IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

Client scheduling, deduplication, parallel processing of restores, disaster recovery manager.

Very reliable backup and recovery system. If you have SAN on the back-end housing TSM’s storage pools, you can achieve blazing fast restore times.

DB2 at the back-end database has some bugs in version 6; however, I have not yet worked with version 7 of TSM, so perhaps IBM has improved this, but don’t know for sure.

Since 2005.

Yes, with deduplication turned on, you need to be careful about how you scale server ratio to clients. Dedup takes more DB space and processing time. We overloaded our first v. 6 server when we moved from 5.3 and this was a major headache.

For some reason on 6.2, when DB2 does a reorg, dsmserv will hang. Have not been able to troubleshoot deep enough due to lack of time.

No. You just need to have the servers and backend SAN storage with which to scale. $$$

IBM has been pretty good so far and you get people who know the product with great expertise.

5/5.

No, I have used TSM since I started managing backup/recovery.

I would say its fairly complex and would be best done with a consultant. It is a product designed to scale to immense proportions and takes a team to put it together right.

Implemented through a vendor team. The consultant we had was an expert.

Not sure. But it has saved us from data loss many times.

Not sure.

No.

Definitely recommend it.

We have a very small footprint. We only use it to back up a couple of servers that we could not move over at this time. I only use it to back up two servers and very large academic systems and number cruncher systems, which isn't the best way to do that, but we do use MN backup with it. Previously, we used to use Spectrum Protect for disaster recovery (DR), but we don't use it for disaster recovery anymore.

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.

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 probably has been 20 years since I have been using it. I started using it when it was ADSM. Now it is Spectrum Protect, which I have been using for a couple of years.

I like its stability a lot. Over the years, I very rarely had a problem with it.

It was very stable when it was on an AIX server. AIX servers are not as common now. It is on a Linux server now, and it is definitely not as stable on a Linux server as it was on an AIX server.

Its scalability is decent. In terms of usage, we used to be exclusively all Spectrum Protect, but now we're not. We just have one department that is using it, and they don't do any restores or anything like that. I do everything. Because it has a small footprint now, I am the main person who works on it, and if needed, I have a couple of other people to help out.

I would rate them as average. It totally depends on who you get. I love getting one of their support staff members named Helen. You lucked out when you get Helen. She is awesome. There is another person with whom I've worked great, but the last couple of times, I've opened a case, and I didn't even get a callback. I ended up fixing it on my own. 

I've always used it. It started as ADSM and then became TSM and then Spectrum Protect. When we were TSM, we migrated from TSM to another product, but there were just a couple of systems that couldn't be migrated. For very large academic systems and number cruncher systems, we use MN backup. We have a very small footprint of Spectrum Protect left.

It is complex. We have a complicated environment, and it took a week. We had to use the encryption key manager, which is also an IBM product called SKLM, and that had to be upgraded. It was definitely a full week, and it was not easy.

We had a consultant, and our experience was positive.

I don't have an idea about the pricing. They send that over to someone else, but I know that one of the issues they had was the licensing costs. I don't think they were happy with how they were charged.

You would really have to implement it. It is very stable, but it is complicated. You really need to get a staff member or a good consultant who knows it fairly well.

I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect a seven out of ten for functionality. I am biased because I know it so well. Over the years, we did really well with disaster recovery with it, but that was the old way of sending tapes down to Iron Mountain and the Sterling Forest site in New York. I always made it work, but that was stressful.

Our primary uses for this solution are Disaster Recovery and operational data protection.

This solution helps us to meet all of our data protection needs.

The most valuable features are compression and deduplication.

In the next version of the solution, I would like to see cloud support.  Specifically, I'd like to see this product leverage the native data protection services in the major cloud providers (AWS, Azure) and not require an agent to be installed.  Since access to the hypervisor is not available in an IaaS environment the native services must be leveraged.  Many competing solutions already do this.

