Cohesity DataProtect vs IBM Spectrum Protect comparison

Cohesity and IBM are both solutions in the Backup and Recovery category. Cohesity is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.3, while IBM is ranked #17 with an average rating of 7.2. Cohesity holds a 3.5% mindshare in BRS, compared to IBM’s 2.2% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Cohesity users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 86% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Cohesity DataProtect

Read 72 Cohesity DataProtect reviews

9,187 Views
5,666 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

IBM Spectrum Protect

Read 149 IBM Spectrum Protect reviews

4,073 Views
3,133 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

Cohesity DataProtect

IBM Spectrum Protect

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

IBM Spectrum Protect and Cohesity DataProtect are two leading data protection solutions. Cohesity DataProtect has the upper hand due to its flexibility and innovative features, though IBM Spectrum Protect has robust, time-tested capabilities.

Features: IBM Spectrum Protect offers comprehensive backup and recovery options, scalability, and integration with various platforms. Cohesity DataProtect provides cloud-native capabilities, simplified data management, and a modern approach to data protection.

Room for Improvement: IBM Spectrum Protect needs better integration with modern cloud services, enhanced ease of use, and modernized functionalities. Cohesity DataProtect requires more mature reporting tools, performance optimization for large datasets, and further polishing of existing features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Spectrum Protect deployment can be complex and time-consuming, with customer service satisfactory but needing quicker response times. Cohesity DataProtect offers a smoother, quicker deployment experience and proactive, responsive support, making it more attractive for users prioritizing ease of use and support.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Spectrum Protect has higher upfront costs, with long-term reliability and performance justifying the expense for some users. Cohesity DataProtect is cost-effective with a quicker ROI due to efficient resource utilization and lower initial setup costs, generally perceived as delivering better value for its price.

To learn more, read our detailed Cohesity DataProtect vs. IBM Spectrum Protect Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cohesity DataProtect vs. IBM Spectrum Protect

March 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Cohesity DataProtect

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

8th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Backup (6th)

IBM Spectrum Protect

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

17th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

149

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Cohesity DataProtect is 3.5%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Protect is 2.2%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Backup and Recovery

Featured Reviews

Giovanni Golinelli.

Hybrid IT Architect at Quanture Spa

Easy to use, offers good scalability and responsive support

The deployment depends on the environment. Deploying on VMs is relatively simple. But for most of our customers, we implement physical clusters with at least three configured hosts using the existing model. So, it depends on the setup. Implementing DataProtect itself wasn't particularly challenging. One key requirement for successful DataProtect deployment is proper network configuration. If the network setup isn't right, you won't achieve optimal performance. We have developed a service for some of our customers where they implement an appliance or physical cluster of Cohesity at the customer site. Then, we use cloud clustering to replicate, and even in production, a second copy of the protected data. And in some cases, we have developed some disaster recovery procedures using Cohesity.

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Syed Habib

Head of Infrastructure Security (S.A.V.P) at EXIM Bank Ltd

Manageable and comprehensive and integrates robust backup features for core banking

It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dashboard from Browser Spectrum. This is why I am searching for another solution. The product also lacks any centralized graphical user interface (GUI), such as Jarek Pod, and I am limited to using a console-based text user interface, which my local partner handles completely.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"I love the ability to clone a virtual server in only minutes."

"It's completely reliable and easy to restore."

"Setup was extremely easy from racking to backing up was about one hour."

"After linking a cloud subscription, like Azure for example (AWS and Google are also supported), you can "spin" a VM onto the cloud from any backup snapshot."

"The most valuable features of Cohesity DataProtect are SpanFS and the handling of hybrid workloads."

"No longer does it take several hours to backup a VM or troubleshoot a backup issue."

"We like that we can use production data to run intensive reports that would otherwise bog down the production server."

"Cohesity has very simple reports to help you stay in the know of which servers are being backed up or not."

More Cohesity DataProtect pros

"It helps our customers protect their data, keep it long-term, and feel pretty secure about it, basically sleeping well at night."

"We've found the product to be quite stable and the performance is very good."

"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."

"We have better, faster backup times, and it has improved efficiency in the backups."

"The best part of this solution is that it just works."

