We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Protect and IBM Spectrum Protect Plus based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Users are split on which solution is best. Both perform well and function appropriately. Spectrum Protect is mature, stable, and robust. Spectrum Protect Plus is moving toward a next-generation product that offers more flexibility, improved features, better scalability, and ultimately provides more of what enterprise organizations desire for the future.
"Instead of taking three different backups of your systems, you're taking only one. You're able to crack that open and get what you need. The incident recovery, where it creates the VM and then you're running it, technically you're running it on Spectrum Protect. But then in the background, it's doing the storage motion and moving it off the Spectrum Protect back to your VMware environment. The users don't know the difference."
"We are able to run it in an enterprise quite easily with one or two resources."
"It is also a product that has been maturing for a long time. This is good because customers need reliability in their enterprise initiatives."
"We have better, faster backup times, and it has improved efficiency in the backups."
"In the past, one of the most valuable features, and the biggest advantage, was the incremental forever feature. Not many other backup vendors provided that. In the pre-virtualization environment, it was very robust and simple technology, especially writing to tape."
"Space efficient data reduction, using progressive incremental forever in combination with deduplication and compression."
"The backup on real-time, especially for the virtual machine, archiving, and retrieving the reader from the backup repository and getting it online, getting it validated, then performing the data consistency check over the backup."
"Regarding technical support, if one has the entire enterprise support, I would rate it a nine out of ten...Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten."
"The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that the product works and helps with restoration areas whenever there is a need to restore something."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is its ease of use. Additionally, it does backups of all of the things we need, such as OS, files, and databases."
"This solution is very stable and has good support available online."
"This is a multi-platform backup solution where you can take a backup from AIX, Windows, or Linux servers and restore from CD, disk, or tape."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is the deduplication functionality. The clients moved to this solution originally because of this feature."
"The feature I find most valuable is the offload to Spectrum Protect for long-term retention. I think the deduplication and replication are quite nice on Plus."
"The API is very good."
"What I like about IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is its integration, plus it has very good technical support."
"Our customers would like to see metadata replication, tearing to tape, and more cloud capabilities."
"There needs to be a bit more automation."
"My customers are not always happy with the Level 1 support. Sometimes, it just takes too long for the response to come, which is probably something that needs to be addressed."
"The Hyper-V and SQL Server backup could be improved. In the 2016 version there was a significant improvement, but I think IBM has a big challenge with these technologies."
"Restoring massive files is a very time-consuming process."
"Perhaps if they could add replication to a second site or third site from the same console, that would be helpful. Currently, we have to connect to another console."
"There is room for improvement in IBM Spectrum Protect, especially regarding its support for virtual environment backups."
"It is not easy to manage like other products in the market. It is okay only if you are command-line driven. Even though the operation center is there, it doesn't provide a single view of everything. You have to, for example, use TSMManager on top of it, which gives you a far better management capability, but it is a third-party product. Its management needs to be improved. There should be an HTML or graphical interface. It is a very difficult product. For example, you have a backup policy where you want a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly policy standard. It is an old kind of system where you have to keep retention for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups, which is very difficult in IBM Spectrum Protect. In other products, in a matter of five minutes, you can configure such a policy. In TSM, it takes you one, two, or three days because you need to configure a node for each of them. If you have 250 nodes, you have to configure each node for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly retention. If you have 1,000 nodes, it is going to take you ages just to configure and register the nodes. You need to configure the schedule and the CAD daemons or services, depending on whether it is a Unix or Windows OS. Unfortunately, it is a very long and drawn-out process. You have to stop and start the services for changes to take effect. This is a very difficult part of TSM in IBM Spectrum Protect. To configure a backup policy, I should be able to select the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly options in one screen and finish it. After that, everything should happen in the background. All the backup products in the market already do that, and they are very simple to manage. This particular part of this solution has really been a major pain area for us, and unfortunately, we could not find a workaround. There is nobody at IBM who can give us a way to configure all this easily through a GUI or even scripts."
"You end up needing to do a lot of troubleshooting to get things to work effectively."
"The replication feature is not available."
"I would like integration into where the VMware guys can do their own restores."
"The user experience is very bad and the interface needs to be improved."
"The software's technical support could improve its response time for different time zones."
"I would like more integration with security. We need to show the value of the product in regards to handling security. For example, how it handles current malware or viruses. IBM should be more proactive in this direction."
"The Gui interface and usability are not so friendly and easy."
"There could be better integration with Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus, it should be one solution."
IBM Spectrum Protect is ranked 17th in Backup and Recovery with 146 reviews while IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is ranked 19th in Backup and Recovery with 29 reviews. IBM Spectrum Protect is rated 8.0, while IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Protect writes "Performance and recoveries are better, and customers are happier with performance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus writes "Has very good integration features and can quickly backup data and optimize storage". IBM Spectrum Protect is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Commvault Cloud, Rubrik, Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) and Cohesity DataProtect, whereas IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Cohesity DataProtect, Nutanix Mine Integrated Backup, Veritas NetBackup and Rubrik. See our IBM Spectrum Protect vs. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus report.
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