Dell PowerProtect Data Manager vs IBM Spectrum Protect comparison

Dell Technologies and IBM are both solutions in the Backup and Recovery category. Dell Technologies is ranked #16 with an average rating of 7.5, while IBM is ranked #14 with an average rating of 7.2. Dell Technologies holds a 4.6% mindshare in BRS, compared to IBM’s 2.2% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 86% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Read 11 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager reviews

8,271 Views
6,538 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

IBM Spectrum Protect

Read 148 IBM Spectrum Protect reviews

5,109 Views
3,892 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

IBM Spectrum Protect

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

IBM Spectrum Protect and Dell PowerProtect Data Manager are two prominent solutions in the data protection industry. Considering most user reviews, Dell PowerProtect Data Manager seems to have a slight upper hand due to its feature set, even though IBM Spectrum Protect often scores higher in pricing and support satisfaction.

Features: IBM Spectrum Protect is praised for its scalability, robustness, and strong data encryption. Dell PowerProtect Data Manager stands out with ease of management, integration capabilities, and enhanced data deduplication and backup efficiency.

Room for Improvement: Users suggest IBM Spectrum Protect requires improvement in its reporting and analytics functionalities, user interface updates, and automation capabilities. Dell PowerProtect Data Manager needs enhancements in its ransomware protection measures, user documentation, and disaster recovery features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Spectrum Protect reportedly has a steep learning curve during deployment but offers reliable customer service. Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is noted for its simpler deployment process but has mixed feedback regarding customer service responsiveness.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Spectrum Protect is favored for its competitive setup costs and strong ROI as per user reviews. Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, while perceived to be more expensive initially, is considered worth the investment due to its broader feature set and efficiency benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerProtect Data Manager vs. IBM Spectrum Protect Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager vs. IBM Spectrum Protect

December 2024

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Categories and Ranking

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

16th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Deduplication Software (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 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is 4.6%, up from 3.7% 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

Pallava Sharma

Cloud Infrastructure Delivery Lead at Johnson Controls, Inc.

A tool that offers good capacity management and product management

I am satisfied with the product. The tool streamlines our company's data backup and recovery processes since the solution fits into our landscape and portfolio, especially with what we have in our infrastructure, and it actually helps us comply with data regulations. The tool protects critical data by dealing with areas like unauthorized access. I don't have hands-on experience with the product to be able to comment on how its UI enhances our company's data management tasks. The tool is majorly used in our company's operations team. I only work on certain projects and help the teams to deploy the product. The tool has the ability to handle growing data volume since my company has not faced any scalability issues since we were able to manage areas like sizing and future capacity expansion. To date, my company has not found any scalability issues with the product. It is a good product that fits in the latest infrastructures very well. If you have legacy products in your environment or data centers, then it is better to consider some other product other than Dell PowerProtect Data Manager. I rate the overall tool a seven or eight out of ten.

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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

"The product's initial setup phase was easy."

"I would say flexibility is the most important feature of the product. The performance and speed are the best on the market."

"The deduplication is the most valuable feature because it helps to control the overhead."

"The solution adequately handles data storage."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its integrated approach."

"Dell PowerProtect Data Manager helps to reduce the amount of data being transferred and stored."

"Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager is user-friendly and easy to use. it does what it needs to do."

"It's the perfect solution for virtual and container directives. The data reduction feature works well, and we haven't had any issues."

More Dell PowerProtect Data Manager pros

"It allows us to have one interface."

"With the new features that we have added, it has made a difference as far as faster recovery and speed."

"The addition of the retention set feature provides a reduction in storage costs. It also reduces RTO and RPO so that you can respond quickly to your clients and services in case of data loss."

"The most valuable feature is the backup speed."

"With Spectrum Protect, you can use any type of disk to back-end the repositories. It gave us flexibility to use whatever storage we wanted at our secondary site."

"Some of the people in our group, like our DBAs and non-technical people, can restore some stuff themselves via Spectrum Protect. That is how simple it is."

"The archiving feature is the most valuable aspect of the solution."

"The most valuable features of Spectrum Protect would be the compression and the deduplication."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pros

Cons

"The interface is too complex."

"A lot of improvement is required in Dell's first level of support."

"The solution should enhance its user interface and make it more flexible."

"There is always room for improvement. The compression ratio should be improved as well as the efficiency."

"They should include a feature similar to S3 bucket."

"As a new product, there are some things that still need to improve a bit as it matures."

"The Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager reports could improve. There should be different kinds of reports on failures, such as dashboards that we can submit to top management or auditors."

"Management is difficult and it is hard to determine when things aren't working properly."

More Dell PowerProtect Data Manager cons

"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."

"The reporting could be better."

"It needs BMR (bare machine recovery) solutions for both Windows and Linux systems."

"RTO is a huge gap for us. If we had a disaster scenario and had to recover a bunch of stuff from tape, the RTO would be too long for us."

