IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

The solution's use cases would mostly involve its use in finance and insurance companies.

The two features in the solution that I have found valuable are its functionalities related to UFS and KMS.

The solution's ability to integrate with a cloud solution is one area that needs improvement.

In the next release of the solution, I would like to see the solution being able to integrate with EFS storage.

I have experience with IBM Spectrum Protect and have been working with the solution for thirteen years. Also, I am a reseller of the solution from the sales department. I have worked with versions ranging from IBM Spectrum Protect Version 9.x to IBM Spectrum Protect Version 11. The latest one I am working on is IBM Spectrum Protect Version 2.1.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a four or five out of ten. More precisely, I rate the solution's scalability a five out of ten. The low rating is due to its inability to integrate with the cloud providers today. So, if the integration is within an IBM cloud, it is good, and if it is outside IBM cloud, it is really bad. Also, most of our clients are enterprise-sized ones.

Regarding technical support, if one has the entire enterprise support, I would rate it a nine out of ten, but without enterprise support, I would rate it a five or six out of ten. So, to be more precise, without enterprise support, I would rate it a five out of ten owing to the timelines required for the technical support to resolve any issues.

Neutral

The solution's initial setup is straightforward as long as the prerequisites are followed. So, I rate the solution's setup between seven to eight out of ten.

The time required for the deployment process is somewhere between two to three weeks.

Around 200 to 300 steps are involved in the deployment process of the solution. So unless specified, explaining all the steps involved in the deployment process can be difficult.

The solution's pricing is fair. Price-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

To the ones planning to use the solution, I would like to say that as long as your use cases aren't transactional, you can use IBM Spectrum Protect for anything they want. For transaction storage, it is better not to use IBM Spectrum Protect. Since the solution can only be launched on IBM cloud and not on Google or Amazon cloud, I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.

I am a consultant and work with different IT technology including data protection solutions. We work with the legacy version of IBM Spectrum Protect from 6.x version all the way to the latest version, 8.1.12.

I have implemented Spectrum Protect for organizations as big as 1,500 users and others that are small workgroups of 40 or 50 people.

Spectrum Protect is used for protecting virtualized workloads. It also allows you to protect traditional workloads such as physical machines and physical servers. It is well suited for storing data to tape.

The addition of the retention set feature provides a reduction in storage costs. It also reduces RTO and RPO so that you can respond quickly to your clients and services in case of data loss. 

Spectrum Protect is a robust solution. A valuable feature of this solution is the retention sets, which is a fairly new addition to the feature portfolio. This allows you to back up information to leverage all their copies of backup and not do new backups of the same information over and over again. 

The usability of IBM Spectrum Protect could be improved, specifically additional features to the product in the operations center. Additional reporting facilities and stronger reporting tools such as build dashboards would be beneficial. The tool should allow you to write SQL queries to get the information as it is not easy for entry users to retrieve some reports.

I would also value a comprehensive mass deployment solution for clients that would provide an automated method for deploying agents across a large environment, not only for Windows, but also for AIX and Linux. This would reduce the time required to deploy the tool.

I have been working with IBM Spectrum Protect for 10 years and consider myself an expert on this solution.

IBM Spectrum Protect is stable.

This solution is scalable. It is a very good solution for mid-range and enterprise customers. It is suitable for a broad range of different environments and types of customers, verticals, and other segments that can implement this product. 

Technical support of IBM Spectrum Protect is superb. They always help us to quickly get to the root cause of the problem. The incidents are well managed so that we can restore service quickly. The product comes with good quality documentation and videos that share best practices and help you get up to speed quickly. This knowledge helps you give a good description to their support team which also helps arrive at a quick solution.

In previous years we used Tivoli Storage Manager. The solution took up to three months to deploy. 

The initial setup of IBM Spectrum is straightforward. Currently, there are blueprints that have a solution to implement quickly. The blueprints come with automated scripts that can be leveraged to make the deployment simpler. You just have to run a script and then complete a set of policies, storage devices, users. The other configurations are already done for you. The documentation, or blueprints, are being updated all the time so you always have a way to reduce deployment time. Deployment takes as little as three or four days.

IBM Spectrum Protect listens to their customers and the feedback about each component and feature. They are always improving quickly based on new trends and software development and agile methodologies.

You have to be careful or aware of the different solutions and the different agents that the solution comes up with so that you select the right product for the right use case. The solution comes with different products that are intended to protect certain workloads such as databases like SAP HANA products. 

