Cohesity DataProtect vs IBM Spectrum Protect comparison

Cohesity and IBM are both solutions in the Backup and Recovery category. Cohesity is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.3, while IBM is ranked #14 with an average rating of 7.2. Cohesity holds a 4.0% 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 71 Cohesity DataProtect reviews

10,934 Views
6,890 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

IBM Spectrum Protect

Read 148 IBM Spectrum Protect reviews

5,109 Views
3,892 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: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Cohesity DataProtect vs. IBM Spectrum Protect

December 2024

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Categories and Ranking

Cohesity DataProtect

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

9th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Backup (7th)

IBM Spectrum Protect

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

14th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

148

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Cohesity DataProtect is 4.0%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Protect is 2.2%, down from 2.5% 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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Rainer Kummerfeldt

IT-Teamleader at Bechtle

A stable security solution for data center protection

We have the requirements for cybersecurity. Spectrum Protect or other products do not have the technology. They need external products to meet this requirement. We utilize various storage solutions across different data centers, including tape and disk storage. It is immutable, preventing external changes. External tools may be required to verify backup integrity. Additionally, there's another product called IBM Spectrum Protect Defender, which aids in backup verification. However, other products can integrate with various tools depending on specific backup needs and at a lower cost. The service cost for IBM is very high. In the event of problems, we open a support call and discuss issues with the lab, which is crucial given the critical nature of some situations. Spectrum Protect's development trajectory differed from Veeam's as it initially didn't prioritize virtualization, resulting in later integration efforts. The first version of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus had shortcomings, though subsequent iterations like Plus may have improved. However, I need more direct experience with Plus to offer a comparison. Veeam holds a stronger market presence, particularly concerning cloud and virtualization, as it was developed with these trends in mind. The evolving landscape, including cloud services like Microsoft Office 365, demands versatile backup solutions with various storage and connectivity options, whether Amazon, Google, or others. This necessitates interfaces tailored to different cloud environments and storage types. Previously, our focus primarily revolved around IBM Protect, which centered on systems storage and tape libraries alongside platforms like AIX. However, the current landscape predominantly features Linux and Windows environments. Despite these shifts, AIX remains notably stable. Overall, I rate the solution an 8 out of 10.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I have found that the speed of restores, especially files and folders, are extremely fast. This bodes well for us, and our end users are always amazed at how fast you can get them their files."

"Cohesity DataProtect is easy to deploy and operate."

"The support is awesome. They are very fast, competent and friendly."

"The ability to essentially instantly recover a VM and have it run on the Cohesity Platform while all those bits are technically being recovered in the background is useful to us."

"The SQL Backup and Restore is very easy."

"We are very satisfied with the product as a whole—all the backup functions, the data protection functions. We are very satisfied with those, and the product is very simple to use."

"Instant volume mount and the SpanFS filesystem itself, which has great dedupe and compression across all of our backups."

"The product is easy to put in place. All backups are done very quickly. It's easy to perform restores. What I prefer in the product is its simplicity. There are no useless settings to define, and everything is ready after the initial setup."

More Cohesity DataProtect pros

"Their GUI has improved quite a bit. It's made the solution a lot simpler and less complex."

"We apply the new dedupe and compression technology, using maintenance and time to give more time for the backup window and less time for the overhead related to the daily housekeeping."

"Forever incremental - allows TSM to optimize storage needs."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is application-aware backups."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the centralized enterprise backup."

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

"In general, the solution is quite user-friendly. The GUI is very nice."

"It is pretty easy to use and maintain."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pros

Cons

"We have Oracle databases running on Linux servers in our environment and we have found the Oracle backups were quite complex to setup."

"You need to put the full name instead of a few letters while searching for backup. It should also improve customization."

"Many of the reports are basic, at most, and at times we had to open a support ticket to help find or develop a report for our needs."

"Non-cloud services need improvement."

"Reporting is one area that isn't as robust as it could be."

"We are waiting on the AIX agent to be released."

"In terms of the product itself, there have been a handful of patches that have had to be applied outside of the GUI via the command line. It's very straightforward and easy and in the same redundant fashion, but not quite as simple as one or two clicks. I'm hoping that will decrease going forward."

"Cohesity DataProtect can improve in the area of databases. We have had some challenges with both Cohesity and Rubrik being able to effectively back up in a timely manner the SQL Oracle workloads."

More Cohesity DataProtect cons

"Any feature that is compliant with virtualizing the application should be improved."

"They can include more cloud-enriching features. I would like IBM Spectrum Protect to have the functionality for backing up a VM directly in Azure. I would like to be able to back up a VM directly in Azure without spinning up a Hyper-V cluster and backing up the virtual server."

"I would love to see something which allows us to do an auto restart of backup jobs."

"The features should be a little bit closer together."

"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."

"The user interface needs to be improved."

"Integration with Windows environments needs improvement. It should be more "assisted", both at the application and database level. It remains a product that fits better in Unix/Linux environments than in Windows environments, given its configuration procedures."

"It lacks reporting and an efficient alert mechanism. The GUI could also be improved."

More IBM Spectrum Protect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is quite high, more so than that of its competitors, Veeam, Veritas and Rubrik."

"Ensure that you understand the per TB licensing model. Also, Exchange backups are not native to Cohesity and require Kroll."

"With respect to pricing, make sure that you look at both Rubrik and Cohesity as they are very similar and are quite competitive."

"The tool's pricing is average."

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

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

"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."

"My advice is to always negotiate for better pricing."

More Cohesity DataProtect pricing and cost advice

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

"We chose IBM Spectrum Protect, because they actually have something called MSP pricing, which means managed services provider pricing. The pricing was attractive, and it seems to be a platform that IBM is totally investing on in terms of new functions and new capabilities."

"We have been at our size for a few years. We are not really looking to battle the licensing costs, as this is our primary system."

"That's no longer my department, but I have some past experience with licensing. It is not cheap. I would rate it a three out of five in terms of licensing. In terms of additional costs, there is management overhead. It is a complex solution and a lot of work goes into managing clients. It has gotten better over the years, but compared to its competitor, it is still heavy on management overhead."

"Going to IBM Tech University Conference saved me from making a major purchase of the wrong thing, which was very helpful."

"We pay for a terabyte license to support our backend usage."

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

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

More IBM Spectrum Protect pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

42%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

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?

Cohesity DataProtect needs to improve its reporting capabilities.

See all answers

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?

For my company, the tool is affordable and reasonable, but most people don't know that. People only see one major price for the tool, which runs into millions, so they would always say that it is a...

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Protect?

The technical team's service depends on where the support service is located. Some products are not included in IBM itself, but external companies are developing some solutions for IBM. I think the...

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 10% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 7% of the time

Zerto vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 2% of the time

More Cohesity DataProtect Competitors

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 20% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 19% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 11% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 10% of the time

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 4% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Protect Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cohesity DataProtect

December 2024

Download Cohesity DataProtect product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Protect

December 2024

Download IBM Spectrum Protect product report

Also Known As

Cohesity

IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

Learn More

Cohesity

IBM

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"

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.

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

December 2024

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