IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

It is for enterprise backup and recovery. I support customers who use this product for their enterprise backup and recovery.

I have small customers with about 40 cartridge libraries, then I have others who have petabytes of data and using everything under the sun. This is another good feature of Spectrum Protect; it does it all.

I support a customer base of about 25 customers. So, I support probably 50 instances.

It provides our customers with the comfort of having reliable enterprise data protection. 

Some of the new advanced features are definitely more into cost savings, e.g., dedupe compression, so doing more with less.

Scalability: Our customers are able to grow the product without having to buy additional hardware, so it is very scalable.

For Spectrum Protect Plus, I would like to see more enhanced reporting features and integration with Spectrum Protect. 

In terms of Spectrum Protect, usually the IBM features are ahead of where the customers' demand is, so I generally do not even install the latest version for at least a year. Therefore, I think they are doing good with this product.

It really depends on the hardware that you are running it on. If you run it with the right resources, it can be up for years on end.

It scales from very small to very large. It is easily the most scalable product out there.

I use technical support quite often, calling in PMRs for customers. Support is really good, as I have never had to close a PMR with them having fixed the problem. Also, they are very responsive.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward and easy to implement.

Customers will look at other vendors in the enterprise backup space: Commvault, NetBackup, Veeam, and other similar solutions.

Most of my customers have already been Spectrum Protect customers. Therefore they are happy with the product. The new implementations that I have done, they have generally chosen Spectrum Protect for its scalability and reliability.

I would absolutely recommend Spectrum Protect.

It has a tried and true tested ability. It has been around for approximately 30 years. The roadmap is definitely aligned with where businesses are going, e.g., cloud support, virtual backup support, etc. In the eight years that I have been a business partner, I have lost one customer that switched off of the platform. This was not because they were unhappy with the product, but from an acquisition,

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).

We primarily provide this solution to our customers. They mostly use the solution for backup and recovery purposes.

The solution offers very good flexibility. 

It's huge. You can do almost everything with it. It's very programmable, customizable, and automatable. It supports a lot of operating systems and a lot of applications. It's very versatile. It's maybe the most versatile on the market.

The solution is used to support newer client types for backup for cloud-based software as a service, mail as a service, things like that, and hyper-converged systems. That's what they intended Spectrum Protect Plus for. They need to make sure it continues to cater to these clients.

The solution needs to work on disaster recovery integration. Basically, VMware applications to the cloud, for example. There needs to be integration with the storage, and integration with VMware. 

I've been using the solution since 2003. That's 17 years at this point.

The scalability is huge. It's maybe the most scalable backup of all products on the market. It's in the petabytes per server. They have the best tape libraries per square meter and capacity per square meter. You can scale in the exabytes with these solutions. You will have to have multiple servers, but most of the exabyte scale projects that we've looked at are IBM.

Technical support is always very good. I have never experienced any support as good as them. I'm very happy with IBM technical support.

The initial setup can be very simple. If you have a small environment, it can be extremely simple. It can be as complex as you want it to be or as you need it to be. That's the good thing about it. 

Some people get lost in it sometimes and the solution makes it too complex for their needs. I know there's criticism that it's too complex. Yes, it's true, it is complex, but it's only complex due to the fact that IBM shares the knowledge. If IBM wouldn't share the knowledge about how to solve things, or how to make things complex, then it wouldn't be complex as then you would have to call support if you have a problem with it.

That's what other vendors do. They don't share the knowledge, they don't allow you to dig into the deeper configuration of the product and you have to call support if you have a problem. That way, with IBM, you can solve it yourself basically. You can customize it to your wishes. 

However, on the other hand, the downside of that is if you have a problem and it's complex and you have to be able to solve it, or you can call support. You have the option. At least you have the option with IBM of making it as complex as you want it to be. With other vendors, you don't have that. That provides flexibility.

Deployment times vary. If you have a VMware environment, it's really fast. It can be a few hours to install the servers and install the data mover, and you're done. If you have a complex environment where you need to install a lot of clients on hardware machines or machines that need a specific backup plan, then it can take weeks.

The pricing is average. It's not expensive, it's not cheap. It's not the cheapest, it's not the most expensive. It's very good value for money I would say.

We're an IBM partner.

I would advise companies to use it for small environments that need a simple solution. I would also advise it for very large environments over a petabyte for flexibility. For the midsize company, I'm not sure if I would advise it as that's where you get into that sweat show. You need complex features, however, you don't really have the complex knowledge. For a mid-sized company, that's where the problems lie.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement. If they shift to a little more simplicity, it might help. There are other products out there that have more modern features, and IBM is not yet there. Therefore, they're not 10 out of 10. That doesn't mean that those other products are 10 out of 10 because they lack things that IBM has. There's no perfect 10 on the market.

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.

Our current primary use case for this solution is for file backup. I'm head of cloud systems and we are customers of IBM.

I believe the user interface is a good feature. The personnel who work with the product on a daily basis seem to be satisfied with what's possible.

