IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

We are using Spectrum as a backup solution. We use it to backup all of our data, which is different kinds of databases and software, with a virtualization environment. Also, we have more than a hundred remote sites. We are taking backups through Spectrum for all of those. 

The most valuable aspect is the fact that it combines all types of data. 

It's compatible with many other products, including Oracle, VMware, and Hyper V products.

The replication is great. 

The solution is robust and problem-free. We have not had any issues with Spectrum since we implemented it around 2012. 

The solution is very stable.

You can scale the product.

The management is pretty good and it covers all of our technical requirements. 

Technical support has been excellent. 

It's difficult in terms of the configuration at set up. In our case, it required another admin, one person dedicated to the backup.

Compared with others, the pricing is high.

There needs to be some sort of personalization within the environment. We cannot back up a shared storage desk through Spectrum.

I've used the solution since 2012 or 2014. I've used it for more than seven years at this point. It's been a while.

The solution is very stable and very reliable. We've had no issues with it. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. Over the years we have not had any issues. 

The solution can scale, however, it's a matter of the license you have. That said, if you need to expand, you can.

We've had a very positive experience with technical support. We are satisfied with their level of service. 

I also have experience with Dell EMC. I use them both.

The initial setup can be a bit complex, specifically in terms of configuring everything. We had to bring on an extra admin to assist us.

The solution is a bit expensive, especially if you look at other competitors. They cost less. The licensing could be more competitive. 

We are partners with IBM.

I would rate the solution at a ten out of ten. We've been very happy with its capabilities. 

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.

The whole product is for doing backups, and it's a reliable tool. Everything stored can be retrieved. We have databases and virtual data storing systems we are covering, but the vast majority is what the backup guys call unstructured data. So we do direct backups from various flavors of file service.

The business value comes from the capability to overcome data losses.

There's no single feature. It's the overall product, the reliability, and the ability to work at the scale we are working at. It's that incremental forever approach, which we definitely need for the amount of data we are handling. It's more a philosophy of product, but a certain feature.

The software is complex.

I've been using the solution for about 20 years.

It is definitely stable.

It's very scalable from the data and the client's perspective. The scalability on the process integration side is not equally advanced.

Once you overcome the first level of IBM tech support, they are great.

ISP by now is our "previous" solution. We successfully switched to Commvault Backup.

It's a complex software, so it's a complex task, especially at the large scale and the software is accordingly complex. You won't set up this software or any competitor within a few clicks. So it is complex, but it's adequately complex. And on the client side, it depends on the documentation given by the central IT on the server side.

It was not a software deployment, but it went along with a strategic shift here. When we introduced Spectrum Protect, we introduced centralized backup service. So it was very little a matter of software deployment, but very much a matter of mentality and processes.

We used our own team to deploy, and have two staff to maintain the solution.

My advice would be to start with a use case analysis and what you want to achieve to determine if Spectrum Protect is the best solution. There's no absolute ranking without looking at the use case scenarios.

We recently reviewed our use case analysis, and as a result, we switched to Commvault Backup.

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.

The primary use case is backup and disaster recovery.

It is fantastic. We have a number of clients using the product. Everybody who uses it is very happy with it. It is cross-platform, very flexible, and a great product.

One of my primary clients has a fairly hybrid solution where they use a TS4500 Tape Library as their offsite and primary data store. They are also using directory-container pools and replicating it to a near-site location which is on the same WAN.

It is something like: How does insurance make people happier? An insurance policy of sorts. You have to spend money to protect your assets. That is what this is. It does that job. That is why people like it. However, much like insurance, I am sure people dislike it for a lot of the same reasons.

There is a laundry list of valuable features: scalability, performance, mass platform coverage, etc. It is one of the few backup products on the market right now which an organization can bring in and it will serve all of their backup needs. It is a completely centralized solution and one of the three largest, market share wise, in the world (I believe).

It is a strong, mature product, which a lot of people are using, and there is a ton of support for it.

This is more something that I would have to go over with the IBM guys. There is probably a small laundry list. 

Ease of use. This has got to be the one thing that I routinely hear from clients and customers. It is a bit more difficult than it should be. What I find is that IBM has heard this issue, and they are responding with updated interfaces.

