IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

The primary use case is to provide backup and archive our data, onsite and offsite. It is performing very well. 

Our infrastructure is on-premise; nothing is in the cloud. We are utilizing things like spinning disks, flash storage, tape, snapshots, etc. We are still sending tapes outside. 

It has a lot more capabilities and functions than a lot of other products. Even though it is more complex, the reason is because it gives you a lot more features. This is what I  prefer, especially for a long retention.

I have not implemented the most important feature yet: node replication. I can have a hot Spectrum Protect server under the DR site instead of having to build one up like I would have had to before.

I would like to see the operations center be a lot more functional. It was nowhere near as functional as the admin center, and I'm doing a lot of command line with it. I grew up doing command line, so it is fine for me. For people that are younger, they want to do everything on their smart phone, and running hundreds of commands is not the answer. Therefore, more functionality for things like creating tape drives and tape libraries, as the functionality is not at the operations center yet. If the operations center had been fully functional, I would have probably given it a rating of a 10.

So far, so good. I am looking to find out, in the future, what the stability is going to be and the best way to architect what we are designing to do.

Everything so far has been really good. It is very scalable.

I am managing two instances of Spectrum Protect.

The technical support has been really good for both Spectrum Protect and IBM Storage. The support team has very responsive. I want to be talking to somebody who can help me and knows more than me, which is the case with IBM technical support. So, their support has been very good.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward because it was really old school. Now, with the whole new design of where we are going, I am involved from ground floor up.

The product is more complex and can be pricey, but you are paying for one copy of the data as opposed to other vendors. For example, if I have five copies of the data, I will be spending a lot more money. Switching to one vendor, it will cost over a million dollars to give us less functionality, which is why we did not do it.

Going to IBM Tech University Conference saved me from making a major purchase of the wrong thing, which was very helpful.

We evaluated Commvault, NetBackup, and Axiom (until they were purchased by a competitor). We also looked at Rubrik. We prefer Spectrum Protect, and even though we have looked at its competitors, we have never switched.

I would recommend going with Spectrum Protect. That is what I would tell them now, and I have, I have former coworkers using other products that ask me about designing a hot site, because their product does not do it.

Main criteria when selecting a vendor: Something that would allow us to be able to have it onsite. For the other vendors who we looked at, you would still have to build up a new server or new environment, and hopefully have a backup of your database. In this case, I can switch from a primary to a secondary, back and forth, instead of spending weeks, maybe months, producing a tape library. Now, I do not have to do that.

The primary use case for the solution is mainly backing up Oracle databases and critical workload AIX servers, and so on.

The Oracle database backup is the solution's most valuable aspect.

The solution is scalable.

We've found the product to be quite stable and the performance is very good.

Technical support has been helpful overall.

Generally, the implementation of virtualization could be improved. The workflow service and so on are not working properly. They have another solution, Spectrum Protect Plus, however, for me, that is a new product. They invented a new product for virtual environments as they didn't succeed in integrating it into the former solution. For me, Spectrum Protect Plus, and Spectrum Protect are not the same product. It's not a new feature for Spectrum Protect, it is just a new thing. Therefore, we assessed IBM was not able to provide a good solution for virtual environments. Therefore, we decided to use Veeam for that.

The initial setup is quite complex.

I've been using the solution for at least these last 12 months.

The stability of the solution is perfect. It's reliable and offers good performance. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. It's good.

The solution can scale well. If a company needs to expand things, it can do so with ease.

We just count the servers in terms of usage. In terms of the servers, I would assume we have more or less, about 400 servers with 1.5 petabytes of storage.

In terms of scaling, we'll remain the same more or less, however, as the databases grow, we tend to increase the amount. We don't have new features and functions that we want to integrate, however, we have new services. We are growing and likely expanding.

We've contacted technical support several times. They are always helpful and responsive. We're satisfied with their level of support.

We're using Veeam for virtualization, as that aspect is not covered under IBM Spectrum Protect.

At the moment, we're happy with the features available. I can't recall feeling that there was something lacking. There aren't any new features we desperately need.

What we would like is integration between this solution and Spectrum Protect Plus. They should be one product and not two different solutions. 

The initial setup is not straightforward. It is quite complex. It's important to have the right people in place. You need good experts to manage upgrades, et cetera.

For the initial deployment, for running the system, for implementing new servers or new clients, et cetera, that is not a problem, however, the problem is really handling upgrades. That is kind of tricky.

