IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

We use it for backup.

Support of the IBM X platform and the backup data replication to DR are the most valuable features.

It has a lot of areas for improvement. Its reporting for job completion or incompletion can be improved. It should also provide a granular recovery, ease of operation, data life cycle management, and media management. 

It should support a backup in such a format that in case of a disaster, one can start the virtual machine out of the backup itself. Its reliability can also be better. It is also expensive, and their support is also poor. 

I have been using this solution for the past five to six years.

From a security point of view, there are fewer concerns about the backup as long as you encrypt the data.

It is scalable. The scalability also depends on your network architecture, etc.

Their technical support is very poor. We are not very happy with them.

Its initial setup is complex. It took three to four days.

My team members handle the deployment. The number of people required depends on the number of IT assets that we are trying to protect.

It is expensive.

I would recommend it depending on the use cases, but it is better to avoid IBM now. It is a new era of other solutions. IBM should catch up or allow itself to become extinct.

I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect a five out of ten.

We use IBM Spectrum Protect for data backup purposes, i.e. for people, administration, and file-level backups.

We did have a challenge with one of IBM Spectrum Protect's systems. For some funny reason, it was not coming up because of the stability. We were able to restore, but it started us thinking about improved backup services. 

Two weeks ago, we were able to restore services as quickly as possible in a production environment. We were able to kickstart and provide services on that particular server to customers, which saved us a lot of embarrassment.

Otherwise, we would have been down due to power supply issues we had in our production environment. Some of the services were misbehaving. We had to do a majority stop and IBM Spectrum Protect was a big plus for us.

The fact that we can take the backup straight onto tape is the most valuable feature. IBM Spectrum Protect is very valuable for me because you don't necessarily need storage on-prem or on a production system. 

IBM Spectrum Protect has its system for taking a backup. It has a backup option on the outside also that makes it easy for you to do a restore.

Technically, I've not used the latest version. What can be improved is the graphical interface and user-friendliness of the products. Secondly, they can make it also more available for other sub-regions so that we can pick up some courses on it. We need to improve our knowledge base on their products.

IBM Spectrum Protect needs improvement, but I'm sure they looked at some of these issues in the latest version. There are continuous improvements in the application.

IBM Spectrum Protect has been stable. On power issues, they blamed some supplier parts of the company. We had problems almost two or three times a week. It cost some of the companies to malfunction, so we labored for two or three days in repair work. 

For backups, it took us about almost a week or two weeks to fix that.

In terms of the scalability, with the latest version of IBM Spectrum Protect, now they have all these cloud features available. It makes it easier for you to plug into.

We have about 10 main users. We have three or four unrestricted users. For deployment and maintenance, about four or five guys on the ground. 

The product is very extensive. We've implemented it about three or four years ago. At the moment, the number of sellers in production increases every day, day in and day out.

We keep on spinning up new services and all we do is onboard the new servers. We've not had any complaints because of capacity. It has been able to serve our clients' purposes.

I'll give IBM Spectrum Protect customer support a seven out of 10 because I'm still not able to take the VMware environment backup. 

Commvault is very user-friendly. From one point you can do all of your restores. You can even restore a backup that was taken by a CMS. We were using Commvault previously.

The initial setup of our IBM Spectrum Protect install was not straightforward. We needed some experts to come down and do it. They could have given us the instructions so that we could have done it here ourselves.

We had some folks from outside for the implementation, which was done in three weeks. That includes implementing the backup test. 

IBM was the vendor. They did well. It's working fine.

My company is a bank. As part of meeting the auditing requirements for banks, we use IBM Spectrum Protect. It can encrypt the backups as well, which helps us to meet our legal requirements for banking. We are seeing a return on investment.

I was with a different organization. We were using Symantec products.

I hope that all users go in for the latest version of IBM Spectrum Protect, which is cloud-based. They should equally ensure that everything comes together well. This should help in case they have all of these challenges like ours, i.e. where power is a major issue.

I rate IBM Spectrum Protect with a seven out of 10 because of our inability to pick a backup of a trusted VMware environment. When the VMware environment is collected, we cannot take a backup. We cannot take VMware backups for that environment.

Spectrum Protect provided a steady state in my backup operations and confidence in restores procedures with 99% assurance.

It is the only backup software which gives retro-compatibility, resilience, and enterprise agents.

This product should be more user-friendly for newcomers.

It is very stable after deployment and will perform in a steady state.

Scalability in not an issue for this product. It is a real enterprise class backup software.

Customer service is a plus, always giving an answer with skillful personnel.

There is really good technical support.

I had different backup products. Each one is really good with similar backup needs, but with Spectrum Protect, I could get a holistic product for heterogeneity environments.

