IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

We are a technology provider and IBM Spectrum Protect is one of the solutions that we are certified in. Our customers are using it for databases and applications.

The interface is easy to use.

Better integration with other tools and databases is needed. Some examples of this are Oracle RMAN and Veeam.

I have been working with Spectrum Protect for three years.

The stability is ok. We are working with different databases and different clients, and we haven't had any issues.

Scalability is good.

The technical support is good but it isn't easy to convince somebody to use it more often because of the cost.

I have used similar products by several different vendors and I feel that many of them are better than IBM Spectrum Protect. For example, Veeam is better because it provides better protection for a physical server. They offer both an on-premises and a virtual edition.

I think that the initial setup is simple, although the solution overall is somewhat complex in terms of detail. Our deployment took one month to complete because it took time to identify the full workload.

We were able to deploy it for databases on four or five systems, some of which are not Windows-based. We have different technologies in use.

This is a product that I recommend, although I think it depends on the sizing of your IT systems. That said, there is a need to have a solution that is recognized by most companies.

Overall, I feel that this is an average product. In my opinion, there are many competing products that are better than Spectrum Protect.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

Our primary uses for this solution are Disaster Recovery and operational data protection.

This solution helps us to meet all of our data protection needs.

The most valuable features are compression and deduplication.

In the next version of the solution, I would like to see cloud support.  Specifically, I'd like to see this product leverage the native data protection services in the major cloud providers (AWS, Azure) and not require an agent to be installed.  Since access to the hypervisor is not available in an IaaS environment the native services must be leveraged.  Many competing solutions already do this.

IBM Spectrum Protect is used for the physical server databases.

I need two separate solutions for virtual and physical systems. I need IBM Spectrum Protect Plus for virtual systems and Spectrum Protect for physical systems and that's a pain. It would be an improvement if they were combined.

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

IBM Spectrum Protect is highly reliable.

The scalability of IBM Spectrum Protect is good.

We are backing up approximately two petabytes of data using IBM Spectrum Protect.

I have contacted the support and my experience was good.

The initial setup of IBM Spectrum Protect is complex and the process took a few weeks.

IBM Spectrum Protect was implemented in-house. We have two people who deploy and maintain the solution.

With backup solutions, you never see a return on investment.

The price of IBM Spectrum Protect is expensive and there is only a standard licensing fee.

My advice to others is if they need a rock-solid solution this is a great solution. However, the problem is it is not future-proof because you never know where IBM aims to go.

I rate IBM Spectrum Protect an eight out of ten.

Primary use case is for data protection and data backup. I work with the following:

• On-premise solutions for customers.
• Building solutions for our managed service, which uses Spectrum Protect as a backup data protection for primarily DIAX Power Systems platform.
• Virtual workloads in our data center.

It performs great and is working wonderfully.

Our on-premise infrastructure is mostly spinning disk right now. Tape is on our plans towards the future. I have come to the conclusion that we need to make sure we add tape into the solution, because archive seems to be a big, important piece, especially since Spectrum Protect is moving as a product. Going forward, we will find it being more as a long-term retention repository than it used to be in the past.

We have two Spectrum Protect instances. We have work redundant ones in our managed solutions center that we offer for our solutions provider. For my on-premise work that I do as a consultant, I take care of instances on and off for various customers.

As managed solutions provider, it has been really useful because it scales bigger than a lot of other products. It allows us to consolidate costs on the back-end, making it somewhat more cost effective for us, while still being able to scale bigger for our larger customers that buy solutions from us.

The biggest thing is its enterprise-wide type of architecture. It supports a lot of different platforms. This is useful for us.

There is not much that they do not have already. 

Integration with some applications in the healthcare field could be added, as that is a big part of our business. I just recently learned that Spectrum Protect Plus has integration with Epic. They are planning on implementing it. It is on their road map, and that seems to be the right direction. 

IBM has a good direction, making sure they address the things that they discuss with us as a service provider, and looking to provide better products to our customers.

It is super stable. This is one of the reasons that we like it as a solutions product.

It is extremely scalable. This is why we like it, because a lot of other products require a more complicated deployment as the environments get bigger. 

Spectrum Protect keeps things rather simple, because as long as we build the core system, it can scale with the hardware, essentially. We use Power Systems for our servers. Therefore, it can scale massively, as well as the application. Thus, we keep our costs low.

The solution will definitely meet my customers' growth requirements. However, the challenge I have is that customers are becoming more homogeneous and need diversity less. This has worked more for us as we take on workload for them, but I have a lot of customers who used to need five or six different types of enterprise integration: workload, virtualization of different platforms, etc. However, this all seems to be getting more homogenized. Therefore, the need has been going down from what we have seen previously.

