retentions. It's awesome.

The user interface needs to be improved. It is mostly a command line and you're stuck in a terminal most of the time. They have been moving over to a graphical interface, in part, but it still has a way to go in terms of ease-of-use. The commands are awesome but you can't really remember all of them. If the whole thing goes graphical then you don't have to remember obscure commands to run stuff, or set stuff up.

The configuration section needs some work done, especially with the day-to-day usage of setting up schedules and policy domains, etc.

The licensing needs to be simplified, changing it from "per core" to "per socket". This would make it much better.

This product is robust, and stability is the best part. It doesn't really fall over unless you want it to, which is the main thing.

As we are currently migrating to Veeam, I can tell you that I had less sleepless nights with the IBM solution. Veeam is very dependent on the health of the cluster, and if it isn't running well them Veeam doesn't perform too well.

In terms of scalability, it doesn't matter how much you throw at it, it just handles it. The product doesn't require that much in terms of resources. There is no overhead CPU consumption unless you're doing deduplication and stuff like that. It is not heavy, resource-wise.

I am the main backup administrator and the only one who is using this product. I run it for the company. Currently, we are backing up between forty and fifty virtual machines on Tivoli. If I want to leave and let the schedules run then I have a second IT person to monitor it.

The usage will not increase because the solution is being phased out, and all of the backups are moving over to the new product. Before the end of the year, it will not be used anymore.

I haven't really needed any technical support because I haven't had any major issues with the product itself.

I did speak with them about tape issues but that's more hardware than software. The experience was easy and prompt, as they came out the next day and fixed it. It was awesome.

We did not use a solution prior to this one.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's a basic setup and you just need to know what has to be done. Your pools and everything, it just has to point to that directory and it's done.

Our deployment took about a day. We last upgraded in 2015 to V7, and it handles backups of all our file systems, our images, our recordings, etc. The deployment included setting up these policies.

I took care of the implementation and deployment myself.

The licensing fees are on a yearly basis, which for us it is about R400,000 (approximately $27,000 USD). The additional costs depend on your backup technology. For example, if you are using tape technology then it depends on the type of tape and how many you purchase every month. It could cost about R10,000 (approximately $650 USD), or so. The pricing is a little expensive for our current employer, so they want to move to a cheaper solution.

Currently, pricing with IBM is based on sockets and the cost depends on the machine or server. Even if you don't have anything hectic running on the host, you are still paying for the whole host. This is something that should be improved.

If it wasn't for the price we would most likely still be using it.

This solution was in place when I arrived. However, we are currently in the process of migrating to Veeam but this is a cost consideration rather than one of functionality or performance.

The best part of this solution is that it just works.

I would rate this product eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is data protection. With the new version, Spectrum Protect 8.1.4 that we are running on, we have had quite a number of issues. IBM has responded well, and after about six weeks of going through a performance tuning with them, we are back on top of our backups and things are running well.

Our old system, which is running Tivoli 7.1.7, uses VTL with tape library behind it. We are actually migrating off of it and going to the new environment, which is Spectrum Protect 8.1.4 on Power s822 AIX server. This is back-ended by a V5030 disk array. We have 12 flash modules for the OS and for a portion of the TSM installation. However, the main bulk of the directory container pool is on two 92F expansion frames off of that V5030 array.

Right now, we have four separate instances that we are monitoring today.

With data deduplication and compression, we are reducing our overall storage footprint for our disk histories. Therefore, we are reducing the actual cost of the disk for our data protection and data backups.

The most valuable features of the new version are directory container pools with inline data deduplication and compression.

It seems like they are a little behind on the integration to Azure Cloud as well as Amazon. Some products are there, but not everything is there, and these seems to be with all products. Even Azure themselves as we are looking to migrate, they do not have the functionality we need. Then all of a sudden, it is there with the next order.

It is very stable for us. So far, the only time it has been down is when we actually had to take it down.

This remains to be seen because we are actually going through a cloud migration process. We are looking at options which will allow us to tier out the cost as well as put another Spectrum Protect in the cloud for data protection backup out there.

With our transition and initiative to go to Azure Cloud, Spectrum Protect's functionality is not there yet for native Azure Cloud integration. We have found out that it is definitely in the road map for native integration to Azure. It is just whether or not it will be there on time for us.

We have used technical support. We had a few performance issues coming up with the new version. IBM jumped on the issues very quickly, got people on the team, and we have been able to work through them.

Everything from the OS installed to provisioning the disk to installing the Spectrum Protect software was neither straightforward nor complex. There were a few bugs and hiccups along the way, but nothing that a seasoned admin could not overcome.

We also evaluated Commvault.

I would have to see what their actual long-term strategic direction is first. If they want to remain on-premise, I would probably recommend Spectrum Protect. If they wanted to go on cloud and a more immediate time frame, it may comedown to Commvault, who already have native books set up as a service within Azure and Amazon Cloud.

Main criteria for selecting Spectrum Protect: We have had IBM Spectrum Protect for a number of years, so vendor stability is one thing that we look for being a government organization. Then obviously, the next one is cost.