IBM Spectrum Protect vs IBM Tivoli CDP for Files comparison

"It is a really scalable solution. We can scale it up. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten."

"The scalability of IBM Spectrum Protect is good."

"The product is very stable."

"by backing up only the changed data, we average around 75TB per night. If we had to do full backups, even occasionally, we would not be able to complete the backup within 12 hours, or we would have to make a large investment to fit a full backup within the 12 hour window."

"Instead of taking three different backups of your systems, you're taking only one. You're able to crack that open and get what you need. The incident recovery, where it creates the VM and then you're running it, technically you're running it on Spectrum Protect. But then in the background, it's doing the storage motion and moving it off the Spectrum Protect back to your VMware environment. The users don't know the difference."

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

"Incremental backup is highly valuable as it allows for significant time and cost savings."

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

"The restoration and infrastructure is extremely reliable."

"This solution is not mature in terms of disaster recovery and could be improved."

"Its management part can be better and simplified. It is kind of a beast as compared to Commvault or Veeam, but they are more user-friendly. They are also easier to learn, whereas Spectrum Protect definitely takes time. They should simplify it. Our teams are pretty comfortable with it because we have been using it for a long time, but from the perspective of a new user who is evaluating or using this solution, it is definitely more complex in terms of manageability. Its monitoring could be improved so that it can even monitor the jobs that are scheduled by external schedulers. There are situations where a database team might decide to use their own schedulers, but currently, Spectrum Protect is not able to catch those jobs in the Operation Manager console."

"The installation process could be simplified."

"Getting technical support all the necessary diagnostic information is still very painful."

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

"For the database side, it does not have object level recovery."

"We recently had a situation where we quickly got code, and the number of tapes exceeded the library capacity so we were waiting a while to change. We got a fix for this right away."

"I would not recommend the tool to others because it is a really complex product."

"We would like to have the opportunity to omit data from being backed up. For example, we have three virtual machines, each with three disks. When running the backup, it will automatically take each disk rather than allowing us to select what data we want backed."

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

"The pricing model of this solution is another difficult area, it's very sophisticated in the way they charge. It's based on PBU, which is a type of processor, how, many processors, and you need to put everything into an equation. However, they have different ways of charging or licensing. One way is a back-end volume or front-end volume, which is quite complicated."

"The solution is expensive."

"The licensing fees are on a yearly basis, which for us it is about R400,000 (approximately $27,000 USD)."

"The licensing fees are between $8,000 and $10,000 per year."

"IBM Spectrum Protect, cost-wise, has way higher pricing than Veeam. By switching over to Veeam, my company saved over $600,000 in USD. The IBM Spectrum Protect pricing is a two on a scale of one to ten. My company paid additional fees for maintenance, apart from the standard licensing fees."

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

"It is expensive."

"It's expensive, but it's worth for it due to the volume of critical information within our database. We are currently paying about $22,000 per year."