IBM Spectrum Protect vs Veeam Data Platform comparison

"It is pretty easy to use and maintain."

"It's a very stable product, and we've never had any downtime with it."

"The ability to use S3 Data Store as a repository."

"The scalability of IBM Spectrum Protect is good."

"It covers all the different operating systems. If you need backup, it can pretty much do everything."

"The solution is mostly stable."

"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."

"Its flexibility is valuable. It is a very flexible solution. There are always more ways than one to do something. It is a software solution, which means you can buy your own hardware and expand it whenever you want. You are not boxed in or locked into something you've bought and outgrown. You can always expand it."

"In Veeam backup, the most valuable feature for me is the recovery. It allows me to recover almost immediately while I continue fixing the problem of the affected machine."

"The most valuable feature is how reliable Veeam Backup is. It has the normal expected features that allow you to ensure that everything is backed up completely."

"The ability to offload backup snapshots to the SAN helps with reducing the backup durations."

"The ability of instant VM recovery, which means starting the backup VM and getting it online while the recovery is still happening is the most valuable feature."

"Pricing is fairly reasonable and not overly expensive."

"Veeam Backup has many valuable features and every feature is different. I have created backups for file-level backup, VMware or hypervisor virtual machines, physical machines, and workstations as well. Every time, I learn something new."

"The replication is the most valuable feature for us."

"The most valuable features are the backup and restoration of our VMs. Additionally, they add features regularly."

"I would like to see more technical training online. Sometimes, it is a little bit difficult to find, or that I do not really know what I am looking for as somebody who is starting off finding their learning curve."

"It can be improved for large file systems with many files. Spectrum Protect can restore large files very well, but if you're restoring millions of little files, it is not as great. At one point, we tried to implement the VMware module with it, and it was awful and terrible. I don't know if that has improved. If it hasn't, this would be one big improvement."

"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."

"We would like to see cloud integration."

"RTO is a huge gap for us. If we had a disaster scenario and had to recover a bunch of stuff from tape, the RTO would be too long for us."

"The usability of IBM Spectrum Protect could be improved, specifically additional features to the product in the operations center. Additional reporting facilities and stronger reporting tools such as build dashboards would be beneficial."

"They should introduce more features for virtualization platforms and backing up IBMs. Backup speeds should also be improved."

"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."

"Cross-hypervisor replication can be improved."

"Since the solution has many options, it is not easier to give tasks to schedule it."

"The one downside to Veeam is that they don't have a cloud product of their own."

"They need to address the confusing recovery dialogue."

"I would like the solution to have better integration with other hypervisors and cloud features that are not exclusive to VMware."

"It is not easy to navigate, especially with the numerous reports available."

"The SME that helped us with the implementation would probably have more insight because he used it way more than we have. We just use it for making sure that our backups are done daily, and the replications are being performed between sites. We haven't had any issues at all with it other than the fact that there is a slight process to acquire additional licenses if we want to expand our number of hosts. That's because it is based on the number of cores and threads that are used."

"In future releases, I would like to see the solution provide auto resolution and auto relocation of resources."

"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."

"The platform is neither highly priced nor inexpensive. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten."

"The solution is expensive."

"It's very complicated. Licensing is a pain."

"We chose IBM Spectrum Protect, because they actually have something called MSP pricing, which means managed services provider pricing. The pricing was attractive, and it seems to be a platform that IBM is totally investing on in terms of new functions and new capabilities."

"Its licensing is complicated. It goes by CPUs, and it is pretty expensive as well."

"Use capacity licensing. It's easier and cheaper."

"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."

"Compared to other enterprise solutions, Veeam Backup & Replication generally offers a competitive price point. However, there has been a noticeable and concerning increase in pricing, particularly in the year 2023. The rate of price hikes has been significant, with prices escalating three times during the first quarter of the year. This trend indicates a substantial shift in the pricing structure, which may have implications for customers and their budgeting considerations."

"My understanding is that it is a fairly small price point."

"There is a license required for this solution and the price is a bit expensive but it depends on the environment that you have on how much it will cost."

"The software subscription model can be once a year, or every three years, or every five years."

"The product must improve its pricing."

"The price is slightly higher than its competitors."

"The price of the solution could improve when comparing it to competitors. The market is very competitive and they should have some discounts or special offers."

"I think the price is good when you choose the Essentials Suite, but when you buy a full featured version (for instance the Enterprise Plus) the price is a little bit expensive."