IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

The primary use case is for pure file backup. We have used it from back in the Tivoli Storage Manager days. Primarily, backing up Spectrum Scale would be our most common use, but we do use it as the main backup client that we use. Therefore, whatever storage that we are supplying, it is generally the backup solution that we put in along with it.

We are largely HPC focused as a company, so it is still very much focused on hardware. Although, we are starting to see more questions asked about how to utilize the cloud and how to involve it. So, it is coming, but traditionally, we are still sticking with the hardware solutions, such as traditional tape libraries. Larger deployments would be the TS3500s and the TS4500s. Then, there are the smaller products along the same lines where you have got a number of drives and a number of tapes. At whatever scales the client is setting it, we will match the size to their requirements.

It is hard to say because we tend to go in with a specific project and deploy that project. Therefore, we do not always have visibility on what the impact is. Just that it is a positive experience and it integrates well with the solution that we have provided. However, we do not tend to get to see the before and after of the impact for our specific client.

Integration with Spectrum Scale is a large part of it. 

We sometimes use different pools of storage (policy engine in it) in terms of retention. 

There is always a balance between the power of the product and the usability of it. There is learning curve to learn how to use it, but it is a very powerful product.

We have our issues with Fibre Channel. but that is the hardware which underlies it. In terms of Spectrum Protect, it runs very well. We have ran it in certain clients for the best part of 10 years, and it runs very well for us. We do not have stability problems with Spectrum Protect. The issues that we do have, it is with the hardware underneath.

High availability (HA) is a challenge, but we do deploy it in certain situations. We tend to stick to a more traditional scale up model rather than a scale out model, but we have managed to meet our requirements for this, so scalability has not been a problem other than when people ask for HA solutions. Generally, we have managed to meet our requirements.

When I used them a number of years ago, the experience was positive. They were always helpful when we had issues and managed to explain what the circumstances were around the issues and how to resolve them. Therefore, the experience then was positive. I have not personally been dealing with the support side for over a year now.

The setup is not too bad. Once you know what you are doing, it tends to be fine. The part we always struggle with is the onboarding process, getting people used to how it works, the specific nuances of the product, the fact that it is always incremental, their retention policies, and the commands to use when you're interacting with it. That is more the challenge that we have with it: The onboarding of new people whether they are internal people to us or clients.

There is quite a steep learning curve to your initial interactions with Protect. Then, once you kind of get into it and get into that intermediate level, the documentation is really good and the resources out there are also good. Thus, once you get over that initial hump, then it is pretty good.

Our clients tend to have an in-house team that at least do the daily check side of it, then back off the support to us. If they are having any problems, any errors coming up, or if the backups haven't run, etc., that is when they involve us. From a day-to-day point of view, we do not tend to be hands-on.

Our clients tend to compare it with NetBackup.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It is often around meeting certain requirements. Our business is usually won on other parts of the project than Protect. While Protect is a vital part of it, the difference is usually around Spectrum Scale, the compute cluster, or other products that Protect is looking after.

We're working with different versions of this solution. We have different versions deployed for multiple clients. The latest version is 8.1.11. We have a mixture of legacy environments and new environments.

Our client's use cases are mainly to protect heterogeneous workloads, virtualized workloads, physical workloads, databases, SAP solutions, and ERP solutions. It's great for large, heterogeneous environments. Spectrum Protect has a lot of different agents and components that allow you to completely backup your entire environment.

I am a technical team leader for this solution. I have an implementation team who work side by side with me. From the customer-side, there is a team of roughly six people working with it. There are administrators, backup operators, and technical managers that work with us and this solution. In total, the organization has roughly 6,000 employees. It's a large organization by Colombian standards. 

IBM Spectrum Protect provides us with the scalability and growth that we need. It is suitable for very large environments. It's very robust and has been on the market for a long time.

Here's an example of how this solution has improved our client's organization: There is a customer in the banking sector here in Colombia — the private banking sector. They had two terabytes of information backed up daily, in incremental backups from a different number of file servers. Those file servers were being backed up daily. At the end of the month, the customer backed up the data completely. In short, they made a full backup of all the data  on a monthly basis. It was roughly 20 terabytes of data. To cope with this situation we implemented retention sets. Thanks to these retention sets, the customer doesn't need to back up that 20 terabytes of information monthly. They can just resort to the incremental backups that they made before, daily, to have a snapshot and an accurate picture of the end of the month. They only have to do another incremental backup for the last day of the month, and that's it; they have a complete, very robust picture for the monthly data. 

