Dell PowerProtect Data Manager vs IBM Spectrum Protect comparison

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager vs. IBM Spectrum Protect

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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

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

14th

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

16th

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 January 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is 4.6%, up from 3.8% 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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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.

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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 most valuable features of the solution are flexibility and data protection."

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

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

"The solution's initial setup is straightforward."

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

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

"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 solutions. It is highly user-friendly, allowing users to quickly learn and implement backup and restore processes within a week. PPDM represents the next generation of backup software and is comparable to offerings from other vendors. Furthermore, PPDM prioritizes security with various access controls, such as user and database access controls. Its deployment tool is also known for its simplicity."

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

More Dell PowerProtect Data Manager pros

"It provides our customers with the comfort of having reliable enterprise data protection."

"SPIR is Instant Recovery for Spectrum Protect. It sends snapshots using space efficiently and blocking backups to the Spectrum Protect server. It provisions the snapshot from the backup server to the same or new server near instantly."

"Traditional archiving. One of our revenue streams involves maintaining archives of our customers' data for very long periods of time."

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

"The ability to use S3 Data Store as a repository."

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

"Since the technology is reliable, it simplifies the backup process significantly. Now, our focus can primarily be on managing full backups and creating some offline copies."

"One of the features which is most interesting in Spectrum Protect is the ability to scale out to great environments. This is something that not many vendors have on the market."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pros

Cons

"PPDM requires further development. It is primarily integrated with DevOps systems."

"You need to use additional software to back up entire environments. It will be good if they could support entire tape libraries."

"The tool's scalability has certain shortcomings, making it an area where improvements are required."

"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."

"The interface is too complex."

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

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

More Dell PowerProtect Data Manager cons

"The main admin console from the UI cannot do anything in the product. It just allows us to maintain, maybe, 30% to 40%. For the rest, we have to use the command line."

"The user interface needs to be improved."

"It could use single store. The ability to mark an archive from my backup for long-term retention."

"I would like to see monitoring within the platform: monitoring for storage pools and monitoring for the server's health (e.g., CPU and memory)."

"This product comes up against other products available that are marketed better but the other products that it's in competition with are a single product and this is one of IBM products. If it could be marketed as more for competitors I think that's where it comes short."

"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."

"There were scalability issues only in the brand new features which were recently released."

"The version that we had when I first started made it look really bad. We are talking about commands that should have run in two seconds, but instead took four to eight hours. Other components were sluggish."

More IBM Spectrum Protect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The solution is more affordable than other vendors."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"At scale, the consumption license (per TB) is very expensive."

"It is fairly reasonable as compared to other solutions in the market."

"It can be perceived as expensive since it is designed for enterprise use."

"The solution is not cheap."

"The product is not cheap."

"It is really expensive. Its price is not good for Latin America. Its price is good for the United States or Europe."

"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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831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

15%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Financial Services Firm

17%

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...

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...

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...

What do you like most about IBM Spectrum Protect?

IBM Spectrum Protect is stable.

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...

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Comparisons

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Compared 17% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Compared 15% of the time

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

Compared 15% of the time

Azure Backup vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Compared 2% of the time

More Dell PowerProtect Data Manager Competitors

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 19% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 18% 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

Cohesity DataProtect vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 4% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Protect Competitors

Product Reports

Backup and Recovery

Download Dell PowerProtect Data Manager product report

IBM Spectrum Protect

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

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager vs. IBM Spectrum Protect