"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."

"Our customers would like to see metadata replication, tearing to tape, and more cloud capabilities."

"They should have a proper technical support team serving the customers and get issues resolved earlier."

"For Spectrum Protect Plus, I would like to see more enhanced reporting features and integration with Spectrum Protect."

More IBM Spectrum Protect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing costs and pricing model are based on capacity and the license is easy to upgrade."

"The solution is more affordable than other vendors."

"The solution is not less expensive than competitors but pricing deals are available."

"The product is offered at a very competitive price in the market."

"We offer monthly or yearly subscriptions. The price could be cheaper."

"Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is not an expensive solution."

"The price of Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager is reasonable."

"The product is not cheap."

"We are paying for support and maintenance on a monthly basis."

"There may be an advantage to going with IBM in terms of pricing. They have a pay-as-you-grow policy, so there is no need to take one license for the entire datacenter. You can start with small licenses and then grow, and pay, as you use more."

"Spectrum Protect is not a cheap option."

"For my company, the tool is affordable and reasonable...I don't think most people know that when a company has large systems in place, the TCO is a lot lower."

"The platform is neither highly priced nor inexpensive. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten."

"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."

"Customers need to pay for licensing in order to use IBM Spectrum Protect. The customers that have been using it for a long time are okay and happy with it. From a cost point of view, it's better for them to renew their licenses than to go through the difficult process of changing a backup product in their environment, and migrate from one product to another."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

15%

Computer Software Company

11%

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 Dell PowerProtect Data Manager?

One notable feature is its robust backup support for Kubernetes and container environments. Additionally, PPDM stands out for its ease of deployment and management compared to other backup solution...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell PowerProtect Data Manager?

The solution's cost depends on the storage. Currently, the pricing for Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is more flexible for customers. Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is not an expensive solution. On...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager?

The tool's scalability has certain shortcomings, making it an area where improvements are required. The market and technology-driven factors will let the market know of any requirements of the user...

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

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Compared 20% of the time

Dell NetWorker vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Compared 18% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Compared 15% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Compared 15% of the time

Dell Data Protection Advisor vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Compared 1% of the time

More Dell PowerProtect Data Manager 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

IBM Storage Protect vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 4% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Protect Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Backup and Recovery

November 2024

Download Dell PowerProtect Data Manager product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Protect

December 2024

Download IBM Spectrum Protect product report

Also Known As

PowerProtect, Dell EMC PowerProtect

IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

Learn More

Dell Technologies

IBM

Overview

PowerProtect Data Manager offers efficient data protection capabilities leveraging the latest evolution of Dell trusted protection storage architecture.

With operational simplicity, agility and flexibility at its core, PowerProtect Data Manager enables the protection, management and recovery of data in on-premises, virtualized and cloud deployments, including protection of in-cloud workloads. You can also protect cloud-native workloads across multiple public clouds via our integrated SaaS based PowerProtect Cloud Snapshot Manager.

Modernize how you protect your VMware virtual machines using Transparent Snapshots. Transparent Snapshots simplifies VM image backups for near-zero impact to your VMs or VM resources – and it works with any VMware supported storage. Transparent Snapshots innovation increases backup performance, lowers costs and simplifies management and reduces the risk of data loss.

Streamline data protection directly for applications or Kubernetes containers to Dell PowerProtect appliances and reduce application resource constraints.

Increase business resiliency with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery capabilities to rapidly recover from cyber incidents.

Modular design allows agile delivery of new features and updates. Rapidly evolve to meet future IT demands.

Software defined: Provide flexible data protection and compliance across applications and cloud-native IT environments
Multi-cloud optimized: Extend protection to the cloud with backup to cloud, backup in-cloud, long term retention and cloud disaster recovery
Self-service: Backup and restore directly from native applications
Cloud-Based Monitoring and Analytics: Telemetry, machine learning and predictive analytics to proactively take action and speed time to resolution

Reviews from Real Users

“We keep an eye on the future, and we are confident that PowerProtect Data Manager and PowerProtect DD series appliances will support our transformation project. Both products are continuously evolving and will cover our future needs, including using the cloud for data protection.” – Dimitris Mavromichalis, IT Deputy Manager at National Bank of Greece

“PowerProtect Data Manager combined with PowerProtect appliances – that’s cutting edge. That’s world leading as far as we’re concerned.” – Drew Hills, Infrastructure Analyst at USC Australia

““Most of my wish list came true with the PowerProtect Data Manager plugin for vSphere, which provides perfect integration with vCenter.” – Dave Chapman, Senior Technician at PSC Publishing

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

National Bank of Greece, USC Australia, PCS Publishing, Dell Digital IT, Rushmore Electric, Melanson Health, Arrow Electronics

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

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager vs. IBM Spectrum Protect

December 2024

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