IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

My company was using IBM Spectrum Protect to back up the environment. It helped my company implement a backup policy. My company needed different versioning and types of backup, but in the last two years, the license cost for the solution got out of hand.

What I found most valuable in IBM Spectrum Protect is that it allows you to back up physical machines, and its proxy feature lets you back up virtual machines.

Software-wise, IBM Spectrum Protect didn't handle virtual machines that well, but I heard that the issue had been resolved on IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, though I didn't get a chance to test that feature.

The license cost is mainly the area for improvement in IBM Spectrum Protect.

Another con in the solution is the Microsoft Office 365 backup, which needed to be handled better by IBM Spectrum Protect, and could have some improvements.

My company switched from IBM Spectrum Protect to Veeam, but I had hands-on experience with IBM Spectrum Protect within the last twelve months.

My company has been using IBM Spectrum Protect for the last ten years.

IBM Spectrum Protect is a very stable solution, so I'm rating it eight out of ten in terms of stability.

Scalability-wise, IBM Spectrum Protect is a seven out of ten for me.

I'm rating the technical support for IBM Spectrum Protect a nine out of ten.

Positive

We stepped away from IBM Spectrum Protect and have started using Veeam, primarily because of the higher license cost of IBM Spectrum Protect.

Before using IBM Spectrum Protect, we used Omniback from HP, and we switched to IBM Spectrum Protect because Omniback didn't keep up with the trend, was still working with OTA backup, and didn't support our backup needs, for example, versioning.

Regarding the initial setup for IBM Spectrum Protect, it's a four out of ten for me. It's complex.

Complete deployment of IBM Spectrum Protect took two weeks.

Initially, the team had some problems with the setup because there was an error in the assessment, and my company ran out of capacity within two months of implementing IBM Spectrum Protect. It was garbage in, garbage out. The evaluation by the administrators was not done correctly, so that IBM couldn't supply an adequate solution.

We hired a consultant from IBM to deploy IBM Spectrum Protect ten years ago. The consultant assessed the environment and implemented the solution.

I don't have the metrics on ROI from IBM Spectrum Protect, but mostly, my company switched over to the product because Omniback was no longer adequate.

Using IBM Spectrum Protect meant using fewer tapes versus Omniback because IBM Spectrum Protect could handle bigger tape sizes, while Omniback held three or five-millimeter tape sizes. IBM Spectrum Protect required less storage, so it was mostly good enough to support my company's new backup policy through versioning, encryption, and security.

ROI-wise, I'm scoring IBM Spectrum Protect as seven out of ten.

IBM Spectrum Protect, cost-wise, has way higher pricing than Veeam. By switching over to Veeam, my company saved over $600,000 in USD.

My company was on a PPU license for IBM Spectrum Protect, which was okay initially. After two or three years, IBM called to switch the license to terabyte licensing, and it seemed OK to change at the time, but in the last three or four years, it became expensive.

The IBM Spectrum Protect pricing is a two on a scale of one to ten.

My company paid additional fees for maintenance, apart from the standard licensing fees.

I evaluated a solution from Quantum, though I can't recall its name.

I have experience with IBM Spectrum Protect, formerly Tivoli Storage Manager.

My company was an IBM customer but has stepped away and moved to Veeam.

The company had three different sites where the solution had on-premise deployments.

Regarding the implementation, there was an IBM consultant on site and two backup administrations learning the IBM Spectrum Protect installation process along the way. My company also had a team of five or six system and network administrators who helped with client-related concerns because my company had more than one hundred fifty clients for separate sites. The two backup administrators handled the maintenance for IBM Spectrum Protect.

One thousand two hundred people use the solution.

I would suggest to others looking into implementing IBM Spectrum Protect to research terabyte licensing and be clear on how much data your company has, including your expected data growth, so you can assess where you'll stand regarding license costs. If you're moving to big data or you'll be storing big data, PPU licensing could be a more suitable option.