"IBM Spectrum Protect is stable."

"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."

"Scalability, performance, mass platform coverage. It's 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's a completely centralized solution."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pros

Cons

"I would like to see Cohesity have the ability to do a file level restore from a Windows server, which is storing data on dynamic disk."

"Non-cloud services need improvement."

"Their UI requires a manual refresh. It doesn't seem like it updates itself sometimes when you're moving from screens or waiting for a change to take effect, so you have to manually refresh."

"The solution has a more complex setup than Veritas and Veeam."

"The solution's dashboard or UI can be enhanced and made more user-friendly than its competitors."

"For Oracle DBs, we have observed a few bugs. This can be done better."

"Cohesity DataProtect takes hours to restore a single file, even a small one."

"I think Cohesity could add more platform support. For example, they could improve integration with DB2 or make the integration S3 object storage a little tighter. Some of that stuff could use some work, but overall, it's a relatively comprehensive platform."

More Cohesity DataProtect cons

"I would like a little more ease with the virtual platforms, because it is a huge thing that is coming up."

"We would like to see cloud integration."

"The user interface (UI) for the admin is still not good. It is way too complicated to manage the product, as we still need to use command line. IBM launched the Operations Center (OC), but there are still functions lacking, especially since we cannot manage all our scheduled tasks by using the GUI."

"I would like to see the operations center be a lot more functional. It was nowhere near as functional as the admin center, and I'm doing a lot of command line with it."

"The solution should improve the ability to monitor backup failure."

"The licensing isn't very clear. They should work to simply or clarify the cost structure."

"The deduplication must be perfect, and thus should be improved."

"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."

More IBM Spectrum Protect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."

"If SQL is in heavy use at your location, I would highly recommend narrowing your PoC testing to Cohesity and Rubrik. They will be competitive on pricing with each other, so really put them through the paces."

"Cohesity came in at the best price. Setup was included and done in half a day."

"There is monthly licensing."

"The pricing model is impressive and very effective."

"Licensing is per node and per protected terabyte. You will also pay 10-15% annually for support."

"It has reasonable pricing, and we know they can give discounts. If you look at the primary pricing or the list pricing, it conforms to the market pricing, but you have to have a discount on it. Otherwise, it is way too expensive."

"We purchased support from Cohesity to ensure that should we face an issue, we don't have to deal with different service providers."

More Cohesity DataProtect pricing and cost advice

"Spectrum Protect is not expensive, and it is simple to use."

"Some of the new advanced features are definitely more into cost savings, e.g., dedupe compression, so doing more with less."

"Use capacity licensing. It's easier and cheaper."

"Spectrum Protect is not a cheap option."

"The product is low cost. It is very cool when we design it to using licensing based on post capacity."

"You need to put it in a PoC and test it out if you can."

"License-wise regarding IBM, it's licensed per terabyte. And that is after compression and deduplication."

"The license model that they have at IBM, which is due to volume, from a certain volume onward is not the right license model."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

44%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cohesity DataProtect?

Several features enable us to perform fast recovery, such as instant fast recovery. All our virtual machines protected with the product can be quickly restored to another healthy environment with m...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cohesity DataProtect?

Typically on-premises nodes/clusters are deployed for primary backup (to enable instant mass restore) so price will be dependent on chosen OEM and capacity required. MSPs like us utilise PPU licens...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cohesity DataProtect?

While there are improvements to be made, such as providing support for older systems like IBM iSeries and tandem systems from HP, the solution overall shifts from older methods to modern practices....

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What do you like most about IBM Spectrum Protect?

IBM Spectrum Protect is stable.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Protect?

It's expensive. I acknowledge the cost associated with it.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Protect?

See all answers

Comparisons

Rubrik vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 27% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 15% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 13% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 6% of the time

AWS Backup vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 3% of the time

More Cohesity DataProtect Competitors

Veeam Data Platform vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 19% of the time

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 18% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 11% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 11% of the time

Veritas NetBackup vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 4% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Protect Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cohesity DataProtect

March 2025

Download Cohesity DataProtect product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Protect

March 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Protect product report

Also Known As

Cohesity

IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

Overview

What is Cohesity DataProtect?