Most commonly, we call technical support for performance related issues, if we run into something which is a weird anomaly, we will call them up. 

They have recently added support tickets specifically engineered around performance. This has been very useful for us when we run into issues where customers are looking to try to squeeze a lot more horsepower out of older system.

The initial setup is a little more complex than some of the other solutions. The younger, backward products out there are much easier to implement. 

Generally speaking, it works well for me, as a person who sells my services. It is nice to be able to be able to set something up for a customer, and have it work directly the first time, because of the fact that I have the experience. 

Typically, the competitors have been EMC or Commvault. Those are the most common ones that we have run into. 

What is probably most interesting, more recently, customers have been having conversations with me around some of these newer backup applications which are more web scale architected, like how Spectrum Protect Plus is designed. This has been a different conversation, because the customers' focus is more about ease of use, and less about flexibility and scalability. Therefore, this has been a little bit of a shift, because they have simplified so much, and what they have is their infrastructure.

Customers' most important criteria when selecting a solution:

• Robustness
• Durability
• Flexibility with storage and the Client.

I have seen my clients use it historically for AIX systems and for applications which are pretty robust, like Domino. I use it there, or for customers who have a lot of systems and are trying to backup everything in a certain time frame. They get this benefit and the benefits of its space efficiency. It keeps the footprint down (the space), so they will not need to continue buying more disk. 

Mostly, it is a flash database for Spectrum Protect, then as far as the user space for everything else, they are using mostly using NL drives. I do not know of anybody using flash all the way. Our customers are also using tape, too.

The great thing about Spectrum Protect is I do not have to be concerned with the latest, greatest technologies. I can still use what has been out there for some time. Traditional storage works perfectly with it.

We do have customers with cloud strategies, who are looking to put their backup in the cloud. A lot of customers talk about moving to cloud, but do not do it because of their size (too large). We are in the works with one customer looking to do this, but their legal people stopped pretty much anybody putting their data in the cloud, so that is on the customer side.

The average Spectrum Protect customer is going to be somewhere around 150 servers, and about 2,000 user company organizations or larger. They have usually dozens of terabytes to protect. Some companies have five Spectrum instances, and some have 30 or 40.

Its capability of just being able to handle legacy servers, and new and old platforms. That is one of the things about IBM, they made sure the product will continue to keep customers loyal.

The Spectrum Protect people know that they have to have the Spectrum Protect Plus product pick up and move faster, meaning getting to those features that Spectrum Protect can't do. 

I think IBM is great with software, and it will always improve. It is just the speed of getting it out there. Faster development and deployment speed would help us as partners go out there with confidence and sell more product right now.

Though, no one can fix every solution for backup and restore.

Stability is excellent. This is one of IBM's strength.

Scalability is excellent. This is one of IBM's strength.

The technical support is general. If you need more than that, you need to know someone within IBM on the technical in-depth side. We will be the transparency to do that for our customers. That is why we are there to help manage their Spectrum Protect environments.

However, if something changes at the customer's company, the environment can go into what we call debt. If you don't watch it, it can get out of hand. That is also where we come in to help our customers if they cannot find the time. A good Spectrum Protect administrator should be spending approximately an hour to an hour and a half a day just to the administration of it. If you are spending more time than that, then it is possible that you need more training on it.

I work on the initial setup with my teammates and technical team to verify the setup will work. I work with the IBM blueprints that they have online as a basis. I try to follow them as closely as possible, but they do not always fit all customers, because there are just three broad versions: small, medium, and large footprints. 

If you follow the blueprints, it is pretty straightforward, because it is all scripted out for you. We do run into something complex with each customer setup, but we have the experience to handle it.

You need to put it in a PoC and test it out if you can. A lot of companies have time and resources to do this for every product that they are looking at. They need to scrutinize every one of the competitors. 

After, you can basically configure it and script it the way you want it to work.

Spectrum Protect is often compared with Commvault and EMC for overall backup solutions, then against Veeam, and Rubrik for virtualization platforms.

Our customers have come to trust IBM. If there is ever an issue that has to be solved, IBM will throw the bench at it and make it work. If you know how to design it right the first time and you show proof that you have done it before with the customer, it will make it easier for the next customer when you go out there and try to sell them on the solution.

Backup is typically last of the things that customers want to tackle, but they have to do it sooner or later, or they will get burnt by it.

Most important criteria when customers select a solution:

• Skill and experience in the product
• Relationships
• Confidence in product.

We completely back up our environment with Spectrum Protect: all databases in our environment, the files in the environment, and all the services. Performance is quite good. We do not worry about it.