My rating for IBM Spectrum Protect is seven out of ten because it's one of the two best backup software currently available. It also has excellent support if you have a maintenance contract, but I live in a small country, so this could be why IBM provided better support.

I'm an IBM Spectrum Protect customer.

The most valuable feature for data recovery in IBM Spectrum Protect is its database protection capabilities. It ensures the integrity and availability of databases through online communication and robust backup drivers.

There is room for improvement in IBM Spectrum Protect, especially regarding its support for virtual environment backups. IBM hasn't progressed much in enhancing its products, leaving users seeking alternative solutions for virtual backups, like Spectrum Protect Plus.

I have been working with IBM Spectrum Protect for 18 years.

IBM Spectrum Protect is very stable. We haven't had any stability issues so far.

IBM Spectrum Protect is highly scalable, ranging from small environments with just a few servers to large-scale deployments with up to 3,000 servers.

I would rate the technical support as an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of IBM Spectrum Protect is complex but flexible, suitable for various environments. Implementation typically takes around three to four months for a large environment with over 500 servers. It may require a team of one specialist and two analysts for deployment and one person for ongoing maintenance.

The incremental backup capability in IBM Spectrum Protect has streamlined daily operations by steadily backing up data over time. However, it is important to note that Spectrum Protect focuses on database and file/folder backups, not virtual environments. For virtual environment backups, Spectrum Protect Plus is required.

IBM Spectrum Protect primarily focuses on backing up databases, online databases, files, and folders, but it lacks native support for virtual machine backups. For virtual environment backups, you would need to use a specific tool called Spectrum Protect Plus.

The deduplication technology in IBM Spectrum Protect helps reduce storage needs but performs at a medium level of efficiency and performance.

I would recommend IBM Spectrum Protect based on your environment's backup strategy. If you primarily need to backup databases, it is a good choice. However, for large virtual environments, consider combining it with other technologies like Spectrum Protect Plus for comprehensive coverage.

Overall, I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect as a five out of ten.

I am a consultant and work with different IT technology including data protection solutions. We work with the legacy version of IBM Spectrum Protect from 6.x version all the way to the latest version, 8.1.12.

I have implemented Spectrum Protect for organizations as big as 1,500 users and others that are small workgroups of 40 or 50 people.

Spectrum Protect is used for protecting virtualized workloads. It also allows you to protect traditional workloads such as physical machines and physical servers. It is well suited for storing data to tape.

The addition of the retention set feature provides a reduction in storage costs. It also reduces RTO and RPO so that you can respond quickly to your clients and services in case of data loss. 

Spectrum Protect is a robust solution. A valuable feature of this solution is the retention sets, which is a fairly new addition to the feature portfolio. This allows you to back up information to leverage all their copies of backup and not do new backups of the same information over and over again. 

The usability of IBM Spectrum Protect could be improved, specifically additional features to the product in the operations center. Additional reporting facilities and stronger reporting tools such as build dashboards would be beneficial. The tool should allow you to write SQL queries to get the information as it is not easy for entry users to retrieve some reports.

I would also value a comprehensive mass deployment solution for clients that would provide an automated method for deploying agents across a large environment, not only for Windows, but also for AIX and Linux. This would reduce the time required to deploy the tool.

I have been working with IBM Spectrum Protect for 10 years and consider myself an expert on this solution.

IBM Spectrum Protect is stable.

This solution is scalable. It is a very good solution for mid-range and enterprise customers. It is suitable for a broad range of different environments and types of customers, verticals, and other segments that can implement this product. 

Technical support of IBM Spectrum Protect is superb. They always help us to quickly get to the root cause of the problem. The incidents are well managed so that we can restore service quickly. The product comes with good quality documentation and videos that share best practices and help you get up to speed quickly. This knowledge helps you give a good description to their support team which also helps arrive at a quick solution.

In previous years we used Tivoli Storage Manager. The solution took up to three months to deploy. 

