IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

Client scheduling, deduplication, parallel processing of restores, disaster recovery manager.

Very reliable backup and recovery system. If you have SAN on the back-end housing TSM’s storage pools, you can achieve blazing fast restore times.

DB2 at the back-end database has some bugs in version 6; however, I have not yet worked with version 7 of TSM, so perhaps IBM has improved this, but don’t know for sure.

Since 2005.

Yes, with deduplication turned on, you need to be careful about how you scale server ratio to clients. Dedup takes more DB space and processing time. We overloaded our first v. 6 server when we moved from 5.3 and this was a major headache.

For some reason on 6.2, when DB2 does a reorg, dsmserv will hang. Have not been able to troubleshoot deep enough due to lack of time.

No. You just need to have the servers and backend SAN storage with which to scale. $$$

IBM has been pretty good so far and you get people who know the product with great expertise.

5/5.

No, I have used TSM since I started managing backup/recovery.

I would say its fairly complex and would be best done with a consultant. It is a product designed to scale to immense proportions and takes a team to put it together right.

Implemented through a vendor team. The consultant we had was an expert.

Not sure. But it has saved us from data loss many times.

Not sure.

No.

Definitely recommend it.

I use IBM Spectrum Protect in my company as an enterprise tool that serves as a backup solution. My company operates as a system integrator.

The most valuable feature of the solution is application-aware backups.

IBM Spectrum Protect is not a very user-friendly tool. IBM Spectrum Protect should be made a user-friendly tool. Though I feel that there are attempts from IBM Spectrum Protect to improve, it's still a very tricky or complex tool.

Three or four years ago, IBM introduced IBM Spectrum Protect for VM-level backup, which was just like how Veeam functions.

I have been using IBM Spectrum Protect for more than ten or twelve years. My company has a partnership with IBM.

IBM Spectrum Protect is a very stable solution.

Scalability-wise, IBM Spectrum Protect is basically for large enterprises.

The solution's technical support response is quick. Due to some software criticality or complexities in the solution, the technical team takes time. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

My company operates as a system integrator and deals with other products like Veeam, Commvault, and NetBackup.

My company has experience dealing with legacy systems, owing to which the setup phase of IBM Spectrum Protect was not too difficult for us. IBM Spectrum Protect might be difficult to configure and handle for a new user, a layman, or a simple administrator.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution can be deployed in an hour and a half.

The biggest benefit of IBM Spectrum Protect is the migration of legacy workloads to the new version of the product, allowing a user to take ten catalogs to the new version, but in products similar to IBM Spectrum Protect, you don't get such options. With other products apart from IBM Spectrum Protect, you have to get a new installation of the new version done and migrate the data from the previous versions. The beauty of IBM Spectrum Protect is that it gives version-to-version upgrades and allows you to take the complete database of your backup to the new version.

IBM Spectrum Protect can be considered an averagely-priced product.

IBM Spectrum Protect is not a very user-friendly tool, like Veeam or other backup software products, but it's a very comprehensive solution as an enterprise-level backup for application-aware backups or as a direct DB backup.

IBM Spectrum Protect serves as a good option for a lot of large organizations that need application-aware backups, access to multiple copies of data, and security. Organizations with a small footprint or those that don't have very well-educated administrators go for the backup provided by Veeam backups or any other GUI-based backup solution.

I recommend others to use IBM Spectrum Protect, but they have to build their own skill to run the software.

If you talk about a complete, full-fledged solution that offers good handling capabilities, IBM Spectrum Protect is a nice choice. If you want an easy-to-use solution, then there are many other options on the market apart from IBM Spectrum Protect.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

We use IBM Spectrum Protect as a backup solution. We do so with robots, each pair robot, making use of the LCO tapes. 

I find the solution somewhat difficult to use with virtual environments or VMware. 

The ability to schedule myVM on operation center should be addressed. 

Setting up the server is not easy; really difficult, in fact. It requires some skill sets. 

Automation should be added in the next release.

It is difficult for the Windows team, as it cannot make use of the solution. 

IBM Spectrum Protect is a big solution. As such, I have been using it for four years. 

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

I feel support to be good and they have resolved all issues of mine which have arisen. 

I did not use a different solution prior to IBM Spectrum Protect. 

Setting up the server is not easy; really difficult, in fact. It requires some skill sets. 

In my previous job, I handled the installation independently. However, we currently have support, as well as the central architecture and the manager sites. When it comes to the initial setup or an upgrade, we work in tandem with their support.