Usually, after the initial rollout, there are a few kinks to iron out, and from then on it's almost a self-maintaining system. It's generally very stable. Only when you introduce new features, options, or massive changes in your workload do you really find a major problem with the backup infrastructure. It tends to be very stable.

It scales infinitely. I have customers that are protecting less than 100 terabytes of data versus customers that are protecting petabytes of data. Provided you size your hardware solution properly, it will work with any organization.

IBM support is great. It is world-class support. They have a great system in place and they generally get the problem solved. It can take some time. If a problem requires it, we escalate it. They have to dive a bit deeper than you normally would, reading through logs, but they are always there with the next step to fix a problem.

If I'm being completely honest, setup is not easy. It's a more complex setup, but with great flexibility comes great complexity. If you want something to do things which are very complex, you have to be mindful of that in the setup process. It is not trivial, but it is very workable and the documentation is out there to get it done.

The competitors are Commvault, Veeam, or any of the other major backup players who are out there right now. It is a zero sum market. Everybody is bidding for the same customers.

In terms of why my customers go with Spectrum Protect, it is usually cost. The second most common is platform readiness. It can support multiple types of clients. It can back up your Exchange database for your email, at the same time that it can back up your user's file shares, and at the same time you can back up your virtual machines. It meets everybody's needs and that is often why IBM wins out when there is a competitive bid process.

I recommend a conversation where we sit down and spec out what the requirements are. I will always recommend Spectrum Protect. From my perspective, it is the best one on the market. That is the reason I have gone in this direction. I am fully onboard.

We have a very small footprint. We only use it to back up a couple of servers that we could not move over at this time. I only use it to back up two servers and very large academic systems and number cruncher systems, which isn't the best way to do that, but we do use MN backup with it. Previously, we used to use Spectrum Protect for disaster recovery (DR), but we don't use it for disaster recovery anymore.

The MN backup for a cluster is most valuable because it has made backing up the GSF as a zero-file system easier.

I like its stability a lot. Over the years, I very rarely had a problem with it.

It can be improved for large file systems with many files. Spectrum Protect can restore large files very well, but if you're restoring millions of little files, it is not as great.

At one point, we tried to implement the VMware module with it, and it was awful and terrible. I don't know if that has improved. If it hasn't, this would be one big improvement.

It probably has been 20 years since I have been using it. I started using it when it was ADSM. Now it is Spectrum Protect, which I have been using for a couple of years.

I like its stability a lot. Over the years, I very rarely had a problem with it.

It was very stable when it was on an AIX server. AIX servers are not as common now. It is on a Linux server now, and it is definitely not as stable on a Linux server as it was on an AIX server.

Its scalability is decent. In terms of usage, we used to be exclusively all Spectrum Protect, but now we're not. We just have one department that is using it, and they don't do any restores or anything like that. I do everything. Because it has a small footprint now, I am the main person who works on it, and if needed, I have a couple of other people to help out.

I would rate them as average. It totally depends on who you get. I love getting one of their support staff members named Helen. You lucked out when you get Helen. She is awesome. There is another person with whom I've worked great, but the last couple of times, I've opened a case, and I didn't even get a callback. I ended up fixing it on my own. 

I've always used it. It started as ADSM and then became TSM and then Spectrum Protect. When we were TSM, we migrated from TSM to another product, but there were just a couple of systems that couldn't be migrated. For very large academic systems and number cruncher systems, we use MN backup. We have a very small footprint of Spectrum Protect left.

It is complex. We have a complicated environment, and it took a week. We had to use the encryption key manager, which is also an IBM product called SKLM, and that had to be upgraded. It was definitely a full week, and it was not easy.

We had a consultant, and our experience was positive.

I don't have an idea about the pricing. They send that over to someone else, but I know that one of the issues they had was the licensing costs. I don't think they were happy with how they were charged.

You would really have to implement it. It is very stable, but it is complicated. You really need to get a staff member or a good consultant who knows it fairly well.

I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect a seven out of ten for functionality. I am biased because I know it so well. Over the years, we did really well with disaster recovery with it, but that was the old way of sending tapes down to Iron Mountain and the Sterling Forest site in New York. I always made it work, but that was stressful.

