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Commvault Cloud vs IBM Spectrum Protect comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Commvault Cloud
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
108
Ranking in other categories
eDiscovery (3rd), Cloud Backup (2nd), Disaster Recovery as a Service (3rd), File Archiving (2nd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (3rd), SaaS Backup (1st), Threat Deception Platforms (1st), Container Backup Software (1st)
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 Commvault Cloud is 6.7%, up from 5.7% 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

Cassandra Cinar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides excellent visibility and helps reduce costs and time
We use intuitive administrative tools that readily reveal the volume of backed-up data. Our Commvault CommCell servers alert us to failed backups and provide detailed information. This transparency allows our managed service provider to easily grasp our pre-established thresholds and readily scale up with new technologies. We're highly satisfied with Commvault's automated data security and management policies. They meet our stringent requirements for secure and private data storage, including anti-ransomware protection and encryption. Notably, they also ensure compliance with GDPR for backups stored in Europe and other regions, fulfilling our regulatory obligations. Threat Scan's ability to scan backup data for threats is invaluable because it proactively identifies and neutralizes certain viruses and threats that may originate from our G Suite or be reported by our security incident response team, preventing potential outages. Commvault provides excellent visibility across our entire organization's data. They perform regular health checks, informing us of areas of strength and offering recommendations for improvement. These recommendations may include upgrading to newer product versions or addressing issues identified during the checks. It is important for our organization that Commvault provides a unified platform for recovery across cloud, on-premises, and software-as-a-service workloads. This is particularly important because many of our existing cloud environments rely on basic backups that are insufficient for our needs. Commvault empowers us to address this issue. We have implemented it not only in our own operating company but also across the corporate structure, rolling it out to virtually all AWS users. This is because the standard backup methods, such as snapshot backups, fail to meet our stringent requirements for recovery, service level agreements, and crucial functionalities like threat detection and other security features. Commvault ensures a robust and comprehensive backup infrastructure that satisfies all our essential needs. It has improved our organization by ensuring we meet our infrastructure requirements, adhere to our vulnerability methodology, and achieve service level agreements for both backup and storage requirements. The quarterly risk analysis allows us to effectively manage the lifecycle of both data and backups. It also sheds light on the types of data and backups we have, providing valuable insights. Commvault's risk analysis is one of the tools we use to meet our compliance requirements and implement the necessary controls for immediate security policy action. To ensure comprehensive data protection and comply with international regulations like GDPR, we rely on Commvault alongside our established financial systems and SOC-compliant practices. Commvault has helped us reduce our organization's data management costs by 75 percent, particularly for long-term backups. We ditched tapes and virtual tapes thanks to Commvault, replacing them with a fully disk-based backup system and cloud backups in AWS and Azure. By implementing Commvault, we've significantly reduced our backup times. This is achieved through a combination of incremental backups and data aging. Aged data is then moved to cheaper disk or cloud storage, ensuring cost-effective long-term retention while still meeting our recovery SLAs. While the overall time savings may be around 10-15 percent, the main benefit is not keeping everything on expensive primary storage and efficiently aging it out. Consequently, retrieving data from the Azure bucket typically takes five days or more, reflecting our agreed-upon SLA. It has reduced our recovery point objective, allowing us to store more backups. However, new regulatory and compliance requirements mandate that some backups cannot be deleted and must be retained indefinitely. To address this while still improving efficiency, we've implemented solutions for long-term data storage and improved data management practices. Commvault has helped our organization not only decrease our threat detection time but also improve threat prevention to such an extent that we often avoid facing the full impact of a threat altogether. By preventing these incidents, we're often unsure of the precise amount of time saved, but the benefit is clear: we don't need to activate disaster recovery mechanisms. It has not only helped us reduce our recovery time objective, but it has also ensured that our backups and long-term storage are secure, thanks to its comprehensive capabilities. In terms of total cost of ownership, Commvault has enabled us to significantly reduce both hardware and media costs for storage and backup. After factoring in encryption and compression, the total savings amount to close to 80 percent. It has been able to reduce downtime, but having a quick recovery plan and policy and SLAs that are published are met regularly.
Rainer Kummerfeldt - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is a stable solution."
"One of the most valuable features is the encryption which helps save you from ransomware. Because the data is already encrypted, it cannot be encrypted again."
"I like the product because of its simplicity and the fact that it provides one single interface for managing everything, including storage, data, and policies."
"The most valuable feature is the ability it gives me to automate backups well and consistently, and to follow up on them as well. It also provides consistent recovery processes. Whenever we have needed to do a restore, it has worked quickly and efficiently."
"The most valuable feature is sharing data sets like they're in a private cloud. We call it our "private cloud" because we can share anything that is inside our backup set with our colleagues or with other people, and yet, everything is still in Belgrade, in Serbia. It's not somewhere else on cloud servers. Everything is in our environment."
"The backup and restore capabilities are key. The most useful things to us about Commvault, in general, is the breadth of the applications that it can protect as well as the features inside of it, like deduplication and encryption. When people get their data encrypted, Commvault has a way to tell if somebody is being attacked through a cybersecurity threat because their data changes. So, Commvault has what they call honeypot files out there to look to see if anybody is changing these files. Only Commvault knows which files those are, so nobody should be messing with those files. If it changes, then it will alert you to say, "Oh, I potentially have somebody messing with my files." It will alert you to something going on in your environment that probably shouldn't be happening. We deploy that with all our customers so they have this capability as well."
"The solution's interface is easy to use. For manageability, it doesn't matter where the resource is coming from or going to. That's the great power of the Control Panel: It's easy to use and does not matter if you manage on-prem or cloud resources."
"The functionality and features of Commvault were much better compared to other solutions."
"IBM Spectrum Protect is stable."
"It is very stable. A plus is to use POWERAge for the SNR copy of the Spectrum Protect, then it is more reliable."
"It is a very good and mature enterprise product. Once it is set up and everything is put in, you don't have to manage it. It actually runs automatically by itself."
"It protects our data. That is what it is there for."
"We do not lose data. That is why we are using this product and have a backup in place."
"Replication processes with container storage pools allow reduction of storage space and network bandwidth, using deduplication and compression."
"It saves you a lot of storage."
"Enterprise-wide type of architecture supports a lot of different platforms."
 