We definitely need certain people to maintain the solution. In respect of just storage, a backup engineering team can work with the IBM Spectrum Protect solution. The Windows team cannot make use of the solution, which poses a challenge for it. 

I am not in a position to comment on the licensing terms, as this is handled by the central team. 

We are the client. At the moment, however, I am focusing on the project involving our migration and upgrading from Spectrum Protect 1.6, dot 7 to spectrum version 1.8. 

The solution is not deployed in the cloud, but onsite. 

I have experience working with TSM and have trained on the old versions of TSM 6.

Our team exclusively uses the solution. 

We are talking about a stable solution which boasts good performance and security.

I rate IBM Spectrum Protect as an eight or nine out of ten. 

Its primary use case is backup and recall for enterprises. 

We were looking for an enterprise solution, and we found Spectrum Protect. It is more enterprise backup and that is what you want.

I am managing two Spectrum Protect system plus one tests.

We are not using cloud storage currently, nor are we planning to in the future.

I am working to implement Spectrum Protect Plus

• It saves you a lot of storage.
• Our performance is better. 
• Our product is running better than it was previously, which is huge.

My organization loves it, because they say it is one of the best product they have ever used.

• Deduplication
• Data compression
• There are a lot more features that we can use versus the previous product.

I want to see better compression than what it currently does. I heard that 8.1.5 has better compression. 

There are more features, but I want test earlier, therefore we can do more bugging for the compression feature.

Stability is good. 

However, depending upon what feature you turn on, you might run into more problems, then it is not stable. For example, when we started with deduplication, it was not working correctly. I spent so many hours with IBM support and development. They were not able to figure out what was going on and why. It was really a nightmare. We spent more hours working this product issue than I spent with my family.

Scalability is good. The product is so scalable and vast. 

They need to do a better job on Windows, because if you are running Windows, the scalability is more limited than AIX and Linux.

We plan to add on more Spectrum Protects in the future.

The technical support is good. I prefer talking to the Level 2 support, because I feel that the Level 1 support sometimes wastes too much of my time.

We needed a better enterprise backup because we were backing up OS-specific backup products with OS only. Thus, we had too many backup products for each OS separately. This was a nightmare to backup. Therefore, we decided to get an all-in-one backup.

The initial setup was easy, but I did struggle with it with no training as I was new to the product. I did do a good job, though.

We also evaluated NetBackup.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• OS compatibility
• Scalability
• Pricing, etc.

I have been working for more than 14 years in service companies dedicated to implementing and consulting in the area of backup and storage. This has allowed me to work with a multitude of backup environments. I have worked in Unix, Linux, Windows, and VMware environments, with all kinds of databases, applications; environment backup contingency solutions (DR) - formerly through "double copy" and tape management offsite; replicating storage pools via disk systems, and the databases of the backup server itself. Lately, I have been using node replication in on-premise environments and replicating against the server located in the IBM cloud (Softlayer).

Yields are a key feature. There are also very few incidents related to restores that cannot be performed. The level of product support is very high.

Integration with Windows environments needs improvement. It should be more "assisted", both at the application and database level. It remains a product that fits better in Unix/Linux environments than in Windows environments, given its configuration procedures. It needs BMR (bare machine recovery) solutions for both Windows and Linux systems.

The deduplication functionality has caused some issues as has the upload of deduplicated/encrypted data to the cloud. These errors have been solved, thanks to the power of its DB2 engine. It enables detection and correction of these problems. To date, I have not found any error that could not be resolved.

Scalability is one of the best features of this product. An IBM Spectrum Protect environment (a DB2 instance) can manage up to 4PB. Sometimes it is more practical to define several instances of DB2 (several DB2 databases, several TSM servers) on the same physical server, which drastically reduces the size of the DB2 databases.

The problem in Spain is that level-1 and 2 support, which were very good, has been moved. Now, almost all level-2 incidents are handled in France or the US. In the US there is very good support but its work schedule does not match ours.

For medium/large environments (Unix, Linux, Windows, VMware) we also propose the Commvault solution. For fully virtual environments, such as VMware and Hyper-V, we always use Veeam Backup & Replication. For a small environment with Windows and VMware/Hyper-V, we usually implement Veritas Backup Exec.

Setup/implementation requires a high level of knowledge/skill. For those with experience, the setup can be very fast, although it is true that it requires a pre-planning and sizing process.

