IBM Spectrum Protect vs NetApp Cloud Backup comparison

IBM and NetApp are both solutions in the Backup and Recovery category. IBM is ranked #17 with an average rating of 7.2, while NetApp is ranked #29 with an average rating of 9.0. IBM holds a 2.2% mindshare in BRS, compared to NetApp’s 0.2% mindshare. Additionally, 86% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

IBM Spectrum Protect

Read 149 IBM Spectrum Protect reviews

4,073 Views
3,133 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

NetApp Cloud Backup

Read 4 NetApp Cloud Backup reviews

576 Views
473 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM Spectrum Protect

NetApp Cloud Backup

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

IBM Spectrum Protect and NetApp Cloud Backup are two prominent solutions in data protection. IBM Spectrum Protect excels in support and cost-effectiveness, while NetApp Cloud Backup offers superior cloud-centric features.

Features: IBM Spectrum Protect offers integrated data protection, scalable architecture, and reliable performance. NetApp Cloud Backup provides seamless cloud integration, automated recovery, and flexible scalability.

Room for Improvement: IBM Spectrum Protect needs a simpler configuration process and better integration with third-party tools. NetApp Cloud Backup requires better cost management and improved customer support responsiveness.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Spectrum Protect has a complex deployment but strong customer support. NetApp Cloud Backup offers straightforward deployment with mixed customer service reviews.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Spectrum Protect is cost-effective with a solid ROI. NetApp Cloud Backup is more expensive but justified by its feature-rich offerings, delivering higher ROI for advanced feature needs.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Protect vs. NetApp Cloud Backup Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Protect vs. NetApp Cloud Backup

April 2025

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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

IBM Spectrum Protect

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

17th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

149

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

NetApp Cloud Backup

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

29th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Deduplication Software (10th), Disk Based Backup Systems (4th), Cloud Backup (23rd), Cloud Storage Gateways (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of IBM Spectrum Protect is 2.2%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp Cloud Backup is 0.2%, down from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Backup and Recovery

Featured Reviews

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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Abbasi Poonawala

Chief Enterprise Architect at Bank in KSA/JPMORGAN

Simplifies our backups with an agentless backup manager, but needs better integration with in-house applications

One area that can be improved is around how we define the different KPIs. In particular, the business KPIs. I have my own in-house application for the business KPIs, so for example, with our policies around retention, which is a period of seven years, I have to read these parameters from other applications and I need them to integrate well. NetApp Cloud Backup Manager should help to get this integrated seamlessly with other applications, meaning that it will populate the data around the different parameters. These parameters could be things like the retention period, the backup schedule, or anything. It might be an ITSM ticket, where it's a workflow that is triggered somewhere, and the ITSM ticket has been created for a particular environment like my development environment, an INT environment, or a UAT environment. This kind of process needs to integrate well with my own application, and there are some challenges. For example, if it allows for consuming of RESTful APIs, that's how we will usually integrate, but there are certain challenges when it comes to integrating with our own application around KPIs, whether it's business KPIs or technical KPIs. What I want is to populate that data from my own applications. So we have have the headroom in the KPI, and we have the throughput, the volumes, the transactions per second, etc., which are all defined. And these are the global parameters. They affect all the lines of business. It's a central application that is consumed by most of the lines of business and it's all around the KPIs. Earlier, it used to be based on Quest Foglight, which is an application that was taken up and customized. It was made in-house as a core service, and used as a core building block. But our use of Quest Foglight has become a bit outdated. There is no more support available, and it's been there as a kind of legacy application for more than ten years now in the organization. And now it get down to the question: Is this an investment or will we need to divest ourselves of it? So there has to be an option to remediate it out. In that case, one possibility is to integrate the existing application and it gets completely decommissioned. Here it would help if there were some better ways of defining or handling the KPIs in the Cloud Manager, so that most of the parameters are not defined directly by me. Those will be the global parameters that are defined across all the lines of business. There are some integration challenges when it comes to this, and I've spoken to the support team who say they have the REST APIs, but the integration still isn't going as smooth as it could be. Most of the time, when things aren't working out, we need dedicated engineers to be put in for the entire integration. And then it becomes more of a challenge on top of everything. So if the Cloud Manager isn't being fed all the kinds of parameters from the backup strategy around the ITSM and incident tickets, or backup schedules, or anything related to the backup policies, then it takes a while. Ideally, I would want it to be read directly from our in-house applications. And this is more to do with our kind of product processes; that is, it's not our own choice to decide. The risk management team has mandated this as part of the compliance, that we have to strictly enforce the KPIs, the headroom, and the rest of the global parameters which are defined for the different lines of business. So if my retention period changes from seven years to, let's say, 10 years or 15 years, then those rules have to be strictly enforced. Ultimately, we would like better support for ITSM. The ITSM tools like ServiceNow or BMC Remedy are already adding multiple new features, so they have to be upgraded over a period of time, and that means NetApp has to provision for that and factor it in. Some of the AI-based capabilities are there now, and those things have to be incorporated somehow. One last thing is that NetApp could provide better flash storage. Since they're already on block storage and are doing well in that segment, it makes sense that they will have to step up when it comes to flash array storage and so on. I have been evaluating NetApp's flash array storage solutions versus some others like Toshiba's flash array and Fujitsu's storage array, which are quite cost-effective.