Cohesity DataProtect is a top-level, sophisticated, software-defined backup and recovery solution created for cloud environments. Cohesity DataProtect is made to hyperscale and is one the most thorough policy-based protection solutions available on the market today.

Cohesity DataProtect melds multiple-point products into a single software that is able to be deployed as on-premise or consumed as a service.

Top Features:

Hyperscale made easy: Cohesity DataProtect improves data protection by doing away with the need for backup silos and administers backup and recovery with a single user-friendly, easy-to-understand interface. Cohesity DataProtect provides extensive 24/7 enterprise-class protection for a large, varying set of sources, including virtual and physical servers, NAS and SaaS workloads, relational and distributed databases, and traditional and containerized applications.

Super fast recovery: Cohesity DataProtect offers near-zero recovery point objectives (RPOs) and near-instant recovery time objectives (RTOs) to satisfy your business service-level agreements (SLAs). Using Cohesity Helios’ unified data plane and control plane you can immediately search and recover data on any Cohesity cluster, located anywhere. DataProtect distinctively minimizes downtime by immediately mass restoring any amount of virtual machines (VMs) to any point in time, and lowers data protection costs by as much as 70% or more.

Backup as a Service: Feel free to take advantage of the elasticity of the public cloud and the cost-effective value of Cohesity DataProtect when delivered as a service. When you choose an OPEX option, you can eliminate the need for on-premises hardware. There is a SaaS option that will allow you to very simply configure your backup workloads and immediately begin protecting your vital all-important data and applications.

It’s as easy as: sign-up, connect, and protect!

Ransomware protection: Cohesity DataProtect offers stellar recovery at scale. The solution is so intuitive, it has machine learning-based anomaly detection to stop incidents before they happen. Cohesity DataProtection can provide immutable backups, Datalock write once, read many (WORM), encryption, and role-based access control (RBAC).

Cohesity DataProtect integrates well with many of today’s top solutions, including, but not limited to:

Hypervisors: VMware vSphere (5.5 and later), Microsoft Hyper-V (2019, 2016, 2012 R2), Nutanix AHV and RHeV

Kubernetes-based data and application state

Cloud: AWS EC2, Amazon RDS, Azure VM, and Google Compute

Physical: Windows, Linux(RHEL, CentOS, OEL, Debian, Ubuntu), AIX (7.x), and Solaris

Databases: Oracle (11g R2, 12c), Oracle RAC and SQL (2008 or later)

Distributed Databases (NoSQL and Hadoop): MongoDB, CouchbaseDB, Apache, Cassandra, Cloudera, and Hortonworks.

Bare Machine Recovery: Windows and Linux

Applications: MS Exchange (2010 SP3 or later), MSFT Active Directory, Microsoft 365 (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Teams, Groups), SalesForce (SFDC), and SAP HANA

Primary storage: Pure FlashArray, HPE Nimble, and Cisco Hyperflex

NAS: Pure FlashBlade, NetApp, Isilon, IBM GPFS, Google EFS, Elastifile, and generic solutions*

Reviews from Real Users

One reviewer, who is head of IT infrastructure at Kampmann says, “Cohesity really is a Next-Gen Data Management Software,” and goes on to indicate that Cohesity “works flawlessly with easy replication of backups and numerous supported backup sources.”

Another user, who is a senior network engineer at a legal firm, relates that "Cohesity is a robust and feature-rich solution"

Cohesity

IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) is a data protection platform that gives enterprises a single point of control and administration for backup and recovery. It is the flagship product in the IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) family. It enables reliable, cost effective backups and fast recovery for virtual, physical and cloud environments of all sizes.

IBM

Sample Customers

Tribune Media

CERN, Einstein Healthcare, Nyherji, Allianz Australia, TZM, ABT Online, NCT, Kindred Healthcare Inc., Cobalt Iron, TransGrid, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Cash America, Piedmont Healthcare, RWGV, Arkansas Tech University, British Columbia Institute of Technology

Buyer's Guide

Cohesity DataProtect vs. IBM Spectrum Protect

March 2025

Free Report: Cohesity DataProtect vs. IBM Spectrum Protect

Find out what your peers are saying about Cohesity DataProtect vs. IBM Spectrum Protect and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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