IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

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.

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.