It's a good idea to hire a consultant or integrator to assist your company in the process. It's not easy to do if you don't have the right knowledge base. 

We're just a customer and end-user.

We're using an older version, called Spectrum Protect. We are not using Spectrum Protect Plus.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've largely been happy with it. I'd give it a higher rating if Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus could either be the same product or integrated together.

It allows us to backup and have the DBAs manage their own backups and our retention period. It reduces the work on our part while we get the backups completed.

It has to ability to backup DV2, Oracle, and Informix.

I'd like to see some benefits to help manage it. With a big installation, we don't have the performance characteristics that we maybe should have. We've come up with a cookie cutter approach, where you would just spit out the same thing time after time.

I would like to see something that maybe a beginner, or intermediate professional could do, in order to give me a set of tools to answer questions and spit out what I should have.

It doesn't integrate with storage pools, with a normal pool. I'd like to see that.

It's very stable. We've been having problems with keeping enough storage on the floor, but as far as the product goes, it's really no problem.

Scalability is fine, as long as you bring up the right server. We have some Linux servers that don't scale as well. Our AIX servers work much, much better. We're backing up about a petabyte a night.

Technical support is good, for the most part. It's rather difficult to get through to all the representatives before you hit Level-1 or Level-2. But they are very responsive nowadays, unlike in past years.

We were using TSM for about 30 years. We switched over to NetBackup for a while. We then switched back to TSM, primarily because NetBackup didn't support Linux on Z.

The installation is better. It's basically a push button thing. You set it up, start a script, and start answering questions. The graphical interface is a lot better than setting it up manually, because it will do everything for you. Now it does an automatic check to make sure that you have enough space and your authorization is there before actually doing the install. In this way, you don't get through an install, or partway through an install, and then fail.

Do your homework. See what you have on the floor, what your road map says you're going to do for databases, systems, and platforms. Get IBM to do some evaluations for you and come up with a better product, whether it ends up being IBM or something else.

When selecting a vendor, we look for stability of the product and support mostly. Nothing's perfect. They're always coming out with new things. Their container storage pools are better. It's basically a setup and forget it.

We are using it for backup and restoration. We also have agents for Oracle. Unfortunately, we are not using it for virtual restoration, like VMware. That part is controlled or set up inside the Veeam software.

We like IBM Spectrum's versioning capabilities. It lets us specify how many versions of a file we want to keep and for how long. Also, the archive component of the software helps us a lot. Let's say we have a department that needs 10 versions of one file that need to be kept for at least six months. So with IBM Spectrum, we can set rules that will respect what has been asked of us. For example, we can set it to save 15 versions, and if the file is deleted, we need to keep the last version for at least six months. 

We need better protection from ransomware or the ability to identify ways we can protect ourselves from ransomware. Having backups is one thing, but specifically, we need methods to recover if we have a ransomware attack. If we could find a way to detect and alert us if specific data has been encrypted (except the ones we choose), that would be a good selling point.

We've been using IBM Spectrum for the past 20 years or so.

HAProxy is highly stable.

HAProxy is scalable. There's nothing that we cannot do with it. The entire IT department has access to it, so that's upwards of 100 users.

IBM support is great. 

Twenty years ago, we had the file server, and we were using tapes. It was a local software. At one point, we switched to the Unix machine — the AIX machine — which could not support the same software. We had an IBM system, and IBM had a solution called ADSM, so we used that on the AIX machine. And since the product was good, we deployed it on Windows Server.

We've been using IBM Spectrum Protect for a long time, so we've acquired the experience over time to deploy it. Installing it would be straightforward for us because we know the product. However, it might take a week for someone new to the platform to get it up and running. We have four people responsible for maintenance, and they're mostly system admins. 

Price and storage are an issue no matter which software you are using. It depends on what our customers ask for. If they want the sky, they will have to pay for it. It all depends on what they need. How much it does cost. The pricing depends on what products you intend to. For example, it's one price if you are using an agent for Oracle, but the price is different if you are only using basic backup and restore. It could be $15 to $25 for one license. It's very complicated. Licensing is a pain.

I rate IBM Spectrum Protect eight out of 10. The advice I would give to prospective users is to take stock of the value of your data. Spectrum is like insurance. Ask yourself how much it will cost you to restore the whole thing and get it back online. A backup solution isn't just a cut and paste of one file. It's a data recovery setup. I recommend doing your homework. When you decide what you want to do, search for the product that will deliver it. 

I'm an IT analyst and we are customers of IBM.

