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IBM Spectrum Protect vs Rubrik comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

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
Rubrik
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
4th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
89
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Backup (4th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (4th)
 

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 Rubrik is 7.8%, up from 7.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Syed Habib - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
CarlosCastells - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to do backup, easy to deploy and scalable
I have experience with different solutions like Oracle, Veeam, andCommvault Cloud. Right now, we are testing a solution for Kubernetes. We are trying to replace it, so we just don't know yet. I don't really know if Rubrik is a good solution for this. We are testing Velero (Open Source) or Kasten K10, and I don't know Rubrik's view for this type of technology.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Scalability, performance, mass platform coverage. It's one of the few backup products on the market right now which an organization can bring in and it will serve all of their backup needs. It's a completely centralized solution."
"Space efficient data reduction, using progressive incremental forever in combination with deduplication and compression."
"The most valuable features are the stability and also how it's seamlessly integrated with other IBM offerings."
"It's very robust and has been on the market for a long time."
"One way they have improved our organization is through the stability of the solution and the availability of the product."
"In the past, one of the most valuable features, and the biggest advantage, was the incremental forever feature. Not many other backup vendors provided that. In the pre-virtualization environment, it was very robust and simple technology, especially writing to tape."
"What I found most valuable in IBM Spectrum Protect is that it allows you to back up physical machines, and its proxy feature lets you back up virtual machines."
"It helps our customers protect their data, keep it long-term, and feel pretty secure about it, basically sleeping well at night."
"Rubrik's immutability feature ensures the security of our backups by preventing unauthorized alterations. The most effective feature for simplifying our data backup processes is the ability to perform on-demand or scheduled backups and restores, which greatly enhances manageability. The security and compliance features have had a positive impact on our data management practices. We utilize Rubrik not only for virtual machine backups but also for backing up approximately twenty terabytes of unstructured data, including file shares and documents. This allows users to easily restore deleted documents using the Soft Delete feature, depending on the backup frequency."
"The Auto-Snapshot SLA feature and recovery time are amazing. It took seven seconds to have a server back up and running in production from a total failure."
"In terms of usage, Rubrik has allowed us to retrieve data 80 to 90 percent faster than our previous technology."
"Instant recovery of virtual machines allows for the restoration of services in minutes."
"Cut backup remediation to nearly nothing."
"The solution's technical support team is very responsive and proactive."
"Live Mount is where we do the majority of our big recoveries, unless it is a file recovery. A file recovery takes a few minutes to restore to where the file in the event a file was accidentally deleted by a user, etc. There has been at least a 90 percent reduction in recovery time based on our previous solution, from the need to recover something to when it's actually recovered went from hours to minutes."
"Rubrik, when compared to Cohesity, Dell, and Veritas, was the best of the four."
 

Cons

"It has a lot of areas for improvement. Its reporting for job completion or incompletion can be improved. It should also provide a granular recovery, ease of operation, data life cycle management, and media management. It should support a backup in such a format that in case of a disaster, one can start the virtual machine out of the backup itself. Its reliability can also be better. It is also expensive, and their support is also poor."
"It does not do too well in our virtual environment."
"If IBM could provide a partial module, that would be great."
"We have run into some periods where we have found some tape issues which were causing us problems, but we resolved them. For some reason, we had a bunch of drives go offline on our disk storage (our virtual library)."
"It might be seen as leaning towards the legacy side, missing some features of newer solutions. The main drawbacks would be its complexity and high pricing."
"Perhaps some better documentation, which I believe was better in the past."
"We are not so happy with the technical support because dealing with them is not easy. We have a very complicated environment, therefore I understand for a support person that it is not easy to troubleshoot it."
"They should introduce more features for virtualization platforms and backing up IBMs. Backup speeds should also be improved."
"I don't like Rubrik's user interface because it's not intuitive, and I find it hard to get the information I need."
"The Office 365 protection could be improved."
"The Polaris piece could use improvement. When you get a report and you have events that are suspicious, you cannot drill down and find out why it's suspicious. You only know it's suspicious, but you don't know the root cause. Other than that, everything works well."
"The reporting, in particular the customization of reports, needs to be improved."
"Rubrik can only leverage cloud storage for archiving and has no cloud failover."
"There is room for improvement through a further extension of their Office 365 backup platform. In addition, it's still a bit cost-prohibitive to backup NAS. Those would be the two primary areas for improvement."
"If I could take a snapshot from a physical and be able to stand it up as a virtual immediately without the need to rebuild an entire system and restoring files, that would be HUGE."
"The only thing that can be improved is catering for open source databases because at the moment it doesn't cater for Mongo, MySQL, and Postgres."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Regarding retro-compatibility of the product between versions, your data is always available and the ROI is unquestionable."
"We have spec'd out our build, and the cost of it can work quite easily today for our future needs."
"The solution is not cheap."
"Licensing can be either complicated or simple depending on what type of licensing you wish to use and what works best for your environment."
"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 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."
"Going to IBM Tech University Conference saved me from making a major purchase of the wrong thing, which was very helpful."
"At scale, the consumption license (per TB) is very expensive."
"We pay yearly and it's based on the number of bricks."
"There are additional costs for add-ons, and they recently upgraded a new cluster, which also carries a price."
"As a technical person, I don't have the details, but from what I have heard, it can be expensive."
"Rubrik is quite expensive for small businesses."
"I rate the tool's pricing a six out of ten."
"The pricing has been quite good from our perspective, in terms of being able to negotiate with the Rubrik team to get the product that we want and be able to sell that out to our end customers."
"We are on an annual license to use Rubrik and it is priced well."
"I rate the pricing an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low, and ten is high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Protect?
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 dash...
Which would you choose - Rubrik or Veeam Backup & Replication?
Veeam Backup & Replication provides an easy-to-set-up solution to the issue of data storage and recovery. Setting it up is a relatively simple affair. For the most part it prompts you from scre...
What do you like most about Rubrik?
It's easy to manage and has an innovated solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rubrik?
Rubrik is considered expensive, with a price rating of three out of ten. Improvements in pricing and licensing would be beneficial.
 

Also Known As

IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
No data available
 

Overview

 

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
Driscoll's, Red Hawk Casino, Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP, Wabash National, Chateau Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, Galliker Transport & Logistics
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Protect vs. Rubrik and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.