I also recommend that you get to know the product well, leverage the latest features so that you can get the most value from it. 

Lastly, I would recommend that you use IBM Spectrum Protect's service and support not only when you have problems but also for recommendations on how to do certain things properly so that you don't have problems in the future. 

I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect an 8 out of 10. It is a great product, it's stable and has been on the market for a long time. 

Our primary use cases for IBM Spectrum Protect are for data backup and archive and high performance solutions.

I would not say that IBM Spectrum Protect is a product like any other product. We have selected this product because we want to standardize. One way they have improved our organization is through the stability of the solution and the availability of the product.

There are a lot of features within these products. One of them is for data backup and protection and the other one, the Spectrum Scale, is for parallel storage as a data storage solution.

All of these features are very important.

IBM Spectrum Protect does have a lot of the features that we need, but I think they need to improve their backup virtualization and backup for container. But overall, they meet the requirements and they're okay.

In terms of what I would like to see in the next release, I think better reporting. Today the reporting lacks some of the features, interface, et cetera. If they increased that reporting and made it user friendly, it will be good.

I have been using IBM Spectrum Protect for over 10 years.

We have different versions. For the file system, the Spectrum Scale, we are using version 5 and for the Spectrum Protect we are using version 8.

IBM Spectrum Protect is stable.

IBM Spectrum Protect is scalable.

There are about two to three direct users for the backup who are the admins.

For the Spectrum Scale file system, we have more than 500 users who use the file system with two admins for staff to deploy and maintain. Of course with backend for both from IBM.

This solution is being used heavily because we are a 24/seven shop, so it's heavily used and we always go and refresh the technology.

Technical support in the region is average. But overall, when we talk about IBM, when they get the right resource for you, they bring the best resources.

We have been with this product for a long time. I know initially it was difficult, but after the team built the experience, things started to be straightforward. So initial setup is complex, but maintenance is average, it is not that complicated.

It was complex because of the learning curve, for people to know more about the product, how to handle the product and the features. That's where the complexity comes from. But once people get the knowledge of how to handle the solution, it can be very straightforward.

Because we have done multiple installations, the initial took a couple of months if I recall correctly. The last installation for the backup was done four years ago and I remember it took two weeks to configure and have everything up and ready. For the Spectrum Scale, it took less than two days because we're getting the appliance model that comes as a total solution - hardware and software preconfigured.

We deployed it by ourself.

When it comes to data protection and data retrieval, most of the time, the projects that you protect cost money. So just retrieving and protecting these projects are a key value. It's like the insurance in my opinion.

We have a yearly maintenance license.

We always look at alternatives, but there are certain things you do as a strategy because you want a certain standardization and there are things you do as a temporary setup for a project or two projects. So we have both actually. We have a lot of products and there is always an alternative to them.

Before choosing IBM Spectrum Protect we evaluated solutions from EMC, from Commvault, and from Veeam. We selected IBM because it meets all our requirements and we have been using it for a long time. Shifting to a new technology comes with the price which includes support, training, development, et cetera. So that's why we continue to use IBM.

My advice to anyone considering IBM Spectrum Protect is that they need to do a thorough study of the market. They need to look at the company's resources to determine if they have the capacity. If they are new to Spectrum Scale, there is a learning curve that they need to go through, and from my experience, it is more than if you go with Veeam or to Commvault. But if you're already established and you have that and you pass that stage, then it's worth continuing with IBM. But you need to negotiate the license pricing. It takes time to negotiate pricing with IBM.

The main lesson that I learned from dealing with IBM is that you always need to have alternatives. There is a reason for it. You have to have an exit strategy. Because IBM, once they see you are hooked up to their solution, they will go and unfortunately, they do this, they will try to raise their pricing. So if you are not ready for that with good negotiation skills, you will be paying more.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give IBM Spectrum Protect an eight.

The reason for the high score is the availability of the solution. If you have mission critical functions, IBM is one of the companies that you trust. They do not release a product unless it goes through a lot of testing. And when it comes to data protection, you can count on them. If there is a bug, if there is any issue with the product, they always maintain it, which is very important when it comes to critical data backup.

Our primary use case is for Windows machines and SQL servers. I'm a senior systems engineer and we are customers of IBM.

In general, this is a good product. Specifically, I like the deduplication and compression features.

