IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

The feature I have found the most valuable is load replication.

We did not see any drawbacks to IBM Spectrum Protect before assisting a customer using Windows that wanted to migrate to using UNIX. IBM Spectrum Protect does not offer an option to migrate from other operating systems.

There are some drawbacks to load replication as well. On their site, you only have the option to restore a backup. You cannot download it. That is a limitation.

I have been working on IBM Spectrum Protect since 2006.

IBM Spectrum Protect is a stable solution.

IBM Spectrum Protect is a scalable solution.

How good the technical support is depends on the severity level of your problem. We solve most issues ourselves. But, when we have to escalate an issue and contact IMB's tech support, it can take a long time to get in touch with them because you have to go through Passport Advantage Online.

Prior to 2006, I worked with the 7TECH backup system. However, I did not work on a large scale. We had it deployed on a single machine on a single server.

The initial setup was easy but it does require focus. You have to have experience with IBM Spectrum Protect to deploy. However, if you do have the experience, it is easy.

The price of IBM Spectrum Protect is a bit higher than other products.

Our primary use case for IBM Spectrum Protect is backup. 

The IBM Spectrum Protect feature I find the most valuable is how fast it is. 

They should introduce more features for virtualization platforms and backing up IBMs. Backup speeds should also be improved. 

I have been using this solution for about a decade. 

IBM Spectrum Protect is stable. 

IBM Spectrum Protect is scalable. 

Technical support is okay. We have not had many issues with them. 

The initial setup at a new sight is straightforward. It takes about a week. 

IBM Spectrum Protect is expensive. 

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.

We completely back up our environment with Spectrum Protect: all databases in our environment, the files in the environment, and all the services. Performance is quite good. We do not worry about it.

We have an on-premise infrastructure. We have many hypervisors in use. We are using ESX, Hyper-V, KVM, and Power hardware. We using the SVC in combination with SSD storage. In addition, we use real and virtual tape libraries. It works well together. 

We will be closing the gap on moving to a cloud environment within the year.

The main thing is to keep the data safe and in files, keep it on tape ready for a request from a bank, and it is working perfectly with all our hardware. 

It is keeping the banking license alive, thus it is perfect for the business.

The wide variety that we have for using the software with each database and your own adapter. You can configure it, and it is quite good. Other backup software, you can be stuck to one environment and have to keep that environment.

Sometimes they have already erased information in our operational center and we need some of it for reporting to our subsidiaries if the backup was successful within the last months and which amount of data was backed up, archived, and stored. This is what the customer has interest in and we have to deliver. If the operational center could assist us, that would be fine. 

Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus, if they move together, that would be good. I heard already that we can get rid of data removal from virtual environments in the next version. The idea that Spectrum Protect Plus was dealing with appliances on ESX or Hyper-V seems good to me.

The service pack is very stable. We have had some problems about using storage agents on the X6 environment. It is not quite stable, but it is also not supported in a virtualized environment.

It is working great. Our database moves on 2.5TB and is still performing well. There are no worries about it.

We have roughly 30 instances for different purposes and different subsidiaries. We are using some Spectrum Protect servers only for library manager purposes to cover all these multiple parts, which have for storage agents and this is sometimes gets to its limit. It is not a well-known limit, but if you have more than 28,000 passes on one server, the performance decreases. That is what we found out and we try to keep it under this limit.

We are using the Technical Support, and sometimes it's a little bit annoying to come to the Level 3 support. Sometimes, it seems to me that if the Level 1 could not assist you and they did not find anyone in the Level 3, then you are stuck.

The initial setup is straightforward. The documentation is fine. There are some issues though. If you create a server, not all testings regarding fire systems are done in advance. Therefore, sometimes we have to go three rounds to fill all the gaps. This could be done a little bit better. 

I do not know who else was evaluated.

I would recommend Spectrum Protect.

Spectrum Protect Plus is covering the topic of industrial environments, e.g., X6 and Hyper-V, and this has been an open issue for years with us.

Our primary use case is to have tape back ups of our open system environments.

It has performed decently. There are certain gaps with the technology where we have issues, such as with our PO and our TO. 

Our infrastructure is on-premise. It is comprised of a tape library (TS3500), tape cartridges, tape drives, and then Spectrum Protect. 

We have three Spectrum Protect servers.

The scheduled backups ensure we meet the requirements for our business, and we keep backups of certain environments.

We have scheduled backups whenever we want.

I am not the one that manages stability on a day-to-day basis on my team, but from what I have seen, it is pretty stable overall. We do encounter issues every once and awhile, just with any product. 

Scalability is poor. As you get to bigger environments, this is where our gaps have been introduced. As we have grown over the past couple of years, the gaps have become more apparent. For example, RTO is a huge gap for us. If we had a disaster scenario and had to recover a bunch of stuff from tape, the RTO would be too long for us.

The more we grow, our gaps will become more apparent. For future needs, as we grow, Spectrum Protect will become a less viable solution for us.

Technical support through IBM whenever we have issues is always pretty good.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

For similar sized companies, I would probably recommend they look at different solutions. For a smaller company, it is probably a viable solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Check to see if it meets certain business requirements.

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.

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.

The primary use case for Spectrum Protect is as an enterprise back-end for companies' top database products, email, VMware, etc. We use it internally and promote that to our customers. It performs extremely well.

Our infrastructure is on-premise. 

When I help architect our customer solutions, we are primarily recommending flash for the catalog of the database, then a NL-SAS big storage bowl. We do have some tape, but we recommend going into the container bowl and replicating to a second site, whether that be a cloud container or a customer's on-premise at a second site.

I architect solutions. One of my biggest customers is managing three Spectrum Protect environments, two large footprints, and one medium footprint. Currently, they are doing two-site replication. They are experimenting with cloud containers (just in the early stages).

Data reduction definitely reduces costs, not only software costs, but from the infrastructure needed. Then, the ability to replicate second copy to cloud helps reduce their infrastructure and management costs (for that infrastructure) by being able to send encrypted, secure information over the internet.

The software-defined ability to do data reduction through deduplication and compression, as well as being able to replicate data to a cloud container.

Single store: The ability to mark an archive from my backup for long-term retention.

A lot of my customers always ask for legal holds, especially on email.

It is definitely a very robust solution. The biggest thing is follow the blueprints. IBM has done a great job documenting what the blueprints are. If you pay attention to those and follow them, you will avoid a lot of pitfalls.

The blueprints are awesome. From everything that I have see out there from competitors' products, Spectrum Protect scales significantly higher than anything else that I have seen.

Spectrum Protect will meet our customers' growth plans.

Technical support will always be a challenge. The biggest thing is you have to be very clear in defining what your needs and urgencies are. Though, they have gotten a lot better over time.

Our team was involved in the initial setup, and it was fairly complex.

The main competitors usually evaluated: EMC and Commvault. 

I would recommend Spectrum Protect.

Most important criteria for my customers when selecting a vendor: An enterprise backup solution which could cover multiple Clients, environments, and databases.