This has reduced our customers' backup time by a considerable amount. They have also reduced the amount of storage space needed as they are not repeating backups every month. The data is 90% the same, month to month, which has optimized both speed and storage capacity.

One of the more recent features that we value the most, being an influencer myself, there is feature we call retention sets. These retention sets are snapshots of previously backed-up data. This data no longer needs to be backed up again so there's no need to re-back up that information, to reinject that data. It allows us to offer, improve, and optimize the use of storage resources for our customers. We implemented this solution for a number of clients here in Colombia and throughout Latin America.

Also, Spectrum Protect has what is one of the greatest ecosystems of experts, users, forums and in general learning resources in the data protection realm.

The reporting could be better. There's not a complete solution for reporting; however, there is a solution that allows you to write SQL queries. This way, you can explore the databases with metadata and get the reports that you want. Still, that's not an out-of-the-box solution, it's just a tool that allows you to write queries as you need. There is a steep learning curve for that.

I would also love to see more agents and solutions devoted to backing up other workloads, especially in regard to non-traditional databases.

The licensing can be a pain to manage. There is a tool that can provide you with automated reports regarding how much licensing you're using, but sometimes it's not accurate. You need to contact an IBM representative in order to get the correct information. 

Traditionally, there has been a Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments module that allows you to protect virtualized environments; however, it's not easy to use. It's very complex. In this case, my advice is to leverage Spectrum Protect Plus, which is the newest addition to the portfolio to back up both virtualized and modern workloads and works very well.

I've been working with Spectrum Protect for the last 10 years.

I think that it's the most scalable solution in the market. That's the reason why the largest enterprises in Colombia use it. Speaking as an expert on these types of solutions, there is no other solution that can support the size of workloads, components, and servers required for very large environments. I don't think it's just a matter of scalability, but also performance, too.

IBM technical support has been pretty good so far. We were given a technical point of contact for every inquiry that we had during the implementation process. My team has a lot of expertise now, but every now and again, we require some support from IBM. Their support has helped us get this solution working precisely as we need. Overall, regarding IBM Spectrum Protect, IBM support has been great. 

The initial setup might be complex. There are a lot of different nuances that need to be taken into account; however, with the help from an experienced team, the product can be deployed seamlessly.

Years ago, it took us roughly three to four months to implement this solution — mainly due to the amount of maintenance and the number of components that also need to be deployed. Security concerns also need to be addressed and resolved from the client-side. All of this made it quite difficult.  Now that we leverage IBM Spectrum Protect blueprints that are available publicly, to reduce implementation time down to a couple of weeks, sometimes even a couple of days. This has allowed us to stay competitive in what is a very competitive market.

Spectrum Protect Plus, a complementary solution to Spectrum Protect, comes bundles in some licensing schemes together with Spectrum Protect. This has allowed us to reach all sorts of customers. It allows our clients to get a hold of virtualization technology, including backup and recovery, and instant restore. These are features are needed in today's rapidly changing environments.

When Spectrum Protect is not suitable for a customer's environment, we always recommend backup replication solutions. Backup replication solutions are much easier to manage as they don't require a steep learning curve. Backup replication solutions are a great fit for small to medium-sized businesses, but for large corporations, large enterprises, or large companies, my choice is Spectrum Protect.

My advice to potential users would be to follow the IBM Spectrum Protect blueprints. These documents are very valuable and informative. They'll provide you with a lot of needed advice. They'll also provide you with a forewarning regarding situations that can occur during the implementation process. Sometimes people completely skip over these blueprints and go ahead with the implementation — my take is: don't .

Make sure to leverage all of the new features that this product offers. For example, many people don't bother using the retention feature; however, this feature is great for reducing storage and also improves the backup speed regarding operations. Don't be intimidated by these features. Contact and experienced team that can help you out to get the most out of the solution.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give his solution a rating of eight — it's a proven solution.

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. 

The primary use case is backing up Oracle Databases, SQL databases, Exchange, and all documents which are produced by my company.

Our on-premise infrastructure is comprised of disks on data domain and tape. We do not have a cloud strategy at the moment, but we are looking into it.

