We compared IBM Spectrum Protect and Rubrik based on user reviews in five categories. We reviewed all of the data and you can find the conclusion below.
Features: IBM Spectrum Protect is highly regarded for its ability to integrate with tape libraries and its customization options. Users also like Spectrum Protect's compatibility with various products, scalability, and stability. Rubrik is praised for its automated policy enforcement and efficient ransomware detection. Spectrum Protect could improve its integration with cloud services and make its interface more user-friendly. Rubrik could expand compatibility with open-source databases, improve documentation, and strengthen its ability to back up remote sites.
Service and Support: IBM’s customer service is described as high quality, friendly, knowledgeable, and responsive. At the same time, some said the support process can be lengthy. Rubrik customers appreciate the support team's expertise and fast response.
Ease of Deployment: IBM Spectrum Protect's initial setup is challenging and demands skilled professionals to configure multiple parameters and features. This process can be time-consuming. Rubrik's setup is simple, and users say the support team was available to assist as needed.
Pricing: IBM Spectrum Protect is considered expensive. The pricing model is complex, taking into account factors like processor type and volume. Some users find Rubrik's pricing expensive, but many say it’s justified by its encryption and security features. Rubrik's license includes both software and hardware without any additional costs.
ROI: Users have realized benefits from IBM Spectrum Protect’s data protection and retrieval. They appreciate its ability to reduce storage requirements with larger tape sizes. Rubrik provides peace of mind and some cost savings, but users say that quantifying the ROI is difficult.
Comparison Results: IBM Spectrum Protect is a reliable, customizable solution that allows smooth integration with tape libraries. At the same time, some say that the user interface could be more intuitive and Spectrum Protect could integrate better with the cloud. Users like Rubrik’s advanced ransomware features, excellent support, and automated policy enforcement. However, some had issues with its remote backup abilities and high price tag.
"It protects our data. That is what it is there for."
"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."
"We like IBM Spectrum's versioning capabilities. It lets us specify how many versions of a file we want to keep and for how long. Also, the archive component of the software helps us a lot."
"The most valuable features are compression and de-duplication."
"The solution is mostly stable."
"This solution has improved our organization through better file and database recovery."
"The MN backup for a cluster is most valuable because it has made backing up the GSF as a zero-file system easier. I like its stability a lot. Over the years, I very rarely had a problem with it."
"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."
"The archiving, off-of-box, is awesome. It lets you put your data where you want it and gives you the peace of mind of having more than one copy of it. And it's smart about the way that it does the archiving. It doesn't just copy one-for-one. It does all of its processing of the deduplication and compression before it sends it off to the archive, which helps with our cloud costs."
"The web-based approach is the most valuable feature."
"The product's most valuable feature is the immutability of a backup."
"ubrik's One-Touch Recovery helps address this. Using backup as a migration tool can also help overcome challenges when moving to a hybrid cloud."
"They have a great PowerShell module and easy mediums to speak to the people who create and enhance them."
"CloudOut, because only blocks are pushed after compression and deduplication, not raw sizing."
"This is a centralized tool where we are able to schedule backups and perform monitoring."
"Rubrik is a faster unit from a hardware perspective. Things, like Live Mount, mean we can bring services back straightaway, then have them transition back into the live storage in the background. Because we can use Live Mount to do instant restores, a restore is now a five-minute job. Then, the rest of it is done in the background, rather than doing something for an hour before you actually get the restore back."
"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."
"Customers have migrated off of it because of its lack of virtual environment functions."
"This product should be more user-friendly for newcomers."
"The administration tools for GI need improvement, as the current assessment suggests shortcomings in the back-end system."
"IBM Spectrum Protect could be improved by making the installation easier. Once it's implemented, it's okay. IBM started lagging behind when things started moving to storage and cloud-based solutions. Even though they've recently released updates that give cloud-based protection, personally, I still believe they are not up to par with the likes of Rubrik. The entire product is a little bit clumsy because they have co-joined two different products, so it's complex. Even from a sales/explaining to people what it does point of view, it's complex. Whereas, if you take more current products, it's a single box solution. You reel it in, you fire it up, you do a couple of points and clicks, and off you go, whereas the IBM system is seriously complex. There's a lot of training involved and it's a massively difficult product to sell at this point in time."
"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."
"Perhaps some better documentation, which I believe was better in the past."
"I am looking forward to new features in the next release. One of the main features is the cloud storage integration, which was one of my main required features. I've had more difficult experiences with other platforms than with this one."
"Collecting logs in Rubrik is very difficult compared to other tools."
"Capacity reports could definitely be improved. It's hard to determine what is using the space and why. For instance, you can see that some host is using 2 TB on the Rubrik node and the disk space on that host is 400 GBs. It's hard to explain how there can be 2 TBs of data on local storage when nothing has changed on the host for the past three days."
"I would love to be able to just get from the dashboard to a file that I need, or a system that I need."
"The reporting, in particular the customization of reports, needs to be improved."
"It needs to keep innovating to stay relevant in the data management field."
"Lacks availability in a NFR format of virtual appliances to test them in public cloud environment."
"The reporting in the dashboard and reporting for extractions both need improvement. I would suggest making them easier to understand and use, not just out-of-the-box. We should also be able to customize them."
"They have what's called an organization which means different groups of access to Rubrik, but the alerting only goes to the admins. My suggestion to Rubrik is to make sure that the separate organizations or groups of users get the appropriate alerting."
IBM Spectrum Protect is ranked 17th in Backup and Recovery with 146 reviews while Rubrik is ranked 4th in Backup and Recovery with 86 reviews. IBM Spectrum Protect is rated 8.0, while Rubrik is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Protect writes "Performance and recoveries are better, and customers are happier with performance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Rubrik writes "Automates the backup and recovery process, reducing manual human errors and global search allows for granular recoveries". IBM Spectrum Protect is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, Commvault Cloud, Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) and Veritas NetBackup, whereas Rubrik is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Cohesity DataProtect, Commvault Cloud, Azure Backup and Dell NetWorker. See our IBM Spectrum Protect vs. Rubrik report.
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