Cons

"Mostly controls, visibility, cost allocation."
"Setup is complex."
"There are many settings that have to be done on your own. It would benefit from a better interface."
"We are using a production environment with customer-sensitive data on it. As per our central bank rules and regulations, we can't keep our customer's sensitive data in the cloud."
"Endpoint backup."
"They reply to the support portal weekly, but there are some delays."
"Sometimes, we have a performance issue with the backup speed. So, that has to be rectified and improved."
"The setup was a little bit difficult for a non-IT person like me. My OneDrive is protected by multifactor authentication, and to get the backup to begin behind that multifactor authentication took a little bit of almost customized support, even though I was following the instructions and the videos. That process could have been easier."
"Integration with some applications in the healthcare field could be added, as that is a big part of our business."
"There have been some sizing issues now, and we are dealing with those."
"We should be talking about the capacity of the tape drives. That's the only problem."
"For Spectrum Protect Plus, I would like to see more enhanced reporting features and integration with Spectrum Protect."
"The only thing that I would like to have a little more of is insight in reporting. I find that Spectrum Protect needs a lot of monitoring, and I have to actually log into the servers."
"The product’s recovery process in terms of agent installation needs improvement"
"The previous GUI that they had was slow, and it did not have enough information on it."
"The usability of IBM Spectrum Protect could be improved, specifically additional features to the product in the operations center. Additional reporting facilities and stronger reporting tools such as build dashboards would be beneficial."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If budget allows using the per socket license and not the agent based with per GB counter for Dedup is the way to go."
"The cost for Commvault is very expensive, even support is very expensive. The full cost of the solution is 50,000 INR per year, which includes 20 VM backups, server data backup, and 200 desktop and laptop agent licenses."
"The solution is bundled with hardware licensing. If I want to increase the hardware, I have to buy exactly the same because it's based on the core hardware license. We cannot tell discount because we have an NDA signed with Commvault because of my academic license. The solution is more expensive than NetBackup and Veeam but cheaper than Rubrik."
"The price should be reduced because it is too expensive for our customers."
"The solution is expensive, but it is worth the money."
"The price is not cheap, but when you compare it to the other products they are all almost the same level in terms of price."
"In India, this is a very expensive product."
"The licensing costs are determined on a yearly basis. It might be around $40,000 or $50,000. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"It can be perceived as expensive since it is designed for enterprise use."
"We worked our licensing into a capacity model, which is nice. Now, everything is much simpler to manage from a licensing perspective."
"The solution has a capacity based licensing, front and back-end license."
"We worked our licensing into a capacity model, which is nice. Now, everything is much simpler to manage from a licensing perspective.​"
"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."
"The licensing is varied. If we have small environments (not many TB being managed) it is best to license by PVUs (depending on the number of cores of the machine). If we manage many TBs we look at licensing by capacity which allows us to use all the agents of the product."
"Its licensing is complicated. It goes by CPUs, and it is pretty expensive as well."
"The license model that they have at IBM, which is due to volume, from a certain volume onward is not the right license model."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Commvault?
The tool is affordable. I rate the pricing a six out of ten. Implementation requires additional costs because we need Commvault Professional Services.
What needs improvement with Commvault?
Data center backup must be improved. We also want the product to provide us with a cloud-based backup. If we use Microsoft Exchange Online for email services, we want to know how to get a backup in...
What do you like most about Commvault Complete Data Protection?
IntelliSnap and file system backups are valuable features.
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...
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...
 

Also Known As

Commvault Complete Data Protection, Commvault, Commvault Backup & Recovery, Commvault HyperScale X, Metallic, ThreatWise
IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Aberdeenshire Council, Acxiom, BAM Group Ireland, Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta, CI Investments, Clifford Chance, American Municipal Power, American Pacific Mortgage, AstraZeneca, Dongbu Steel, Denver Health, Dow Jones, Emirates Steel, Penn State Health, Prime Healthcare, Sonic Healthcare, Sony Network Communications, TiVO, UCONN Health, The Weitz Company
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Commvault Cloud vs. IBM Spectrum Protect and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
823,875 professionals have used our research since 2012.