As an IBM business partner, we are interested in helping our clients get the most out of their technology. 

For our clients using on-premise infrastructure, they usually have a mixture of workloads and a lot of databases with a lot of different operating systems. Therefore, they need a backup platform which helps them to get the most out of every piece of software that they have, not different pieces of software to back up different technologies. Spectrum Protect enables us to do that for them.

A mixture of technologies comprise their backup, as they are using incremental technology. They are using snapshot for backups, and also using CBT Tracking, which is one of the technologies that VMware has in its APIs and that Spectrum Protect leverages to do virtual machine backups. Therefore, there is a mixture of things. 

Many customers that we have are in the banking system of Columbia. For example. I estimate that 70% to 80% of the banks in Columbia, including eBanks, are using Spectrum Protect.

We now have 20 Clients with Spectrum Protect. We have a very special one with four instances of Spectrum Protect on the same Client. This is a very big bank in Columbia. They have instances in production, instances for developing environments, and instances for coverage throughout all their infrastructure. This is the biggest environment that we have, and it takes approximately 30,000 backups a month. So, it is a large environment.

We see that solution is now getting a new breath. The solution is helping new customers with sending workloads to the cloud, which helps us a lot, because they are uploading their internal and on-premise systems.

About 20 to 30% of my clients are now using cloud to upload their backups. This is very important to us, because Spectrum Protect now helps them to achieve this result.

One of the features which is most interesting in Spectrum Protect is the ability to scale out to great environments. This is something that not many vendors have on the market. 

It is also a product that has been maturing for a long time. This is good because customers need reliability in their enterprise initiatives. 

I would like to see monitoring within the platform: monitoring for storage pools and monitoring for the server's health (e.g., CPU and memory). This has been somewhat lost from previous releases because we had IBM Tivoli Monitoring for these purposes, but now we do not have anything, and it is important to cover this. 

Also, I would like to advance reporting and analytics for the platform to see how much data is coming into the platform. how much data is expiring everyday, and what tape savings we are getting through reclamation. These are important things to know, as we are lacking a bit in this area.

We have a very long road to walk. We can make a lot of improvements taking into account all the participants in the ecosystem: The developers with the business partners and the clients who help us to improve the product.

The solution is very stable. It is one of the most important features that we look for in a product before putting it into the market and when establishing a strategy with our customers. 

There are a lot of clients who are using the product for 10 years or more. We began working with them long time ago. We have been seeing the product progress and the evolution of it through time. They clients have seen that this special feature, which is stability, has not being lost with the product's evolution. We are maintaining the quality of the product, and at the same time, advancing new features. This is very important for us.

The technical support for Spectrum Protect is very mature. It is very committed to giving a top-notch support experience. I have no complaints about them. We are working mainly with the Argentina team, which is a Level 2 team who helps us in Latin America. They are very considerate and help us to get our issues resolved or questions resolved.

In recent years, there has been improvement regarding the product's setup. Now, we have an installation manager, which helps us a lot. There is no customized research. It is the same installation manager that all other IBM products use. This is great for us, as it is very simple to install patches. That was difficult previously, but now we have a streamline method to install the product. 

With initiatives like Spectrum Protect Plus, which is new, we are advancing even more with our technology initiatives.

I am involved in the whole lifecycle. I am involved in design, setup, and also the post-sales report.

Our customers always evaluate other vendors. Customers are sometimes using Veeam Backup for their virtual workloads. They may also be using some other tools from EMC. However, Spectrum Protect is the only tool that can work throughout all their technology and platforms. Therefore, they do not need separate tools for separate technologies. Spectrum Protect is the only tool which helps them do this.

IBM is most compared to Veeam Backup because there are a lot of virtualized workloads in our Clients. It is also compared with HPE Data Protector and Veritas. These are the solutions that our customers evaluate. 

The powerful reason IBM technology is good for to our customers is they already have IBM technology present. For example, they have IBM Power in their infrastructure for core business. They also have IBM applications, like IBM cloud applications and IBM monitoring applications. They want to form a stack of applications and solutions from the same vendor. It is much easier to take another solution and incorporate it into their existing solutions that they already have.

We try to help our customers, not only to be the seller, but also be an adviser to them and help them chose the best technology around