One of the benefits for the company is that if a major error has been made we're able to restore to a backup prior to when the error occurred.

The most interesting feature is without a doubt the 'management classes'. A management class allows us to configure the number of previous versions of each file that we want to keep as well as the number of days that we want to keep them. Thanks to the way in which the management classes can be assigned to file, the possibilities are endless.
To my knowledge only SP offers this flexibility.

We've noticed that restoring massive number of files is a time-consuming process and should be improved. We found a way to deal with it by using the 'no query restore' where the restore operation is done on more than one thread and is restartable as opposed to the 'query restore' which is a single thread process. The 'no query restore' needs setting a few parameters for the node in order increase the number of resources that will be used by the restore process.
In addition, we've found that this is not the best solution for backup and restore of virtual machines. Even with Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environment which could be improved a lot. I believe they're working on that with the new product Spectrum Protect Plus.

Finally, the licensing is complicated and could be simplified.

I've been using the solution for 15 years. 

Scalability becomes somewhat limited with the growth of the database, but we are still able to run with only one instance on one database, although we are reaching the limit. We have thousands of users. We have three network administrators dealing with the solution. I'm an analyst and the others are service administrators. 

We haven't used technical support for quite a while but when we did use them, they were very good. 

Deployment is a difficult question because we've been using the product for so many years that it's simple for us. I think implementation for the server and the node is simple but the configuration is a little complex. Part of the issue is that there are so many features and if you want to use them all, it needs to be via configuration. There are a lot of configuration parameters in Spectrum Protect. To add a new computer to the server takes a minute. To deploy a new server might take a day or two. All our deployments are done in-house. 

The cost is high and the license is complicated. You have to figure out which license best suits your needs. It's not as simple as Veeam or the other software products we use. We need an ILMT license with IBM. We have a computer dedicated to compute the license we need for our IBM project. We pay an annual license fee of somewhere between $100,000 and $150,000.

I recomment this solution if the need is to be able to quickly recover one or more files destroyed by mistake a few weeks ago. We must ensure that the configuration meets the needs of the users. The best advice I can give is to read the tutorial provided by the IBM documentation. And for anyone administering the backup, they should perform restore tests regularly.

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

However if the needs are to be able to quickly restore a cloud infrastructure, there is undoubtedly better solutions.

Protecting infrastructures and applications. We have infrastructures and applications that must be online. Some has archiving requirements that need to store data using longer retention due to legal or other requirements. With Spectrum Protect, you can adjust this to your needs.

We use this to fine tune our business requirements for the data, where we can save shorter data retention data on a storage pool with faster performance and save archiving on a storage pool with tapes to keep cost lower.

With Spectrum Protect, we were able to lower the TCO thanks to it always being incremental by design (progressive incremental forever).

Why back up data again if the data has not been changed? It has faster backups, as only changed content is sent and has less storage use.

Why restore the same content many times if you can just restore one backup?

• Faster restores as only one full backup is needed to restore. With other competitors, you have to restore fully with all their incrementals.
• We successfully lowered data storage due to its progressive incremental-forever by design (always incremental), plus its advanced data reduction techniques using deduplication with compression.
• Backups are much faster, as only changed content is sent, especially if the journaling is added.
• Restores are much faster too, as it only restore the objects needed. Other competitors restore objects from full backup, later restoring a more recent version of the object.
  

Progressive incremental-forever (always incremental):

SPFS is a file system for Spectrum Protect. A way to mount a Spectrum Protect storage pool as a mount point on your server for easier usage. With this one can protect any data using the Spectrum Protect storage.
Eg
# mount -t spfs /backup
# mysqldump > /backup/mysqldump.bkp

SPIR is Instant Recovery for Spectrum Protect. Take application consistent snapshots locally using, and sends snapshots data using space efficiently and blocking backups to the Spectrum Protect server. It provisions the snapshot from the backup server to the same or new server near instantly, so that applications can be started before all data has been copied back to original place.

Replication services would be nice. If these could be enhanced to be always on so multiple storage backup services could be added as a cluster pool. This would provide a better availability service.

It would be great if the API could add functions to check storage pool details using the client-side API.

It would be great if there would be an API to add new licenses using the client-side API so the licenses can be reviewed using QUERY LICENSE. Then, new licenses could be added using the REGISTER LICENSE command.

