IBM Spectrum Protect vs IBM Storage Protect comparison

"I love the TDP for VMware because of the web interface and the possibilities provided by this tool. It's amazing."

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

"Once it is completed properly, it is low maintenance. Most of the functions do not require much deliberation. It is all the blueprints and technologies laid out, and it is straight forward."

"The solution offers very good flexibility."

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

"The best functional system I utilize is integrated with the data domain and DIGS backup solution, which makes it easily manageable and comprehensive."

"Because of the flexible parameters, everything can be fine-tuned to the customers’ needs in their environment."

"High availability (HA): It is one of the best features."

"The tool's backup engine is very powerful. Previously, our client finished backup with HPE product in 48 hours. IBM Storage Protect completes backup in 8 hours."

"The best point about IBM Storage Protect is that it can use IBM tape environments, which we still use and will continue to use in the future."

"The administration tools for GI need improvement, as the current assessment suggests shortcomings in the back-end system."

"It seems like they are a little behind on the integration to Azure Cloud as well as Amazon."

"It's difficult in terms of the configuration at set up. In our case, it required another admin, one person dedicated to the backup."

"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 solution is evolving, so it has to be evolved to fit all new types of software requirements too."

"We need everything cloud. Strong support for cloud services. S3 connectivity, which is mandatory for us in the future along with this integration of Spectrum Copy Data Management or Spectrum Protect services together with these Spectrum Protect Plus functionalities, e.g., hardware, snapshots, and Copy Data Management. They should come together in one solution."

"It needs better connectivity with other non-IBM application hardware and non-IBM platforms."

"It does what we need it to do, but it could be better with VM backups. It could be better integrated with virtual machines or VM backups, but that's why they have their Plus out now. Plus version is more geared toward VM backups. The regular version is more for endpoint clients."

"The solution is expensive."

"The product should improve its GUI. It should also support Windows clustering."

"The product is not cheap."

"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."

"The solution is not cheap."

"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."

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

"It is expensive."

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

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

"IBM Storage Protect is not expensive and fits the needs of all business types. The licensing is based on a capacity-based model. You can take a license for one, two, or three terabytes."