It is an on-premise infrastructure, not cloud, which is comprised of IBM and Oracle. In the next couple of years, we will probably look to the cloud.

Right now, we are working on send volume, IBM Controller SVC, and we also have products, like IBM Storwize V7000 and FS900 Storage.

The capacity of the storage is huge. It can be affected with all of our requirements. We also have two copies for each volumes. This makes life easier and safer for us, in cases of disasters happening and for any volume or data corruption as well.

It has increased our security, scalability, and high availability.

High availability (HA): It is one of the best features that we have.

• It needs some software upgrades to fix some of its current bugs. 
• In SVC, we need a masking view that combines with a storage group. This is collected all in terms of hosts, storage, and volume, both on the storage side and the host side. We need to combine them in one storage group in the SVC.

From a storage perspective, it is very nice. From SVC, we do have some issues with rebooting, nodes, etc. However, we are working on them. As a software-defined storage, we should face some issues like this. From storage level, it is very nice and powerful.

We have not scaled it yet, because we already have enough storage capacity. Since the scalability will be online, I know it will be fine. There should not be any downtime. 

For time being, we have enough with the storage of IBM and SVC. At least for next three years, we have enough storage with what we have already.

IBM does not have a Kuwait entity open for calls and support, but we usually work with Dubai support. They are very nice and on the spot. If there are critical issues, they will come on spot. 

I was working with a IBM different product, DS4700. However, right now, we are in different stage of technology, which is SVC and Storwize V7000.

The initial setup is very impressive. I am a system admin, but I do love learning a lot. It is a straightforward setup, and the IBM engineers are very helpful and provide me with new information each time that they do an implementation.

During the implementation phases, technical people come over from Turkey and Dubai to Kuwait and help on the implementation. This is nice. 

It has not reached any SLA. Things are good.

We manage IBM, SVC, IBM Spectrum Control, and IBM Spectrum Storage.

I would recommend the product, because the storage is very nice, especially the FS900. It has very nice features.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They are clever. They have committed in their words, implementation, their price, and the capacity (which they already offered).

The solution is primarily used for backup and restore and also for DR, for Data Recovery in case of a disaster. We are using replication from two servers, the Spectrum Servers, so they replicate on each other. We are using it for backing up remote sites also. Basically, all the machines are downloading their backup to the Spectrum Server and from then on we are moving that data to tape units so we can have outside data of the building.

IBM allows for the versioning of the data, allowing us to have multiple versions of a file or directory of a server. 

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. I could have 10 versions of one file and that file I could keep for as long as I want.

There is the archive for a version of the solution which gave us the opportunity to have, let's say, one full backup every month for a long period of time. Its archiving offers us good flexibility.

The solution is very stable.

We've found the scalability to be very good.

The initial implementation is straightforward for the most part.

The pricing is a bit high. It would be ideal if it was more affordable.

Generally, everything is changing so fast within the product, it's hard to pinpoint what needs to be changed or what is missing. The solution is constantly evolving.

It would be helpful if the solution included some sort of ransomware protection.

The only thing that I haven't tried yet is using it with VMware. I haven't done any tests on it. Let's say that I want to restore a VM, virtual machine, and I would like to access it in a short period of time. This is something that Veeam, for example, is doing. Veeam will permit you to start a VM and start working with it and restore only what is needed to do a prompt work. If it's possible to have the same functionality on this product, that would be ideal.

I've been using the solution since it was called under a different name. I've used it for about 20 or so years at this point. It's been two decades. It's been a while. 

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. Its performance is excellent.

The scalability of the solution is very good. A company can expand the solution if it needs to.

IBM Spectrum is used in the data center and we don't have too many users that would use the backup facilities. Everything is centralized to enter the data center.

We are not fully using the solution to its full potential at this time. I'm not sure if there are plans to increase usage. We're looking into other options to see if we can get better user-friendly functionality and better pricing.

We've been in touch with technical support. They are very good. We haven't had any issues with them. They are helpful and responsive. Every time I've talked to them, they've solved our problems.