More than 20 years.

the solution is stable and all the fixes and patches are well tested before rolled out. workarounds are being published if bugs exists early bug fixes can be shipped earlier for clients has emergent needs (eFix) change list is being published at each release

the solution scales frmo small setup to enterprise hosting many thousands of clients. Competitors need more resourses, as it has difficulty to host the inventories, of manage the amount of data If needed, one can add storage agents, which can be used to off load data transfer, so that the data goes over these agents, instead of being sent to a central server

support is great

We previously used Dell EMC NetWorker and switched because:

• More storage was needed to manage data protection.
• It was more difficult to manage traffics, as it uses RPC, and more ports needed to be opened in the firewall.
• The solutions sometimes does not respond on "push/pull requests".

being working with ADSM, TSM, Spectrum Protect for several years, and the setup becomes more easier nowadays

we used an in-house team

By changing to this solution, we saved not only a lot of license costs, but also 450% storage cost (without space reduction techniques) + 450% additional using space reduction techniques

IBM provides an open license policy, which is more like a gentlemen's agreement.

One can go with either a PVU licensing model or a capacity based licensing model. Either solution does not block the usage, if over used.

NetBackup.

The perfect solution with a robust, scalable, open architecture.

Many additional plugins are available on the Global Solution Directory.

Primary use case is backing up data in order to restore our customers, if needed. The performance right now is okay.

Our on-premise infrastructure is comprised of two tape libraries (3500), each staffed with about 55 TS1150 drives, and approximately 5000 cartridges. The snapshots are taken on NAS filers, as they are EMC VNXs, and Spectrum Scale. It is there that we take the snapshots. For buffering, we have some V7000s in place, but all in HPE Blade enclosures. We previously had virtual tape, but not anymore.

We do not lose data. That is why we are using this product and have a backup in place.

• We can scale. Today, we have an average backup volume of 100TB a day. 
• It is reliable; it works. 
• We have a good cooperation with IBM. 

The features should be a little bit closer together. 

If you take Spectrum Protect into account, and you have it along with restrictions to Spectrum Archive by means of LTFS, this is also something which should be made better within the overall product's program.

The stability is very nice. The only thing that IBM should improve with the program is the licensing. We have a little engine in place. However, if you use Power PC and you have big engine in place. then you have some restrictions to the versions. This should be remedied. 

This would be a real improvement: The product to gather storage on the one hand, and storage for backup on the other hand.

It scales until the next frame must be purchased.

The growth plans are given by the user. In science, you never know what the next step is. We are struggling against newer experimental setups. This is great for the scientists, but if you double the resolution size for microscopy, it ends up with a lot of more data on our side. However, we serve our scientists, so we just purchase new.

The support levels at IBM are very good.

The initial setup and infrastructure were done within days. It was an okay process. There was nothing negative about it.

The license model that they have at IBM, which is due to volume, from a certain volume onward is not the right license model. Right now, we have a better license model. This is the model that we had at the end of last year.

There was a call for tender for an overall storage renewal, and IBM easily won out versus its competition. 

If you are looking for a reliable solution, it is okay. If you are looking for just backing up some smaller clients in a small business unit, so there are probably other competitors around. 

Well, apart from restoring data which has been inadvertently deleted or corrupted, we also use Spectrum Protect in conjunction with Spectrum Scale.

As the tape storage pool for HSM (inactive) data, this leaves a stub file in Spectrum Scale's GPFS file system and moves the file data to the LTO6 tape based storage pools -- so it vastly reduces the cost of the overall services, whilst maintaining Nearline access to the files.

a. Incremental forever
b. We have approximately 4.5PB’s of front end data and a 12 hour backup window.

However, by backing up only the changed data, we average around 75TB per night. If we had to do full backups, even occasionally, we would not be able to complete the backup within 12 hours, or we would have to make a large investment to fit a full backup within the 12 hour window.

• Reporting
• Ease of use

No, we have found it to be an extremely reliable system.

No, scalability is one of its key capabilities.

Local in country L2 is average. Offshore L3 is okay, but not as good as they used to be.

Yes, it wasn't scalable enough, and client support was not as extensive.

You do need to know what you are doing to setup the platform, so invest in doing the design work upfront before deploying.

At scale, the consumption license (per TB) is very expensive, so generally, licensing the hosts running the software (both Target and Source), this does mean you will need to work out the PVU for each client, but you can use the License Metric Tool to make this easier.

That was really too long ago to be of any use. However, I would suggest that at scale today, only Commvault and now Veeam, would be the products to compare it against.

Make sure your people have the right skills. You have a design, setup your automation policies so it doesn’t need manual intervention, and have your admins investigating and resolving the exception.