In the beginning, the product was sometimes difficult to deploy. Then, there were improvements by IBM, giving more confidence to customers.

Now, setup is really straight forward.

Implementation was made in-house for many clients, which provided me with quite good expertise and autonomy for the future deployments.

Regarding retro-compatibility of the product between versions, your data is always available and the ROI is unquestionable. Also, the different license models can give good benefits to the end customer.

Licenses have to be studied regarding a client's need. However, with Entry License, Front End Capacity or Back End Capacity, there are many choices.

I tried other products, but some of them were not suitable for enterprise class.

The product is always getting better, and it is still the most reliable backup product in the market.

Our customers have a more traditional infrastructure, less related to snapshot technology. We have a couple customers trending towards cloud, but they are not there yet.

Most of the customers that I work with today tend to use more disk-based solutions. Therefore, we apply the new dedupe and compression technology, using maintenance and time to give more time for the backup window and less time for the overhead related to the daily housekeeping.

• Performance
• Scalability
• Backing up virtual environments
  

Most customers still struggle with the reporting piece, especially trending and generating reports. I think it needs some improvements in this area.

It is famous for its complexity, which is a big challenge for the customers to accept. Customers are still scared about some of the history related to Command One. These are some of the challenges that customer usually complain about.

Stability depends on how well it was implemented. In most cases, we depend on the movement reference models, so we rely on the recommendations coming from the IBM development team. That is our way to success.

This depends on size and how big the environment is. If this size good, there are no issues to scale out.

I have positive opinion about support, but my customers are not always happy with the Level 1 support. Sometimes, it just takes too long for the response to come, which is probably something that needs to be addressed.

With the initial setup, if you follow the blueprint rules, there are no issues.

Our customers also look at Commvault and Veeam.

I would recommend using Spectrum Protect.

Main criteria when selecting a vendor: loyalty.

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.

Our primary use case is supporting DB2 environment. We have about a couple hundred servers that we support for our SAP environment. It is one of the most critical applications that we have.

IBM Spectrum Protect has improved my organization with its total support of IBM products.

It is an IBM product. With SAP, you are using IBM software to protect it. DB2 and AIX servers are both IBM. Therefore, it is a total IBM solution, which helps.

At the moment, it meets DB2's needs sufficiently.

Stability is very good. It used to be rocky years ago. It has been a very good solution, and very rarely do we have problems with it.

I have worked with it for 20 years now. It scales well for the amount of clients that we use with it. The clients have been very good about keeping up with the technology changes.

It should meet our future needs. We do not plan to grow it at this time as we just use it for SAP. 

Their technical support is very good. They are very good about getting back to you and trying to help you work through issues. I generally contact support online versus calling in, but that is just my preference.

It was easy to set up/rebuild.

This was before my time with the company.

We have a cloud strategy using Amazon. 

For leveraging cloud, we are in the beginning stages. Therefore, we are using Avamar.

Our non-cloud/on-premise infrastructure consists of servers.

• 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.

The most valuable feature is the breadth of what it can do in an environment for backup protection of data. It's very scalable. Customers can adopt a Spectrum Protect solution at an entry level.

As their environment grows, the solution will grow with it. They don't have to worry about purchasing additional vendor solutions to meet their backup and storage needs.

With a single solution, a customer can manage all their data from a backup protection perspective. I think, single-handedly, the way that it does their backup is quite unique. It incorporates data reduction during all stages of the backup process. Customers can manage more data without incurring additional licensing costs.

I would like to see IBM take the solution more into enabling customers to work with cloud solutions. While they are making great strides to do that today, I think there are some areas for growth required in that area.

In addition to the hypervisors, whether it's VMware or Hyper-V, there are still some areas that I would like to see continued. So to sum up: Handling with the cloud and the hypervisor.

It's a very stable solution. It's been around for a very long time. Because of all that length of time it's been in use, it has become a very, very stable product.

IBM does a great job of innovating and keeping the product current with their new roll-outs and new updates to the solution to meet the ever changing needs that customers are facing today in managing and protecting their data.

It's really scalable. Great scalability.

I personally have never used support, but we work with customers who do. We find that their support, on the average, is very good.

We look for stability when first considering solutions. IBM, overall, brings the greatest set of solutions that can tackle a customer's storage needs. This is not just from a data protection perspective, but through the whole lifecycle of managing their data. IBM has a full spectrum of solutions they can bring for customers' needs.

I would definitely do the research. Part of that research should include the IBM Spectrum Protect solution.

One of the benefits they should always look at is the total cost of ownership of any solution. I think that's where Spectrum Protect really shines. You need to look past just the software costs.

There are also going to be hardware costs, training costs, and services involved with it. You'll find that with Spectrum Protect, the total cost of ownership of implementing and maintaining the solution is going to be less than other vendors.