IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

My primary use case for this solution is for large data backup.

This is a very mature product. It has been around in the large data set. People widely use this product and it helps our organization for backing up the petabytes of data.

This solution does not have good support for virtualization and a hyper-converged environment.

We use it for physical and virtual servers, especially when we are talking about IBM Power architecture.

• Deduplication
• Compression

But really, today, all features are available from all vendors. We can ensure incremental backups, full backups, differential backups. These are not specific to IBM. All other products contain the same features. But when I'm backing up a Power server, I feel more comfortable with IBM Spectrum Protect because it's the same vendor.

The solution is not complex, it's very easy to configure agents or VM backup and restore. Upgrades from one version to another are very fast and the product is very stable.

I really haven't noticed that something is missing. There is a central console for all backups and restores. Perhaps if they could add replication to a second site or third site from the same console, that would be helpful. Currently, we have to connect to another console.

I'm very comfortable with it. I see that the product is very stable. It's a good product.

It's very scalable. We can start the product with 10 machines and we can manage more than 1000 machines. There are no limitations with respect to adding agents. The only thing we need is the addition of some resources for the backup server. For example, we can start with a backup server with 16 gigabits of memory and when we add many jobs and many agents to the backup, we have to add some resource tools to the backup server.

Technical support is very good. When we submit a ticket, it will be resolved in a short timeframe. I believe the technical support is managed today by Watson, although I'm not sure. Watson for IBM Support Center is a machine but today it's the best support of all vendors we interact with. It's better than other vendors because we communicate with the machine and, from the database, it resolves all tickets in a short time.

In this case, we received recommendations, a short-list. IBM was on that list. We went with IBM because we have many IBM Power servers. There are some work loads for PowerVM and IBM knows the architecture of PowerVM better.

Initial setup is very easy. If there are updates, there are recommended actions.

There may be an advantage to going with IBM in terms of pricing. They have a pay-as-you-grow policy, so there is no need to take one license for the entire datacenter. You can start with small licenses and then grow, and pay, as you use more.

EMC and one other.

I rate it a nine out of 10. It's a good product, simple to use, simple to configure, and we get very good technical support.

The ability to seamlessly migrate storage sub-systems underneath IBM Spectrum Virtualize.

Being able to migrate off and release storage without impacting the client at all.

The ability to migrate seamlessly between clusters, such as between Spectrum Virtualize clusters.

It is very good, very stable.

Scalability needs some work in some areas. The number of volumes needs to be increased drastically. That's number one.

Technical support on the product is very good.

We were using Direct Attached DS8000 before and we switched for scalability.

The setup was pretty straightforward.

Don't go with EMC. Go with IBM. Go with this product. Absolutely. It's a very good product compared to the competitors.

Disaster Recovery Manager, TDP Backup Vmware, TDP Oracle, TDP Exchange. Flash Copy Manager.

Easy, relieable, Scalable Backup Solutions to save data and recovery.

Tape management.

9 years.

No issues.

No issues.

No issues.

10/10.

10/10.

No.

Vendor team.

Increase RPO, and reduce RTO.

Symantec Backup Exec.

The solution is mainly used for backup of data and customers' infrastructure, such as, for example, backup of databases, Oracle, SQL, a backup of the self server, a backup of SharePoint et cetera.

It's very hard to say which feature is most valuable. It's a complex product. It's not possible to say what is most valuable.

The solution is mostly stable.

The product scales well.

The solution offers good cloud extensions.

The technical support on offer is pretty good.

The user interface could be better. It could be more intuitive or more user-friendly.

The initial setup is complex.

It's not a good option for smaller companies. It can be a bit expensive.

I've been using Spectrum Protect for maybe seven or eight years. It's been a while.

There are some troubles, however, definitively it's a very stable product. There aren't too many issues with bugs or glitches. It's pretty reliable.

This solution is more suitable for medium and large infrastructures, in my experience.

While it does depend on the environment, for the most part, the solution scales easily. The operating system, hardware, et cetera, make it compatible with all the vendors.

I've been in touch with technical support on four to seven occasions. It was very valuable, speaking IT IBM support. It was okay. They helped me. I'd say we are satisfied with the level of service that has been provided to us.

We also concurrently use Veeam and HP Data Protector.

If I compared it to, for example, Veeam, Veeam is more valuable for a cloud environment and it's not suitable for the physical environment. Spectrum Protect is a complex product and it's suitable for both the cloud and physical environments. Veeam, however, has a better user interface. There's no perfect product. Basically, some products have more advantages in one area and others in other areas.