The initial setup of IBM Spectrum is straightforward. Currently, there are blueprints that have a solution to implement quickly. The blueprints come with automated scripts that can be leveraged to make the deployment simpler. You just have to run a script and then complete a set of policies, storage devices, users. The other configurations are already done for you. The documentation, or blueprints, are being updated all the time so you always have a way to reduce deployment time. Deployment takes as little as three or four days.

IBM Spectrum Protect listens to their customers and the feedback about each component and feature. They are always improving quickly based on new trends and software development and agile methodologies.

You have to be careful or aware of the different solutions and the different agents that the solution comes up with so that you select the right product for the right use case. The solution comes with different products that are intended to protect certain workloads such as databases like SAP HANA products. 

I also recommend that you get to know the product well, leverage the latest features so that you can get the most value from it. 

Lastly, I would recommend that you use IBM Spectrum Protect's service and support not only when you have problems but also for recommendations on how to do certain things properly so that you don't have problems in the future. 

I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect an 8 out of 10. It is a great product, it's stable and has been on the market for a long time. 

I cannot tell what is the tool's most valuable feature. It is used in a different department of my company.

The technical team's service depends on where the support service is located. Some products are not included in IBM itself, but external companies are developing some solutions for IBM. I think the support within IBM is even better than that offered for IBM Cloud Management Console by Rocket Software, so I think the support is not as good as IBM itself.

I have been using IBM Spectrum Protect for fifteen years. My company uses the tool for different departments. I am a customer of the solution.

It is a very stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

A maximum of five people use the tool.

The solution's technical support is pretty good. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have not worked with any other tools apart from IBM Spectrum Protect.

A couple of years ago, I worked with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM).

For my company, the tool is affordable and reasonable, but most people don't know that. People only see one major price for the tool, which runs into millions, so they would always say that it is an expensive tool, but it isn't, and it is a normal price for me. I saw some of the comments on PeerSpot's website. I don't think most people know that when a company has large systems in place, the TCO is a lot lower.

Speaking about how IBM Spectrum Protect has handled our enterprise-level backup and recovery needs, I would say that we are using it right now for Linux and as an archive system. We also have an IBM storage system.

I have not used IBM Spectrum Protect for disaster recovery planning. Mostly, our service as a company is to maintain and administer IBM Spectrum Protect.

I am not only familiar with the tool's deduplication technology but also with its competitor's product from Dell.

I cannot say whether the duplication technology of IBM Spectrum Protect improved our storage efficiency because we do not have it in-house.

I would not recommend the tool to others because it is a really complex product. My company has an external third-party supplier that maintains and administers the tool for us.

The tool is complex. You can't spend a lot of time administering and maintaining the system.

We only use it for archiving and some backups in our company.

I rate the tool a six to seven out of ten,

We use the solution for our data protection.

We deployed the solution on-premises because the majority of our applications are also on-premises.

The file-restoring feature is the most valuable.

The Operations Center requires improvement. We are still using TSM Manager for many of our projects to administer our platform because the gap was not resolved with the new Operations Center.

I have been using the solution for ten years.

I give the stability a ten out of ten.

I give the scalability an eight out of ten.

The technical support team is always prompt in their response.

Positive

I previously used, NetApp Backup and Atempo Time Navigator but in the financial industry IBM Spectrum Protect is the most popular solution.

I have more than ten years of experience with the solution, so setting it up is easy for me. The deployment took less than one hour.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have seen a return on investment with IBM Spectrum Protect because we are guaranteed to have our data when we need it.

We pay for a terabyte license to support our backend usage.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

We have two engineers responsible for the maintenance.

I recommend the solution to others.

There are various use cases. We have managed services, and we have customers on-prem or backing up to our TSM servers. There are different ways.

I work with various versions. I work for a service provider. We manage the service of various customers. So, we have from 8.1.9 to 8.1.14.

Its flexibility is valuable. It is a very flexible solution. There are always more ways than one to do something. It is a software solution, which means you can buy your own hardware and expand it whenever you want. You are not boxed in or locked into something you've bought and outgrown. You can always expand it.