The licensing is varied. If we have small environments (not many TB being managed) it is best to license by PVUs (depending on the number of cores of the machine). If we manage many TBs we look at licensing by capacity which allows us to use all the agents of the product.

If the customer has more IBM products, as well as IBM storage, we can resort to global licensing, which can be very economical.

In principle, and whenever I can implement this product, if a customer is reluctant or has many Windows servers I choose products that are configured/installed almost entirely via a graphic interface, such as Commvault.

It is a very powerful product that offers great performance and integrates very well in Unix/Linux environments and with powerful databases (Oracle, DB2, SAP, etc.). However, it requires a middle to high-end knowledge of, and skill with, the product.

Our primary use case is for database backups. It is performing okay. 

We are probably moving to NetWorker, because we want to use one platform for all of our backups. Right now, we use Avamar for virtualized environments and Spectrum Protect for databases. We want to get to one platform.

We have two main campuses with three petabytes of storage. We use virtualized tape, IBM product TS7700 Hydra. Those are all replicating, and we also have our Spectrum Connect and Spectrum Protect databases being replicated using Remote Mirror between sites (about 130 kilometers apart). Right now, the database (300 to 400 gigs) is sitting on some flash on a EMC VNX behind an SVC.

It is just a backup. It has not changed anything.

It allows us to have one interface. Our database administrators can schedule backups themselves. We can freeze and start databases for consistent backups. Also, we can have different schedules for whatever they need, whenever they want.

We would like to see bare-metal restorers.

There are some things that it is not doing too well for us. It does not do too well in our virtual environment. We have had to move away from it because of this.

Stability is good. We have some trouble with Clients, but I think all backup products have problems. They just have different problems.

It is pretty scalable. It will scale to anything. There have been no problems. 

Technical support has been good. Except sometimes, there will be some performance problems and no one knows what is happening. We end up spinning our wheels. With a couple of performance problems, we have ended up having to rebuild the database because everyone will eventually give up. 

Everything is normally good. If we have had a problem with our Client, they respond right away.

I do not know who else was evaluated when we were looking for a solution.

Now, we have NetWorker, Avamar, and Spectrum Protect. So, we have two and a half too many backup products.

What it does, it does excellent. I would recommend the product.

We chose Spectrum Protect because everything we had was IBM. At the time, it could do everything; all the environment. Everything that we had could go into Spectrum Connect: There were some P7s, Windows, and that was it.

We use it to back up all of our midrange enterprise systems. It performs exactly the way we need it. We don't need anything more, don't need anything less. It has always done the job.

Our infrastructure is on-premise. We have a bunch of Microsoft servers and VMs, but mostly what Spectrum Protect covers is our Power systems. We have roughly 30 servers that we protect at this point. We do backup a few Linux servers as well, because our group actually covers that area.

It provides upper management peace of mind that we can recover, if needed. We have never had a problem (knock on wood) of recovering anything via Spectrum Protect. Whatever we backup has always been there. It is a good product.

I like the new GUI. It makes things really nice. The previous GUI that they had was slow, and it did not have enough information on it. Therefore, they have truly improved in what they are offering. It is moving into the main stream, like all the other backup solutions are. 

I also like what I am seeing with some of the new features which are coming out.

Stability is very good.

We have approximately 30 servers right now. It will always be our solution for our midrange Power boxes. As we grow with Power servers, we are going to stay with Spectrum Protect as it is growing with us. We are going to upgrade a bit more aggressively than we previously have, because we are excited about the newer stuff coming out.

For technical support, you just call the 1-800 number, tell them your customer number, and voila, they are there. They have been pretty responsive.

While I was not involved in the initial setup, new releases and implementation have gone smoothly. I have never had problems.

We had another product brought in to take care of the other side of the Microsoft servers and VMs. They thought about dragging us into that as well and getting rid of Spectrum Protect. I said, "We don't need something that complicated. Spectrum Protect is a perfect fit for what we need."

NetBackup was previously running, but they have moved to Commvault, and I said, "There is no way that I am going to CommVault. It is too expensive and complicated. Spectrum Protect is not expensive, and it is simple to use." 

Even some of the people in our group, like our DBAs and non-technical people, can restore some stuff themselves via Spectrum Protect. They don't always need me. That is how simple it is. That is what I like about it.

I would recommend Spectrum Protect, especially for use with Power servers.

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.