This is quite an expensive solution so I'd like to see the cost reduced. Technical support could be improved. 

We've been using this solution for 20 years. 

The product is stable. We have one person involved with maintenance. 

This is a scalable solution. We have 25 users in the company. 

The technical support really needs to be improved. 

The initial setup was quite complex. It required experienced and skilled people with a lot of know-how. We used a consultant for the deployment. 

I'm not sure what the licensing fees are but I believe they are substantial. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

We use this product to back up our VMs and files locally and then to the cloud.

The most valuable feature is the backup speed.

The interface could be more user-friendly.

In the future, I would like to see more features regarding file backup, as well as multiple cloud integration.

We have been using IBM Spectrum Protect for about two years.

The stability is good.

Spectrum Protect is used to back up our infrastructure on the backend and is not directly related to the number of people in the company.

We are using both Veeam and Spectrum Protect.

The initial setup was a little bit complex. Our deployment took a couple of months to complete.

A consultant assisted us with our deployment.

The licensing fees are between $8,000 and $10,000 per year.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is to implement the newest version, IBM Spectrum Protect Plus.

This is a good product, although it would be better if it were easier to use and manage.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

My primary use case would be that I use Spectrum Protect for Exchange at the moment. It is working really well. These is a little bit of a learning curve with it, but I am finding it to be good, as Exchange now is migrated into SIP versions. IBM needs to catch up somewhat, but from what I have seen, it is acting the exact way that I would want it to act.

We have an on-premise infrastructure comprised of flash storage, disk, and tape, working well together. We are not looking to move to a cloud strategy in the immediate future.

It is reliable. The backup solution is our fail safe. When we are required to recover data, it is there.

Reliability: It has never had a problem with backups or restores. If you store something, it is there.

The only thing that I would like to have a little more of is insight in reporting. I find that Spectrum Protect needs a lot of monitoring, and I have to actually log into the servers. I would rather be more proactive and send the information when things do not work the way we want.

I am hoping that the Spectrum Protect Plus supports Exchange. That is my primary wish, since Spectrum Protect Plus should be a single pane of glass where I will be able to monitor all my instances from.

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. The first part of it was very long, but once I found the terms and where to look, it became a lot easier. Then. I found another gap when troubleshooting information that I needed to have. I needed to contact support to actually find that information.

So far, from my limited experience, it is working flawlessly. 

It seems very scalable and robust. It can do what we require it to do.

I currently have eight instances of Spectrum Protect installed on the servers that I manage.

Technical support is above standard in regards to the Exchange part. In our organization, we have backup administrators taking care of the exchange, and my primary function is to monitor and setup the schedules and backup. 

When it comes down to when it actually moved to the TSM part (now Spectrum Protect), we were having problems with the backup. It seemed to go well when we contacted technical support and they seemed to be fluent. They had a good response time and solved the issue.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I would recommend Spectrum Protect. It does what we require. It is robust. The support is good. 

We are actually implementing our own private cloud and using Spectrum Protect to back up and replicate the backups to a secondary site.

With Spectrum Protect, you can use any type of disk to back-end the repositories. It gave us the flexibility to use whatever storage we wanted at our secondary site. On our first site, we have really high performing variable disks, and at our secondary site, we have a lower performing tier. On the cloud, we have an even slower tier.

Most valuable features are:

• Good tape integration
• The node replication to a secondary site.
• The ability to use S3 Data Store as a repository.

I would like to see integration with Copy Data Management, which is an IBM product. That would be really nice. Right now, these two products are siloed, so if these two become integrated, the product would become a bit of a powerhouse.

With stability, we have had some challenges. There have been some issues around some of the functionality around reclamation. In the reclamation jobs, there has been fighting over the backup jobs. With Spectrum Protect, you have a reclamation job that takes space back from tapes which are no longer needed, and we' are having a challenge with that right now. 

We are having a balance issue between the reclamation and the backup function. It has to take the space back from the tapes before it can record to those tapes, but sometimes those two processes are overlapping.

This is in the process of being resolved. We are currently working with IBM support and the IBM engineering teams to resolve the issues.

We have not really had a chance to properly scale it, but I imagine it should be fairly straightforward in terms of growing it out, e.g., we spec'd out a server that was really powerful.

In terms of scalability, the next thing should be adding additional storage.

We currently have one Spectrum Protect instance, but in the future, there will be at least three or more.

The support is really good. They are very responsive. There is a PMR set up, and we are working directly with the engineering team, who are actually coding the product.

The initial setup was not complex. It was really straightforward. It has been a lot easier as of late to do these implementations.

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. 

We seriously looked at Commvault. We also looked at Veeam and another third-party.

The way it works is customers can host their applications on our cloud, and we basically charge them to backup those products. We wanted something that could do that and we have the skill sets in-house. That is how it came about that we purchased Spectrum Protect. It is pretty much a function of wanting to backup primary workloads running on our cloud.

Most important criteria when selecting a backup:

• Resiliency
• Integration with tape
• Integration with cloud.