We also currently use Veeam.

The installation is simple. You just click and follow the instruction. Where the complexity is coming up is when you decide how you want to do your backup and restore. Like any other software you have to decide how you want to do it and understand what's going on behind the scene. 

The deployment itself, with my experience, doesn't take long due to the fact that I know the product. That said, for someone that does not know the product, I would say, it will take, just to understand how it works about a week.

We have two or three people on staff that can handle any maintenance required. They are all systems administrators. 

In the beginning, we had a consultant as it was a very long time ago and we did not have the knowledge we have now. However, today I would not deal with anybody from IBM. We have the capabilities we need. 

In general, at the time, we had a good experience working with them.

While it's my understanding that the solution is expensive, I do not directly handle the licensing and therefore cannot speak to how much the company actually pays to use the solution.

We are customers and end-users.

We have the Enterprise version of IBM Protect. It's not the Plus version.

My advice is not specifically for IBM Spectrum, but for any product. I would say, sit down and think about it. Think about what you want to do. There are so many options in any software. It's like getting house insurance. What do you want to do, how do you want to insure your data? It's important to understand what you want so you can see if the solutions you are looking at actually have the required capabilities.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's a very good product. It's strong. It's stable. The company's good.

My first use case was a big company with 16 subsidiaries. We implemented the TSM Server, v6.1, with Exchange, VMware, Oracle, File System backup, and DRM. Today, this company uses IBM Spectrum Protect 8.1 with all items mentioned plus cloud backup with cloud containers. It's about seven years of partnership.

With IBM Spectrum Protect, we optimize our costs of media and storage use, thanks to the Incremental Forever backup. The TDP software provides us many ways to protect our data, so we don't need to use monstrous scripts for doing backups now. My life is easier and the environment administration is simple.

All features help me meet my requirements, but I love the TDP for VMware because of the web interface and the possibilities provided by this tool. It's amazing.

In my opinion, the Hyper-V and SQL Server backup could be improved. In the 2016 version there was a significant improvement, but I think IBM has a big challenge with these technologies.

In some small clients, we worked with Veritas Backup Exec, but just for small environments as a low cost option.

As an IBM business partner, we are interested in helping our clients get the most out of their technology. 

For our clients using on-premise infrastructure, they usually have a mixture of workloads and a lot of databases with a lot of different operating systems. Therefore, they need a backup platform which helps them to get the most out of every piece of software that they have, not different pieces of software to back up different technologies. Spectrum Protect enables us to do that for them.

A mixture of technologies comprise their backup, as they are using incremental technology. They are using snapshot for backups, and also using CBT Tracking, which is one of the technologies that VMware has in its APIs and that Spectrum Protect leverages to do virtual machine backups. Therefore, there is a mixture of things. 

Many customers that we have are in the banking system of Columbia. For example. I estimate that 70% to 80% of the banks in Columbia, including eBanks, are using Spectrum Protect.

We now have 20 Clients with Spectrum Protect. We have a very special one with four instances of Spectrum Protect on the same Client. This is a very big bank in Columbia. They have instances in production, instances for developing environments, and instances for coverage throughout all their infrastructure. This is the biggest environment that we have, and it takes approximately 30,000 backups a month. So, it is a large environment.

We see that solution is now getting a new breath. The solution is helping new customers with sending workloads to the cloud, which helps us a lot, because they are uploading their internal and on-premise systems.

About 20 to 30% of my clients are now using cloud to upload their backups. This is very important to us, because Spectrum Protect now helps them to achieve this result.

One of the features which is most interesting in Spectrum Protect is the ability to scale out to great environments. This is something that not many vendors have on the market. 

It is also a product that has been maturing for a long time. This is good because customers need reliability in their enterprise initiatives. 