Right now, we have six Spectrum Protect instances with three of them in full production.

We have better, faster backup times, and it has improved efficiency in the backups.

• The ease of use
• Being able to set it up and configure it.

We have had issues, but everybody is going to have them. Overall, it seems to be stable. 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 scales well. We have grown here in the last year or two, and it has been relatively easy.

I have used their technical support. It has mostly been good. There has been some times where Level 1 tried to hit at things which I had already looked at, but once we got passed that, then they were able to either send me to the next Level or resolve the issue.

The additional features that I am looking to see in the future are already in the roadmap.

• Backup
• Archive
• Restore

We currently backup about 400 clients using traditional incrementals forever as well as another 350 using VE incremental forever.

IBM Spectrum Protect is a robust tool which allows us to backup pretty much any environment, virtual or physical, and create offsite copies of all our data for security and recovery purposes.

• Incrementals forever
• SnapDiff functionality
• VE

The ability to do dedupe in the product is nice to have. We currently have a VTL appliance with dedupe functionality. We will be exploring the SP features in this area shortly.

Easier configuration of some of the products, e.g., VE comes to mind. 

Perhaps some better documentation, which I believe was better in the past.

Well, apart from restoring data which has been inadvertently deleted or corrupted, we also use Spectrum Protect in conjunction with Spectrum Scale.

As the tape storage pool for HSM (inactive) data, this leaves a stub file in Spectrum Scale's GPFS file system and moves the file data to the LTO6 tape based storage pools -- so it vastly reduces the cost of the overall services, whilst maintaining Nearline access to the files.

a. Incremental forever
b. We have approximately 4.5PB’s of front end data and a 12 hour backup window.

However, by backing up only the changed data, we average around 75TB per night. If we had to do full backups, even occasionally, we would not be able to complete the backup within 12 hours, or we would have to make a large investment to fit a full backup within the 12 hour window.

• Reporting
• Ease of use

No, we have found it to be an extremely reliable system.

No, scalability is one of its key capabilities.

Local in country L2 is average. Offshore L3 is okay, but not as good as they used to be.

Yes, it wasn't scalable enough, and client support was not as extensive.

You do need to know what you are doing to setup the platform, so invest in doing the design work upfront before deploying.

At scale, the consumption license (per TB) is very expensive, so generally, licensing the hosts running the software (both Target and Source), this does mean you will need to work out the PVU for each client, but you can use the License Metric Tool to make this easier.

That was really too long ago to be of any use. However, I would suggest that at scale today, only Commvault and now Veeam, would be the products to compare it against.

Make sure your people have the right skills. You have a design, setup your automation policies so it doesn’t need manual intervention, and have your admins investigating and resolving the exception.

I guess it keeps everything under one umbrella. So there are fewer products to deal with.

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

I would like to see it simplified. Depending on what client you're talking about, there are lots of different features. There's instant recovery that it doesn't have. For the database side, it does not have object level recovery. There are just a slew of things that are lacking feature-wise. But the biggest problem is the complexity.

The stability is lacking. From the client side, which is my focus, it's very complicated.

It doesn't have the features that a lot of other products have. It seems like they're always three to five years behind what other companies are doing.

It's very hard to use. It's not user-friendly. It's not designed with the administrator in mind.

I think from the server side, it scales very well. The client side is much more difficult to deal with. It's a lot of hands-on work with the client.

I have used tech support, and I would rather chew off my left arm than have to deal with tech support.

I was involved in the installation and it was complex in every aspect.

We are actually looking for different solutions right now.

I would do a lot of research on all the vendors before I made a decision. It's expensive, it's hard to use, and takes a long time.

The most important criteria when looking for a product is simplicity. We have a set of criteria for every client in terms of what it has to do. Being the backup window, the recovery is the most important thing. So make sure it can do the recovery the way you want it done, i.e., fast.

1. Disaster Recovery module
2. Incremental backup
3. Flahcopy manager
4. VTL support
5. IBM Spectrum Protect Operation Center
6. Deduplication
7. Node replication

Using LTO6 technology you can store up to 10TB of compressed data.

Very good performance with Virtual Tape Library technology

Reporting via Operation Center.

5 years.

No problems.

No problems.

No problems.

Excellent.

Very good.

No.

A little bit complex.

Through a vendor team and the level was not very high.

No.

Go ahead because this solution is very good.