Replication of data could be improved and made a little easier to use. 

I've been using this solution for 20 years. 

Stability is good. 

Scalability is good. 

Customer support is quite good. 

The initial setup is quite complex, but I'm familiar with the solution so it's not a problem for me. 

Licensing costs are a little high but it's not too expensive.

I recommend this solution for backup servers. We have around 700 nodes and servers. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

Spectrum Protect is performing well, and the primary use case is just for backups to provide recovery. It is not the first point of recovery for the customer. However, it definitely prevents our customers from going out of business, because they need to have a backup.

On the backup side, we use ProtecTIER Virtual Tape recoveries. On the customer side, the front-end side of it, they recently moved to all-flash storage, not IBM storage. They have got a mix of old servers, which are physical. There are a mix of Sun, AIX, VMware, and Hyper-V, so there is pretty much everything across the board at the customers.

Generally, the happiest users are Oracle users. What they like about the platform is that they have received organic benefits in performance from the backup system and also as their platforms have upgraded over the time. Therefore, every time customers make a change or we have made a change, then they use the product to do a cloning and refreshing. They are happy that they get good performance something changes.

The ability to migrate between media over a long period of time. My customers are long-time users, and they have benefited from being able to move between tiers, e.g., L Tier 5 from L Tier 6 and/or L Tier 7. They have been able to do this within the product.

More support for non-mainstream databases, in particular PostgreSQL, SQL, and MySQL. I would also like support for snapshots of non-IBM hardware. I have read some future statements, and it seems that this is coming, though.

Sometimes, there is a perception that it is a legacy product, and some customers are less keen to take on the more innovative features. Therefore, we have some customers who are running on the current version of Spectrum Protect and use all of the current features, and some customers who consider it a legacy product. However, they are a bit stuck in the way that they use the product, only using the old style features.

I have worked with it for 15 years. I have found it to be very scalable. Where I work now as a business partner, our customers use it. I have some small customers and some large customers, and it works well. Where I used to work before, we ran backup as a service, and we had about 21 instances of Spectrum Protect running. It was just reliable. That is my experience.

The customers who are doing workloads in the cloud are choosing to have cloud-based backup strategies. It is an area in the product where our competitors may have better offerings right now, but the people who are moving to the cloud, if they are doing it well, are choosing not to have their data in the cloud be static. They are using the cloud to spin up a workload and spin it down. Thus, the workloads are being provisioned as opposed to needing to have static data in them. Therefore, the real value is the code which generates the machine running in the cloud, and we backup that.

I have used technical support a lot over a long time. There are two sides to it. I find quite often with the Level 1 and Level 2 support that I struggle with time zones. Sometimes depending on where the support is coming from, there can be barriers in understanding the problem. 

Usually when I get up to Level 2 or Level 3 support the technical capabilities are really good, and I also find that if I need a point solution to a point problem, they will find code and build code for my problem. This has been very good. They won't just say, "We are looking at fixing that, you may need to wait a year." They will come out and help you fix a problem. However, the first day of interaction at Level 1 is not really very good.

I have been involved in the initial setup a few times. I have also migrated from one hardware platform to a different one, Solaris to AIX along with TSM (before it was Spectrum Protect). I have found it more complex then some of its competitor products, but because I have worked on the product for a while, I find it fairly simple. Now, I understand how to install it well, but it would still be complex for a novice. 

I am quite keen on getting more experience with Spectrum Protect Plus, because it seems like it is a lot easier, and that is where we will go in the future.

I have used a couple of different backup products. As a business partner, our customers do choose other backup products. Generally, I find I have less trouble with Spectrum Protect than I have had with the other backup products.

Mainly, the competition is Commvault, if they are looking at the functionality that Spectrum Protect is offering. There are some customers who go with Veeam. The reason that they go with Veem is because they have a desire to go there. When they already want to go that way, it is difficult to position Spectrum Protect as an alternative. I am really keen to see how Spectrum Protect Plus might compete with Veem in the marketplace.

As a business partner, the customer is choosing the product, and we are recommending Spectrum Protect. Certainly our bigger customers have a lot of legacy data, so they already had Spectrum Protect. Therefore, it is a fairly simple decision to maintain it. However, some of our customers go through reviews and look at options. 

We have, in our long history, lost some customers to competitors, but the reasons why did not have to do with the product. I do not think we have lost anyone because the product was not delivering.

