IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

I have found that the most valuable feature is useful documentation and troubleshooting.

I want a better user interface, support, and integrations.

I have been working with IBM Spectrum Protect for four or five years.

The stability of IBM Spectrum Protect is excellent.

We definitely are experiencing scalability.

I would rate technical support with high marks for their service.

Positive

The initial setup had some complexities.

We have found that the pricing is high in our country.

I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for security purposes. We implement this solution for many of our clients.

Due to the rapidly provision new server in my organization, the backup resource needs to add more also. But IBM Spectrum Protect can help me to optimize the backup resource. 

The backup aspect of the solution is very good. The solution allows for incremental backups forever. It saves your backup files while also saving space.

The product is quite stable.

The API is simple to integrate into a custom application.

You need to use command line rather than the console. It would be better if users didn't have to use command line in order to use the solution.

Technical isn't so great. It's a bit slow in terms of response. They need to get back to their users a lot faster.

The licensing isn't very clear. They should work to simply or clarify the cost structure.

More than 10 years

We have enjoyed very good stability while using this solution. It's reliable and seems to be free of bugs and glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. We've been happy with it.

We have a pretty big setup. There are users across ten servers. I'm not sure exactly how many there are in total.

Technical support is a bit too slow. They really should be more responsive.

There is no remote support.

As long as you have a bit of experience, you shouldn't have any trouble with the initial setup. I didn't handle it directly, however. We had someone who did it and he was quite knowledgable. Due to that, the deployment was pretty quick. He had is up and running in three or four hours. 

We handled some aspects ourselves, however, we did enlist some outside help as well for the initial implementation.

The licensing process is very unclear and a bit complicated. Many of our clients have trouble figuring it out. They'll buy a license and then they find out the limits are wrong. 

We're an implementor.

Overall, we've had a good experience with the solution and I would easily recommend this product to other organizations.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it at a seven.

• Enterprise solution
• Scripting-automation possibilities
• Easy commands
• Very good monitoring tool 
• Operations center
• Good compression
• Deduplication

We've used it for a very long time and this is impossible to describe. 

• Enterprise solution
• Easy to build and add new instances: physical and virtual 
• Easy deployment in the cloud
• Scripting-automation possibilities necessary to have in a big environment above 5 PB a month
• Very good monitoring tool 
• "Operations center" very useful in order to check how instances feel and backup results.
• We also use it to create tickets in SNOW in order to address issues and assign to the right team.  

• A new adjustment to Azure cloud
• Possibility to split big file spaces CIFS and NFS into smaller parts (together with storage split) in order to avoid retaking backup from scratch.
• Possibility to move file-spaces between nodes: These are very needed in very big environments.

I primarily use the backup and recovery features.

It works well with AIX. 

Sometimes we experience trouble with the backup transfer of the control files. 

The product is very stable.

The pricing of the solution is high in comparison to other products on the market. For example, Symantec costs less than this solution.

It is an enterprise product.  

We can gain benefit from any advance features (incremental forever, deduplication, compression, etc.).

• Incremental forever: This feature helps us reduce backup time and backup storage space.
• Deduplication and compression: This feature helps us move away from physical tape by using disk.
• Replication: This feature help us to offsite backup data without tape. Data replication is incremental and will send only non-duplicate data.

The user interface (UI) for the admin is still not good. It is way too complicated to manage the product, as we still need to use command line. IBM launched the Operations Center (OC), but there are still functions lacking, especially since we cannot manage all our scheduled tasks by using the GUI. 

There have been stability issues. The product does not exactly have a high availability (HA) solution.

There have been scalability issues. The core product does not support scale out. We needed to create a new system and manage resources separate from the existing one.

I would rate the technical support as a seven out of 10.

We did not use a previous solution.

The initial setup is complex. The solution needs a designer who knows the product in-depth.

The product is low cost. It is very cool when we design it to using licensing based on post capacity.

We compared it to NetBackup. In the end, for design and cost optimization, we chose IBM Spectrum Protect.

The product may look difficult to manage, but if you need enterprise backup software which supports cross platform and you have good design and skills transfer, this product will help reduce costs.

Spectrum Protect is a primary backup product that is used for physical and virtual servers in the open systems world.

One of our customers is using a cloud strategy, but it is on-prem cloud. So, it is cloud object storage.

Some of our customers are going to VTL (IBM and non-IBM). I have one customer who will be going to a Spectrum Scale environment for their backup. The Spectrum Scale environment is doing spinning disk, and they migrated off of a VTL product onto it. These are major two infrastructure environments that I have seen.

Most of my clients have been running Spectrum Protect for a long time, so they have been running it for years. If they have migrated off of it, they migrated off of it because of its lack of virtual environment functions.

• The speed of backup
• The amount of data that it protects with very little storage by doing incremental forever.

Its availability has been excellent.

Scalability is pretty much unlimited.

One client with a distributing environment has 130 to 140 instances. Another client has probably somewhere between 10 to 15.

I have not personally used technical support. The feedback from my clients has been pretty positive. 

I do have one customer who does not tend to stay current, and that causes issues. Anytime you are not very current and call in with an issue, it is hard to get it resolved. It will depend on how far back you go though.

I was involved in a migration setup. When one of our customers was moving from a VTL to Spectrum scale for their target storage, we had to go through some migrations because we switched from VTL doing the replication to using Spectrum Protect for node replication, using compression, etc. It was pretty straightforward.

The valuable features for me are Disaster Recovery Manager, Replication and and File Device Class for ease of recovery.

I’m a consultant. I provide installation and technical support and help to customers. TSM provides ease of use for customers to recover from any type of data disaster.

Once the product is installed and configured correctly, it’s easy to use. But for the average user, the product is extremely difficult when compared to other products.

15+ years

I’ve been doing this for 15 years. Deployment and installation for me is fairly easy.

Unless run on Windows or an undersized machine, the product is fairly stable.

This scales quite large.

Depends on the type of support the customer purchases. But overall IBM’s first line of support is pretty bad. Not very knowledgeable and take forever to return a call and ask for the same information over and over.

Poor at the first level.

No other products used.

The set up is complex unless you know the product.

It usually takes a week of consulting to implement. That can cost 10-15k plus the cost of the product.

No other options have been considered.

Hire an expert to install and configure it and get some training to make it run.

Overall the solution is fairly complete.

The installation process could be simplified. However, the tool is comprehensive and if the installation is too easy, then the tool itself will be too simple as well. I do not see any pain points. The only issue I see is the pricing, it is expensive.

We have been using the solution with the last 12 months.

It is a really capable tool. It is the best solutions on the market regarding recovering and the way it functions.

The scalability is really good. It is very capable, it has high availability, multiple backup servers, many posts, and workloads.

The installation is complex. It is a comprehensive solution as IBM has evolved from the TSM and Tivoli Storage Manager. It has multiple integrators, allowing it to communicate with most of the kinds of workloads. It is not easy to deploy.

We usually had three people doing the deployment. The solution uses multiple integrators, for example, they integrated with Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft, and Bare Metal. You will normally need one senior deployer, and a senior analyst to deploy it. If the individual that is going to do the deployment is a high-level senior person, he can do it by himself depending on experience. If there is not a senior person, you are going to need more than one to assist.

The solution is expensive.

The solution is capable of connecting to the cloud, public or private, but we are currently using it on-premises on this particular project.

I rate IBM Spectrum Protect a nine out of ten.