We have an on-premise infrastructure. We have many hypervisors in use. We are using ESX, Hyper-V, KVM, and Power hardware. We using the SVC in combination with SSD storage. In addition, we use real and virtual tape libraries. It works well together. 

We will be closing the gap on moving to a cloud environment within the year.

The main thing is to keep the data safe and in files, keep it on tape ready for a request from a bank, and it is working perfectly with all our hardware. 

It is keeping the banking license alive, thus it is perfect for the business.

The wide variety that we have for using the software with each database and your own adapter. You can configure it, and it is quite good. Other backup software, you can be stuck to one environment and have to keep that environment.

Sometimes they have already erased information in our operational center and we need some of it for reporting to our subsidiaries if the backup was successful within the last months and which amount of data was backed up, archived, and stored. This is what the customer has interest in and we have to deliver. If the operational center could assist us, that would be fine. 

Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus, if they move together, that would be good. I heard already that we can get rid of data removal from virtual environments in the next version. The idea that Spectrum Protect Plus was dealing with appliances on ESX or Hyper-V seems good to me.

The service pack is very stable. We have had some problems about using storage agents on the X6 environment. It is not quite stable, but it is also not supported in a virtualized environment.

It is working great. Our database moves on 2.5TB and is still performing well. There are no worries about it.

We have roughly 30 instances for different purposes and different subsidiaries. We are using some Spectrum Protect servers only for library manager purposes to cover all these multiple parts, which have for storage agents and this is sometimes gets to its limit. It is not a well-known limit, but if you have more than 28,000 passes on one server, the performance decreases. That is what we found out and we try to keep it under this limit.

We are using the Technical Support, and sometimes it's a little bit annoying to come to the Level 3 support. Sometimes, it seems to me that if the Level 1 could not assist you and they did not find anyone in the Level 3, then you are stuck.

The initial setup is straightforward. The documentation is fine. There are some issues though. If you create a server, not all testings regarding fire systems are done in advance. Therefore, sometimes we have to go three rounds to fill all the gaps. This could be done a little bit better. 

I do not know who else was evaluated.

I would recommend Spectrum Protect.

Spectrum Protect Plus is covering the topic of industrial environments, e.g., X6 and Hyper-V, and this has been an open issue for years with us.

We use it in the retail banking environment because of regulations. For our databases, we have to back up the catalogs every 20 minutes.

We have a very complex environment, meaning from VM to PC arrays, with all the types of databases which are available on the market. In terms of volume, we have stored around five petabytes of data. We use tape on both cloud and on-premise environments, though we are going to discontinue tape because of its limitations.

We just started to backup cloud environments, so we are looking for solutions in order to backup the VM at the ESX level. On the other hand, because of our constraints, we have to have an agent in our VM for our database backup in order to meet regulation requirements.

Historically, we have a very good team of administrators who know the product perfectly and are able to manage it on a day-to-day basis.

I need to have more than two instances working together. I need a worldwide grid able to have replication between three, four, or five instances.

The problem with Spectrum Protect is you can do anything with it, so you can also do bad things. While it is a very good solution, you have to provide a good quality of care to your administrators. One other challenge of the bank is examination, meaning that most of our administrators now are not located in France, but in India or Bangalore. This causes a lot training time, but it is not useless time.

It is perhaps one of the best products on the market. It does a good job.

I have never had any scalability problems with it.

In retail and management, I manage around 30 Spectrum Protect instances at this time. The company is planning to grow and I expect the product to handle it.

Because we have experts inside our company, we have only contacted technical support a few times. We requested high-level support, because each time we have a problem, it is a real problem, like sometimes a feature problem of a product.

We are not so happy with the technical support because dealing with them is not easy. We have a very complicated environment, therefore I understand for a support person that it is not easy to troubleshoot it. Generally, our problems are with the product's designs and we cannot Google the answers/solutions.

I was not involved in the initial setup since it happened before I joined the company.

The D2D2T archive of my PACS data improved after I put Spectrum Protect 8.1.4 into production.

Disk-based implementation of a data protection solution for multiple sites, which is a better fit for my complex data protection needs.

They need to reduce the complexity and make the learning curve easier.

So far, version 8.1.4 is stable.

The scalability is better than my legacy TSM 7.2.

I would rate tech support at seven out of 10.

I don't see moving from TSM to Spectrum Protect as a solution swap, I see it as just re-branding.

The initial setup is better than TSM, buts still has room to improve.

If you do not have deep pockets, don't come to IBM.

EMC Avamar and Cohesity were also in the PoC.

Be careful what you wish for, and make sure the new solution will fit into your current IT environment.