I would like to see monitoring within the platform: monitoring for storage pools and monitoring for the server's health (e.g., CPU and memory). This has been somewhat lost from previous releases because we had IBM Tivoli Monitoring for these purposes, but now we do not have anything, and it is important to cover this. 

Also, I would like to advance reporting and analytics for the platform to see how much data is coming into the platform. how much data is expiring everyday, and what tape savings we are getting through reclamation. These are important things to know, as we are lacking a bit in this area.

We have a very long road to walk. We can make a lot of improvements taking into account all the participants in the ecosystem: The developers with the business partners and the clients who help us to improve the product.

The solution is very stable. It is one of the most important features that we look for in a product before putting it into the market and when establishing a strategy with our customers. 

There are a lot of clients who are using the product for 10 years or more. We began working with them long time ago. We have been seeing the product progress and the evolution of it through time. They clients have seen that this special feature, which is stability, has not being lost with the product's evolution. We are maintaining the quality of the product, and at the same time, advancing new features. This is very important for us.

The technical support for Spectrum Protect is very mature. It is very committed to giving a top-notch support experience. I have no complaints about them. We are working mainly with the Argentina team, which is a Level 2 team who helps us in Latin America. They are very considerate and help us to get our issues resolved or questions resolved.

In recent years, there has been improvement regarding the product's setup. Now, we have an installation manager, which helps us a lot. There is no customized research. It is the same installation manager that all other IBM products use. This is great for us, as it is very simple to install patches. That was difficult previously, but now we have a streamline method to install the product. 

With initiatives like Spectrum Protect Plus, which is new, we are advancing even more with our technology initiatives.

I am involved in the whole lifecycle. I am involved in design, setup, and also the post-sales report.

Our customers always evaluate other vendors. Customers are sometimes using Veeam Backup for their virtual workloads. They may also be using some other tools from EMC. However, Spectrum Protect is the only tool that can work throughout all their technology and platforms. Therefore, they do not need separate tools for separate technologies. Spectrum Protect is the only tool which helps them do this.

IBM is most compared to Veeam Backup because there are a lot of virtualized workloads in our Clients. It is also compared with HPE Data Protector and Veritas. These are the solutions that our customers evaluate. 

The powerful reason IBM technology is good for to our customers is they already have IBM technology present. For example, they have IBM Power in their infrastructure for core business. They also have IBM applications, like IBM cloud applications and IBM monitoring applications. They want to form a stack of applications and solutions from the same vendor. It is much easier to take another solution and incorporate it into their existing solutions that they already have.

We try to help our customers, not only to be the seller, but also be an adviser to them and help them chose the best technology around

We use it for our backup and recovery services.

Our environment is on-premise. We also do tape. However, we do not have any cloud infrastructure at this point. We have a cloud strategy in the works.

We have six Spectrum Protect instances: Three of them are disaster recovery (DR) and three of them are in production. We have grown out the three in production and are looking to add two more in the future. Spectrum Protect should have no issues accommodating this growth.

With the new features that we have added, it has made a difference as far as faster recovery and speed.

• The server application - the features in it.
• The replication part of it.
• The dedupe piece of it, which is a huge help, especially in our environment.
  

I would like a little more ease with the virtual platforms, because it is a huge thing that is coming up. We have a huge virtual environment, but it seems like it is convoluted as far as the process of planning it, then integrating Spectrum Protect. There are a lot of moving pieces, so I am looking forward to Spectrum Protect Plus. There seems to be less moving parts to it, so hopefully it will be quicker.

It is a very solid product.

The scalability is solid, provided we setup the infrastructure as needed.

If I have an issue, I will call support. I am not really impressed with the Level 1 support, but once I get past that and go to Level 2, then we will usually get some type of resolution. 

We do have really good support through our IBM rep, who will jump on it as soon as something is out there.

I was not part of the initial setup.

I have seen a lot of other backup products out there, and they are good. However, Spectrum Protect seems to encompass a broad range of things, and you can pretty much put it anywhere. You can tie it into your backup network or backup needs.