IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

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.

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.

Our primary use for this solution is Backup & Recovery.

We have worked with old fashioned tape media hierarchies, completely disk-based backup using Data Domain, and now a mixed tape and directory container pool environment.

This solution has improved our organization through better file and database recovery.

The most valuable features are scripting to control daily processing, scripting to integrate special client backups, and scripting to develop enhanced reporting (primarily using SQL).

The deduplication must be perfect, and thus should be improved. It costs us too much when we hit corruption in a backup and cannot recover.  

Most of our customers use it for backup. It performs very well.

Most of my customers are still doing the traditional disk storage backed by primarily tape storage on on-premise infrastructure environments. A few are doing disk only, and that will probably continue to grow, but most of our customers use tape. For their use cases, they find it suits their needs.

We currently manage dozens of Spectrum Protect instances.

For most of our customers, it is more efficient than most traditional backup solutions. It can also scale from a very small environment to a very large, multiple-tenant environment.

The incremental forever backup, which makes it more efficient than any other solution that does not use this scheme.

Continue the incremental improvements that they have been doing all along. There is not any one big thing right now that my customers can think to do. 

The Spectral Protect Plus addresses the VM inside of things and is a huge improvement. This is the main thing everyone has been seeing.

It has always been very stable.

It is scalable beyond anything my customers ever aspire to.

We expect the product to meet our growth needs.

For the most part, once you get them the right information, technical support is very effective. Getting them all the necessary diagnostic information is still very painful.

I do the initial setups of the solution. The initial setups are complex still. This is maybe the one weak point, getting it setup, but this is where I help.

Most of my customers are coming from old NetBackup type of environments. What I see a lot more now is Commvault, and these two being the other two main competitors.

I would recommend Spectrum Protect.

Pay attention to the backup, because it does matter in terms of the efficiency and scalability of the solution. A lot of other approaches are not as effective.

Customers main criteria for choosing Spectrum Protect:

• Efficiency
• Scalability.

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.

It is our enterprise backup system.

Our on-premise infrastructure is comprised of Windows VM, AIX, and SUSE Linux for SAP HANA. We currently do not have a cloud strategy.

The product has been there ever since I have been there; the enterprise system along with the hierarchical system. It is pretty easy to use and maintain. I do not run it all the time, but I can get in and do what needs to be done. When I have to do disaster recoveries, I can do it with this tool.

That it backs up everything, except Linux.

I should be able to backup Linux. I would like SUSE for Linux on POWER. Right now, we have to use Storex, which is a pain to use.

It seems to be fine. We don't have any problems.

We are well under what the capability of it is. We are a mid-sized shop with hundreds of servers, not thousands. We could do more, it just depends on how much money we want to spend.

We will probably grow in data, but not in numbers of systems. I am sure it is going to go more towards VMs and SUSE Linux. The servers are getting smaller, holding more data. Also, I am hoping we get off of tapes. 

Technical support seems pretty good. I have not had any problems with them. They seem to know what they are doing when I get a hold of them, because there are times that our admin is not there and I have to take care of things that I do not know about.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I have used HPE. 

I have also used NetBackup. NetBackup seemed a little more intuitive, but it did not do near as much. This will do a lot more.

Incremental forever philosophy.

The benefits are that it's an efficient, scalable, and reliable product that provides what it is supposed to provide.

I would like to see better cloud integration. The big thing is the ability to better integrate with the cloud.

The current cloud integration is good and improving. The conference provided insight to some interesting and useful cloud directions that I was not aware of when we spoke. But in response to your question, I would like to see more (is better - right?) functionality. One notion is to provide self describing backup data which can be picked up by a second Spectrum Protect server in an ad-hoc manner. This could provide a simple means of DR recovery without requiring a DB Restore or existing replication configuration.

Another, similar notion would be an ability to create cloud based backup sets or client images which could be retrieved directly to a client without a Spectrum Protect server. There would be some serious security considerations for both of these ideas and their use case may be too small to realistically consider. I would like to say that I did meet some sharp folks who work in Spectrum Protect Development and they do like to think outside the box and they seriously consider input from their user community.

Stability is very good.

Scalability is excellent.

I've used tech support. Tech support is usually pretty good. Sometimes it takes a while to get past the first level, but once you do, know that they're just doing their job. They are very knowledgeable people who will do everything they can to reach out to you and make sure that they resolve the problem.

Understand how the incremental approach can be better than other solutions. It's a very good solution. It has some improvement to go, but compared to anything else out there, it's the top of the pack.