The ease of the setup depends on the infrastructure, however, mostly it's a complex process as it's not so easy to deploy Spectrum Protect when you compare it to the other products.

You have to know the customer infrastructure and you have to know what they need, and what they want to do. It's important that their requirements are clear. Even when you deploy according to these requirements, it's very complex. 

The solution does have automatic maintenance services, however, it needs an administrator on the system engineering corrections. It's not required not every day, however, from time to time, you'll have to check the logs and everything.

For small customers, it can be a very expensive product. It's much more suited to larger organizations. It's expensive in comparison to other solutions, and it doesn't make sense, cost-wise when you are a small company.

We are a service provider and a business partner with IBM. We have just come out with the latest update and other customers with the specific version. It depends. We have various customers.

It's a good product overall.

I'd are it at a nine out of ten. We've mostly been very pleased with its capabilities.

It is a very stable product. The cost is similar to that of other enterprise solutions.

The main admin console from the UI cannot do anything in the product. It just allows us to maintain, maybe, 30% to 40%. For the rest, we have to use the command line. I think the management console could be improved.

The initial setup is very complex.

I've been using this solution for more than twenty years.

IBM Spectrum Protect is very stable.

The technical support is at a medium level; not bad and not good.

The initial setup was very complex.

When compared to the cost of other enterprise products, it seems to be in the same range. However, compared to the cost of non-enterprise products, it is really high.

I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect at eight on a scale from one to ten.

This product handles backup issues in all areas and tasks, both stand-alone and various cluster options, replication.

Spectrum Protect does not just improve our work, it saves the infrastructure of more than one enterprise in the event of hacker attacks, administrative errors, and a variety of other failures.

The main feature of this product is a flexible architecture and functionality that allows you to solve problems of any complexity and scale. Most importantly, it is not just a product that simply makes a backup, but it restores and saves a large number of services in critical situations. By the way, it works fine with different types of clouds, supports S3.

I think it makes sense to think about Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization because Red Hat has better backup.

We use Spectrum Protect as our core product for backup and recovery of all our servers, and has started to use this for our office workstations too.

IBM is a partner-friendly company which has open API that one can use. In our case, we have built solutions which have helped many customers who use API to protect databases and applications with Spectrum Protect that IBM doesn't protect today. For example, MongoDB , MariaDB , MySQL , PostgreSQL, Firebird, Progress OpenEdge , SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise , and SAP IQ Server. See www.ligtas.org.

Space efficient data reduction, using progressive incremental forever in combination with deduplication and compression. IBM philosophy is to not backup data that has not been changed

I would like to see a way to have "always on" implemented. In this way, if an error happened on the primary backup server, there would be a way to continue to protect the data without any disturbance. This is partly implemented today, but only in the purpose of restore.

There are normal and known limitations with stability.

It can scale from very low to very big using one instance. One can use StorageNodes (a media server) to further extend its capacity by avoiding sending data traffic to the backup server.

I have experience of many different solutions, and some of them do not exist anymore.

REELbackup was the best at it time, but was based on periodically full backups. The database was local on each server which has fantastic scalability. This product doesn't exist anymore, and would not be the best today because of periodically full backups, etc.

Networker is great with its many integrations to databases. But requires at the time when I used it periodically full backups. Newer version of the product has a way to overcome this, but requires more resources in the back-end. The database wiz in the system didn't respond sometimes which causes the backup to fail frequently. Networker seams also to not be a product that EMC and DELL see as strategic for the future.

Netbackup is great with its way to balance the data streams to get a good throughput, but requires periodically full backups at least when I used it. It has integrations to many databases.

IBM Spectrum Protect is the best of them. This solution is the best way to store backups with its space efficient data reduction technologies. In the past when tape was the main media for backup; it was very difficult to improve restore performance as the data was spread on many tapes, and collocation improves only a bit; but far from its competitors.

Today when most customers use disk or VTL this is no longer an issue. It is better than the competitors today, as only one restore is needed compared to if you have periodically full backups where you have to restore firstly it's full and all its incremental backups.

With help from partners ('LIGTAS') to IBM you can also have block level incremental forever for databases. Another great function is incremental restore which restores only the data that has been changed to the point in time selected. This also exists for databases with help from partners to IBM ('LIGTAS')

In the past, it was complex to set up the solution. But today, it is easier with its graphical interface.

We can now be sure that we have a valid insurance, and has used this several time to restore individual objects which help our implementation of new products etc..

Use capacity licensing. It's easier and cheaper.

• Commvault
• NetBackup
• Networker

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