They are behind on many things, especially security. They are catching up a little bit now, but the competitors are doing better security-wise. There should be malware detection and prevention and higher security.

The ease of use also needs improvement. There are many products that are easier to use than Spectrum Protect. It is quite complex to manage, and you need an experienced administrator to manage it, whereas other products are easier to get into. You can have somebody with less experience managing them.

I have been working with this solution for about 15 years.

It is very stable. Especially over the last five years or so, it has been extremely stable. I've had very few crashes or very few downtimes. They are almost nonexistent.

It is very scalable. It scales very high as well. It is an enterprise-class solution. It is one of the most scalable ones.

We have 10 to 15 customers who have their own TSM server and products, and then we have about 18 customers who back up to our servers.

It depends. The TSM server is pretty straightforward. Some other parts are pretty complex. The VMware solution is very complex, especially compared to competitors.

Deployment depends on the size and the customer requirements. If you want to set up a small company server, it takes one or two hours. If you have to set up a large enterprise with various wishes and custom demands, it can take days or maybe a week. For a basic customer with VMware, it is set up within a day with a few databases and a few things.

For deployment, one person is enough. A qualified and certified engineer has to do that because otherwise, we won't give the warranty. So, that person has to be a certified engineer.

We have customers who manage their own TSM servers, and we just come in to install it, or if there are any serious problems. We resell it as well as sell our managed services. They can back up to our servers. We have customers who have their own TSM servers, but we manage those for them. We manage the clients and servers. For some customers, we only manage servers, and they manage the clients.

We do A to Z for TSM basically. We are IBM's only business partner in our country. To our customers, we are basically IBM.

We are a managed service provider. Backup makes us money. So, the ROI is always there.

That's no longer my department, but I have some past experience with licensing. It is not cheap. I would rate it a three out of five in terms of licensing.

In terms of additional costs, there is management overhead. It is a complex solution and a lot of work goes into managing clients. It has gotten better over the years, but compared to its competitor, it is still heavy on management overhead. That comes with flexibility, and that's the price you pay when you want a solution that can do everything and not just a few things. It is not a simple solution. It is a complex solution, and that requires some management overhead. However, you can automate it pretty easily because it has a SQL interface. If you have a person who can script or knows SQL, you can automate a lot with it. It has a command line interface, and there is also an API. The command line is very much like Linux or Unix. It is really highly automatable.

Even though TSM is a great product, it is a great product for a classic backup solution and not for the future. It is a legacy solution. The newest product is IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, but we haven't adopted it. The legacy TSM server is great. It was the best product around, but now, it is not. For a new solution, it is not the best product. If I am looking to buy a new product, I would look elsewhere. I would look to the competition that is more modern and more up-to-date. 

I would rate it an 8 out of 10. It is still very good. It is good for what it can be used for, but if you need a more modern solution, it is not the perfect solution anymore.

We have two data centers, we have two Spectrum Protect servers, and we do cross replicating between them.

The main use case is AIX. Because AIX is an IBM product, they have their backup software for it, for SysBack and things of that nature that most other companies don't get into because there are not a lot of companies that use AIX. Bigger federal government companies use AIX  but AIX is a big one that always hampers us. That's why the business, over the last several years, we've been trying to encourage them to go into the VMware arena. We're using a lot of different products in VMware that are able to recover things very quickly, versus Spectrum Protect and AIX, you have to drop down the OS, then you have to restore the database, and then you have to roll the logs forward.

All of that takes time, whereas in VMware you can take snapshots, or you can use products like Zerto. We have Zerto in-house where we're doing asynchronous replication from our primary site to our DR site. Our VMware systems that are being protected by Zerto are seconds behind the production world. We're running anywhere from four seconds to 11 seconds behind, whereas in AIX, you have from that last backup. You may be eight hours behind. It's challenges like that, that we run into, that I'm always on the lookout for. I've been using Spectrum Protect since it was TSM for 17 years, but I'm not tied to it. There are other products out there that make your life a lot easier. As far as the data protection admin or business continuity, whatever you want to call the title they have out there, but those are challenges that we run into. And so that's where we're going, but it's just going to take some time to get there.