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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

"We do not lose data. That is why we are using this product and have a backup in place."

"We are able to run it in an enterprise quite easily with one or two resources."

"One of the main things that I like about IBM is the versioning of the data - meaning that we can have multiple versions of a file or directory of a server."

"It is an IBM product. With SAP, you are using IBM software to protect it. DB2 and AIX servers are both IBM. Therefore, it is a total IBM solution, which helps."

"The solution is mostly stable."

"Every time customers make a change or we have made a change, then they use the product to do a cloning and refreshing. They are happy that they get good performance something changes."

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

"Regarding stability, it's been rock solid."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pros

"NetApp Cloud Backup performance is good and they have beneficial technology."

"Scalability is very good."

"One feature that works well for us is that the Cloud Manager is a completely agentless solution. There's a similar dashboard on both the versions for on-premises and the cloud, and with reference to the Cloud Manager, it's a little faster because there's nothing to be installed as such. Being agentless, it doesn't require any agent to be deployed on the targets where the backups are triggered."

"I rate the scalability a ten out of ten...It has a great impact on our business because we have the infrastructure deployed globally on four continents around the world."

Cons

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

"We would like to see capabilities of long-term archiving and more support for hardware platforms."

"The features should be a little bit closer together."

"In the next version of the solution, I would like to see cloud support."

"The initial setup is complex."

"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."

"A lot of my customers always ask for legal holds, especially on email."

"The interface could be more user-friendly."

More IBM Spectrum Protect cons

"NetApp has a nasty way of dealing with the license for the product's on-premises virtual NetApp appliance that you need in your whole architecture, and it is not directly linked to NetApp Cloud Backup."

"Integration and reporting could be improved."

"One area that can be improved is around how we define the different KPIs. In particular, the business KPIs. I have my own in-house application for the business KPIs, so for example, with our policies around retention, which is a period of seven years, I have to read these parameters from other applications and I need them to integrate well."

"NetApp Cloud Backup could improve by being easier to use. Veeam solution is easier to use."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Spectrum Protect is not a cheap option."

"It is expensive."

"Some of the new advanced features are definitely more into cost savings, e.g., dedupe compression, so doing more with less."

"We pay for a terabyte license to support our backend usage."

"IBM provides an open license policy, which is more like a gentlemen's agreement."

"The price of IBM Spectrum Protect is expensive. However, there are a few packages and it is unclear because, for the entry suite they have both options, which are the back-end storage capacity and the front-end storage capacity."

"Licensing can be either complicated or simple depending on what type of licensing you wish to use and what works best for your environment."

"We worked our licensing into a capacity model, which is nice. Now, everything is much simpler to manage from a licensing perspective."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pricing and cost advice

"NetApp Cloud Backup has a subscription-based model and it is paid annually."

"Cost could be lower."

"If one is not cost-effective and ten is a highly cost-effective product, I rate the tool as a three. The tool is not so cheap."