The main benefit is the protection.

You can protect your data and keep it for long durations, without it spending too much time on the local disk. You can send the data to an outside location. I think the main feature is that you can protect your data from disasters.

We should be talking about the capacity of the tape drives. That's the only problem. We have a system that is in petabytes. We have five frames of the tape drives and we have more than 2,000 slots. If we could compress that space in the data center, that would be good.

I was looking for what is already in the market. Everyone is getting a cloud. The product has already given us some solutions which we can use in the cloud. I think that's fine for the moment.

I think we are running the product on AIX at the moment. I think that is the most stable platform for any product.

In terms of scalability, we have been using it for the last five years and the scalability is very good. I like that.

In terms of technical support, we had some troubles when we reached out to them, especially with IBM Europe. For the last two years, we had some issues when we were trying to reach out to IBM, even in the US. This is especially the case when the call is for Level 1 technical support.

We have been working for eight years with the product. I open a call when I have exhausted Google knowledge and my personal knowledge.

The call goes to IBM and they just ask me some silly questions. That's where you have the problem. You lose maybe two or three days just to get the right person.

I have been using this product since I joined my company.

I was involved in the setup. It was straightforward.

They should go for it. The most important thing I look for when selecting a vendor is after sales support.

Our primary use case is using it for protecting the physical environment.

The feature we have found most valuable is when you want to integrate it with a Tape Library and then do the DRM life cycle. That is when it works the best.

In terms of what could be improved, the integration with Cloud and a simplified, unified GUI. They do not have a unified GUI, they only work on CLI and operations center, which is really complicated for the installation and configuration.

I have been using IBM Spectrum Protect for almost 15 years.

It is very stable.

Yes, it is scalable. It is scalable with Db2 and it can be scalable with the metatext.

Their technical support is good.

The initial setup can be a little bit complex.

It could be simplified.

The pricing is costly.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give IBM Spectrum Protect around a 7.

To raise that score, I would like to see Cloud integration and full Cloud support.

Additionally, they have much less support in terms of backing up the SQL databases than other applications.

There are many modernized applications out there in the market. If someone has a full legacy with tape in front or if they have purely tape and they want to use tapes, then for them I would say it is a very good solution. But if they want to move towards Cloud and modernize more, then I think there are better solutions to look into than IBM, such as Veeam or Cohesity or Rubrik.

We use IBM Spectrum Protect for all the organization backups. When there is loss of data, we can restore it from the backup.

We have found the building, compression, backup, and the tool to save point-in-time backups to be valuable features.

The backup is very good. In other backup systems, you need a lot of storage to gain the same backup policy.

There aren't too many bugs, and it is good for storage and backup.

The high availability of the backup servers can be improved because we can replicate nodes, but the software is very complicated. It's very complicated to do backups in several clusters.

You have to do a lot of configurations to build a server, and you would need to backup and restore.

To go to new hardware, it's a project because you would need to do tests of the backup and restoration of the  DB2 database. A lot of time would need to be spent.

There are lots of configuration issues.

I think it would be good if they could improve the self service of the users.

We've been using this solution for about 20 years.

It is a stable solution.

It's not a scalable solution. For example, if I need to move to a better host or if I need to move my database that gives them the metadata, then I would need to move the IBM Spectrum Protect database to another storage spot. So, I would need to do a backup and restoration of the database. There is no scalability in the backup server.

I can't move it to another host without downtime. I would need a minimum of one day of downtime to move the database to another storage spot or to move the server to another server. I can't build another host and then switch.

We do plan to increase usage because there are more backup needs.

The technical support is okay. Sometimes, they give the answer but not immediately. At other times, we have to handle a case for a very long time.

The initial setup for IBM Spectrum Protect was complex. It's not a software that you can install and do a little bit of configuration and be done. You have to know very well what you're doing with it.

It works with DB2, and you have to know what the sizing, the log sizing, and so forth are. This is the difficulty with this software.

I did the deployment myself, but it would be very difficult to do it alone. I did it because I had enough time as a new employee 20 years ago; I took it on as a project.

However, in most organizations there won't be enough time to learn about IBM Spectrum Protect yourself. It would be better to do it with a deployment company that has more experience.

I think that overall it's a good software for backup. There aren't a lot of bugs, and it's very good for storage. However, you have to be a specialist; it's not plug and play.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect at nine.