In the past, we've always been uploading our stuff to tape. We now have disc-based solutions, and those disc-based solutions, one of the neat features of them is when you use what they call TSM for VE, Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environment, you're able to crack those snapshots open and are able to do file-level recoveries out of them. It gives you the ability to get rid of some file-level backups that you're using and gives you the ability to get rid of some SQL data protection backups. 

Instead of taking three different backups of your systems, you're taking only one. You're able to crack that open and get what you need. The incident recovery, where it creates the VM and then you're running it, technically you're running it on Spectrum Protect. But then in the background, it's doing the storage motion and moving it off the Spectrum Protect back to your VMware environment. The users don't know the difference. 

Those are nice really features that we really use. And it's really been helpful since we've gone to an all disc-based solution.

Their support is lacking. I've talked to their developers and stuff in the last couple of weeks and they reassure me that some people have retired, and they're working on getting that bumped back up. But the support lacks a lot to be desired at this point.

Their backups are once a day, they're not doing asynchronous replication. They're doing a one time a night backup. So whereas products like Zerto, every time there's a change in a block, it's immediately written across. They're not doing replication instantaneous, they're doing it once a day. There is a lot to be desired there.

At the company that I'm at now, they've had it since 2004. I've been here since 2010. I used it at my prior company, and I've been using it for 17 years in total.

My impression currently is that stability is not very good. I'm constantly babysitting it. I'm working with IBM right now to do an assessment to hopefully pinpoint if our systems are truly undersized. And if they are, then that's not a reflection on the application. That's a reflection on us purchasing undersized equipment. If it's not, then that's a reflection on the application not performing correctly.

I'll give them a seven out of 10. They've got their niche. The two shops I've worked at have been big AIX shops, and that kept them in there.

It's definitely scalable. 

Support is retiring, they move on, and they just don't have the expertise. I've spoken to some duty managers and they've even told me that they lost a lot of people and that they are trying to rebuild that up, and it takes time. I understand it takes time, but as a customer, I don't have the luxury of saying, "Hey, I'm going to leave my system down for a couple of months because support's working on beefing back up."

I would rate the initial setup on the medium side. It's not totally complex, but there are a lot of moving parts to it. I would give it a medium.

I would say partner up with a business partner, someone who does it day in and day out because installing the application or the server is not something you do every day as a customer. As a customer, you do that once in a blue moon. A business partner is constantly doing these installations over and over so they've got it down fairly well.

I would say partner up with someone who can help you through it. Support's not going to do a whole lot with you as far as installing it. That's not really what they're there for. They're there to troubleshoot issues. A business partner's there to hold your hand and walk you through getting it installed and set up and running.

In the next release, I would like to see better protect storage pool and node replication.

I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect as a whole a seven out of ten. 

The product has helped our organization recover and restore data faster.

The most valuable features of the product are data deduplication and disaster recovery.

The solution should improve the ability to monitor backup failure. There should be proactive monitoring to provide early warning. The solution should also improve its dashboard.

The next release should include automated DR.

I have been using the solution for almost two years.

I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

The solution’s scalability is good. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten. Almost 20 employees in our organization use the solution, including IT specialists, backup engineers, and senior backup engineers. We will most probably increase the number of users in the future. However, it depends on our customers’ feedback.

We have used Veritas NetBackup and HP Data Protector. We switched to IBM Spectrum Protect because we wanted a more stable solution, and our customers liked IBM Spectrum Protect.

I rate the ease of initial setup an eight out of ten.

The deployment did not take long. We deployed the product in-house in one month.

The solution is not cheap. We do not have to pay additional costs apart from the licensing fee. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten.

IBM is a good option for any organization seeking a stable and steady solution. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.