"Our usage depends on the number of licenses we have. On the cloud, it's a pay-to-use kind of model which suits our needs well. Once we have the Cloud Manager installed, the licensing process is okay, regardless of whether we're running backups in the cloud or on-premises. Sometimes, we have to restrict the number of users as per the contractual agreement and in this case we simply cut down on the licensing."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

University

Manufacturing Company

18%

Computer Software Company

15%

Government

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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?

It's expensive. I acknowledge the cost associated with it.

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What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Protect?

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What's the 3-2-1 data protection that NetApp Cloud Backup offers?

Hi, the 3-2-1 data protection from this product is related to a backup strategy with the same name. I'm assuming you don't know about it so I'll tell you in a few words. In its essence, this backup...

See all answers

Is NetApp Cloud Backup secure for backup?

I've just started using NetApp Cloud Backup but my initial reason behind choosing it in the first place is that they advertise their high-security approach. So basically, they give you ransomware p...

See all answers

Is NetApp Cloud Backup expensive in your opinion?

It depends on how much exactly you count as expensive. For me, NetApp Cloud Backup isn't too expensive. I say that based on the services it provides and on the way it provides them. I think it's im...

See all answers

Comparisons

Veeam Data Platform vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 18% of the time

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 17% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 11% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 11% of the time

Rubrik vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 6% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Protect Competitors

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager vs NetApp Cloud Backup

Compared 41% of the time

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs NetApp Cloud Backup

Compared 24% of the time

Rubrik vs NetApp Cloud Backup

Compared 19% of the time

Dell NetWorker vs NetApp Cloud Backup

Compared 16% of the time

More NetApp Cloud Backup Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Protect

April 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Protect product report

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Backup

April 2025

Download NetApp Cloud Backup product report

Also Known As

IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

No data available

Overview

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.

IBM

NetApp Cloud Backup is a fully integrated service for cloud backup and restoration. It was created to comply fully with NetApp's native data management software ONTAP, used for hybrid cloud experience. NetApp Cloud Backup is used to create backup and restoration for the protection and archiving of data, databases, and virtual machines related to the Cloud and On-Premises data in ONTAP. The way NetApp Cloud Backup works is by automatically creating block-level incremental backups. This ensures that the created backups are very fast and easy to restore. It is suitable for data protection regarding on-premises software as well as in the public cloud. NetApp Cloud Backup provides users with the ability to protect their cloud data at affordable prices and with a user-friendly interface so they don't need a lot of technical knowledge to be able to secure their cloud storage.

The copies created by NetApp Cloud Backup can be stored in the user's personal object storage in the cloud as well as on premises with StorageGRID - NetApp's storage platform. The backup copies can be restored to the original source or to a different source in Cloud Volumes ONTAP. NetApp Cloud Backup provides backups to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

NetApp Cloud Backup Features

The features NetApp Cloud Backup provides include:

Data recovery: NetApp Cloud Backup provides restoration of individual files as well as full volume recovery, based on the user's needs. The data can be retrieved from a specific point in time, giving clients even more assurance that their cloud-stored data can and will be saved.
Indexed catalog: Another feature that NetApp Cloud Backup offers is a search catalog, providing multiple search criteria and the ability to locate a file across all backups.
Various archival tiers: This feature provides the ability for multi-cloud support, including top services like Google Cloud Storage Archive, Glacier Deep Archive, Amazon S3 Glacier, and Azure Archive Storage.
Encryption: End-to-end encryption allows users to feel more secure about their data.
Cloud technology features: Additional features regarding cloud technology include the options for movement from CAPEX to OPEX and mixing BYOL and PAYGO.

NetApp Cloud Backup Benefits

In addition to enhanced security and protection from malicious attacks, the advantages of using NetApp Cloud Backup include:

Aligns with the 3-2-1 backup strategy
Various levels of protection of data, including encryption and full customer control
Protection against ransomware, using different security methods
A wide variety of supported workloads, including databases, VMs, applications, NAS, and K8s

Reviews from Real Users

Abbasi P., a User at a financial services firm, likes that NetApp Cloud Backup is a completely agentless solution.

A Service Manager at a tech services company values its stability, scalability, and good technical support.

NetApp

Sample Customers

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

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Protect vs. NetApp Cloud Backup

April 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Protect vs. NetApp Cloud Backup

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