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IBM Spectrum Protect vs Veritas NetBackup 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
Veritas NetBackup
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
115
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 Veritas NetBackup is 3.8%, down from 5.4% 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.
Wesam Qashou - PeerSpot reviewer
A mature backup solution, with many features, and great support
Veritas NetBackup is the first line of defense when disaster strikes. Before performing disaster recovery, we must have a good backup of our image that is also protected from ransomware. This way, we have a golden image that is resilient to ransomware attacks. We saw the benefits of Veritas NetBackup within the first three months.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It saves you a lot of storage."
"It's very robust and has been on the market for a long time."
"The solution is really scalable."
"It has increased our security, scalability, and high availability."
"The interface is easy to use."
"Good deduplication and compression features."
"It is a very mature product."
"With the new features that we have added, it has made a difference as far as faster recovery and speed."
"The solution is stable."
"The feature that is most useful for us is that it backs up every application that we own."
"The VM portal and the CloudCatalyst are two of the solution's most valuable features."
"AIR and duplication, overall management and troubleshooting."
"The backup and restore features work very well."
"It is a good solution. It covers most of the applications."
"The most valuable feature is the trouble-free operation, as we have not had many problems with it."
"Disaster recovery primarily involves backup usage. We employ it for both backup and recovery purposes. The backup and recovery processes have been executed multiple times, even restoring data from backups created three to four years ago."
 

Cons

"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 are still using TSM Manager for many of our projects to administer our platform because the gap was not resolved with the new Operations Center."
"When it comes to virtualization in IBM it's not perfect."
"We should be talking about the capacity of the tape drives. That's the only problem."
"There were scalability issues only in the brand new features which were recently released."
"For Spectrum Protect Plus, I would like to see more enhanced reporting features and integration with Spectrum Protect."
"We need better protection from ransomware or the ability to identify ways we can protect ourselves from ransomware. Having backups is one thing, but specifically, we need methods to recover if we have a ransomware attack."
"I would like to see the operations center be a lot more functional. It was nowhere near as functional as the admin center, and I'm doing a lot of command line with it."
"The implementation process could be simplified to make it quicker."
"The biggest additional features needed are more cloud capabilities and security from ransomware."
"The solution must provide a different way to schedule backups."
"The backup operation interface is not as mature as those of Veritas's competitors and has room for improvement."
"It would be helpful, in future releases, if the solution could add WORM (Write Once Read Many) support right within the product."
"The web interface is not modern."
"We faced so many backup configuration issues. And from the Veritas side, they couldn't fix that issue. So we started from scratch, purchased everything, and then we configured everything. Therefore, the support could be better."
"There have been issues with performance and some features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You need to put it in a PoC and test it out if you can."
"IBM provides an open license policy, which is more like a gentlemen's agreement."
"It is fairly reasonable as compared to other solutions in the market."
"The solution is expensive."
"Licensing can be either complicated or simple depending on what type of licensing you wish to use and what works best for your environment."
"When compared to the cost of other enterprise products, it seems to be in the same range. However, compared to the cost of non-enterprise products, it is really high."
"We worked our licensing into a capacity model, which is nice. Now, everything is much simpler to manage from a licensing perspective."
"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."
"Veritas Netbackup offers affordable licensing."
"It is slightly more expensive than Commvault, but it is pretty much the same. It is an enterprise solution, so it scales quite well. It has a lot of features. So, you pay for what you get. It is not cheap, but it is fit for the purpose."
"Our primary complaint about this product is that it is too expensive."
"The price of Veritas NetBackup is high, it should be reduced."
"This is an affordable solution"
"Smaller virtualized environments will want to stick to a traditional licensing model if possible. It will likely be cheaper, but it is a pain to manage all the individual licenses for each client."
"If you have a complex environment with dozens of different servers and apps, I recommend you look for TB licensing."
"It was on a yearly basis. During the annual review, when we asked them about our licensing, they couldn't explain it. For example, we had reduced by a factor of 40%, but our license only dropped by 5%. We would then ask Veritas people if we've reduced this much and shut down these servers, why has our license changed so less? They were never able to give us a straight answer. They weren't able to say, "Well, you're using this, and this is more expensive." In many cases, as we reduced our capacity and what we were using with Veritas NetBackup, our licensing actually went up, and they were often unable to explain why."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
8%
 

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...
What is the best next generation backup tool?
Assuming you have an onprem ecosystem which runs the VMware, physical systems on Win, Linux and Unix and run both traditional DB's and nosql DB's like mongo, then Netbackup (NBU) will be the right ...
What do you like most about Veritas NetBackup?
The most valuable feature of cloud integration is the ability to send data outside of your location. This can be achieved by integrating cloud tier options or other object storage solutions.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Veritas NetBackup?
The product is cost-effective, and I would rate its pricing as an eight out of ten. The pricing model is based on the amount of data transferred, making it manageable for us.
 

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
Beta Offshore
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Protect vs. Veritas NetBackup and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.