IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

It is performing very well. However, our customer feedback is the product is very complex, and mainly built for the enterprise customer. They will need to do some developments on the Spectrum Protect, especially on the Plus series. Maybe on Spectrum Protect, they can simplify it, so the admin can get more easily access the console, and generate jobs and alerts.

As a product, it is very nice. People love it, but the only issue is it requires a very unique/rare skill set. 

80% of the core business is running on-prem, and some of the applications which are add-on, go on the cloud. This is a mixture: 80% is on-premise, which is non-critical.

The problem with moving to the cloud is the government compliance agreements. The government says the data should not leave the country, or if the data is leaving Iran, it should be encrypted and no one else can read it. This is why Amazon is coming with their data center. Once it is live, all the Ministry's data should be part of Amazon and it should not go out. Those are the compliance issues with the Ministry.

We manage approximately 20 customers, except Saudi Arabia.

Especially for the banking and ministry sectors, they have core businesses running and they can't have a single bit of data corruption or data loss. This is a very important product for them, because it gives ease of access and the type of data consistency where they can rely on it and its safe on-hand. When there is a need or a disaster, they can get the information back from the archive. So, it is very much required.

The backup on real-time, especially for the virtual machine, archiving, and retrieving the reader from the backup repository and getting it online, getting it validated, then performing the data consistency check over the backup.

• I would like the users to have a better experience with the product.
• Easier recovery
• It needs better connectivity with other non-IBM application hardware and non-IBM platforms. If it can get connected with other applications, the customer would be happier because they would not need to stick to a single vendor, so they could have a backup on multiple environments.

It is very stable. It is meant for the enterprise customer's core business. I have never seen any customer talk about a system crash and not being able to retrieve their backup. 

It takes a lot of time to configure on the first setup. Once setup, you do not need to touch it again. You just need to do a formal check on possibly batch updates.

If you are attaching with IBM products, it is all compatible and very easy. Issues arise when you are working with non-IBM products. Then, you need to find all the APIs with the Spectrum Product. There are some issues with HPE and Dell, because these two do not support Spectrum Protect. You have to be on certain versions before they will support integrations.

Spectrum Protect will meet our customers needs as they grow, because as the data is growing they need to have a backup. We are talking about on-premise backup, we are not talking about cloud backup. We are discussing out of the country backup. There are tapes which are getting shipped out of the country with an encryption key. Spectrum Protect is playing a vital role, because they do the encryption. It is a very reliable, consistent, unhackable product. 

Technical support is okay, but their skills are limited.

Example: Our customer was not able to do certain activities. So it went from Level 1 to Level 2, then Level 3. Level 3 takes a longer time to bring up the batch or find a resolution. I think that is a part IBM could fix something. They should have a proper technical support team serving the customers and get issues resolved earlier.

The initial setup starts straightforward, but as soon as a customer opens the requirements for the backup because they are happy it, they will want to export their system, virtualized platform, or some applications on the databases. This is when it starts getting complex. Then you need to run multiple jobs, multiple consoles, and bring it all together. Of course, customers want to have a single console to connect all their different environments.

I would recommend IBM, but I am a business partner.

Other market competitors include EMC NetWorker, Veritas (Plus Edition), and Veeam (for virtualization).

Customers main criteria when selecting a vendor: presence in the market, and onsite and offsite support.

My primary use case is to back up our data to tape to outsource storage to protect us against any sort of cryptoware attack. We are using our DR recovery scenarios, basically for protection we are backing up to tape. We also back up the disk first. 

Our environment consists of two primary data centers with IBM storage in the thousands along with older and newer generations, and we have backed up everything to TS4500 already. We are still trying to move away from TS3500, but we are working on that. We have a mix of all sorts of databases and Exchange.

One of the recovery methods used to help troubleshoot all of our operations for contractors or the lower tiers, it meets that. Therefore, we are able to run it in an enterprise quite easily with one or two resources. All of the automatic tape deck functions are done well, too. We are able to connect two separate sites relatively easily without any problems. 

Once it is completed properly, it is low maintenance. Most of the functions do not require much deliberation. It is all the blueprints and technologies laid out, and it is straight forward.

The version that we had when I first started made it look really bad. We are talking about commands that should have run in two seconds, but instead took four to eight hours. Other components were sluggish. I noticed it as soon as our database improved. 

Because the database was slow, everything was very unresponsive. I did not know if I was doing anything wrong or if the system was not performing. With support, we were able to get up to a working version. 

Now, we are having issues with some of our underlying hardware. We require a lot of support, which has given us more scripts to get data out to the databases. In my 15 years experience of experience with backups, though not with Spectrum Protect, I could not get enough data out of the system to figure out what is going on. 

It is very scalable for my need, especially when you can just buy the hardware attachment. It is very fluid. To increase, as long as all the performance issues are taken into account, you can add as much you want. You can really scale it up in a lot of areas. The only issue I have with scalability is for the small offsite locations. You have about 50 different companies and you would never consider using Spectrum Protect in them. 

Our primary use centers are using Spectrum Protect instances. We run two Spectrum Protect instances.

We have spec'd out our build, and the cost of it can work quite easily today for our future needs.

I find the Level 1 and Level 2 support spend 80% of the time communicating the same information that I have already provided. 20% of those leads get a resolution. 

Because of our current case, I have had to open multiple cases and had some stagnant delays when answers did not fit the problem we had. It is normal in the industry to have to reach out to our customer rep to get proper support. 

It is not just for the IBM product, but it is on par at the top tier level. We receive the proper amount of attention once the proper communications are opened up with sales. On the lower tiers, I'm reasonably better off without creating communication with support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We used a third-party provider to set up the solution. The only problem is the speed of picking it up. There have been some sizing issues now, and we are dealing with those. Afterwards, we can move it forward.

We have been at our size for a few years. We are not really looking to battle the licensing costs, as this is our primary system.

I do not know who they evaluated.

I would not recommend Spectrum Protect at this point.

Protecting infrastructures and applications. We have infrastructures and applications that must be online. Some has archiving requirements that need to store data using longer retention due to legal or other requirements. With Spectrum Protect, you can adjust this to your needs.

We use this to fine tune our business requirements for the data, where we can save shorter data retention data on a storage pool with faster performance and save archiving on a storage pool with tapes to keep cost lower.

With Spectrum Protect, we were able to lower the TCO thanks to it always being incremental by design (progressive incremental forever).

Why back up data again if the data has not been changed? It has faster backups, as only changed content is sent and has less storage use.

Why restore the same content many times if you can just restore one backup?

• Faster restores as only one full backup is needed to restore. With other competitors, you have to restore fully with all their incrementals.
• We successfully lowered data storage due to its progressive incremental-forever by design (always incremental), plus its advanced data reduction techniques using deduplication with compression.
• Backups are much faster, as only changed content is sent, especially if the journaling is added.
• Restores are much faster too, as it only restore the objects needed. Other competitors restore objects from full backup, later restoring a more recent version of the object.
  

Progressive incremental-forever (always incremental):

SPFS is a file system for Spectrum Protect. A way to mount a Spectrum Protect storage pool as a mount point on your server for easier usage. With this one can protect any data using the Spectrum Protect storage.
Eg
# mount -t spfs /backup
# mysqldump > /backup/mysqldump.bkp

SPIR is Instant Recovery for Spectrum Protect. Take application consistent snapshots locally using, and sends snapshots data using space efficiently and blocking backups to the Spectrum Protect server. It provisions the snapshot from the backup server to the same or new server near instantly, so that applications can be started before all data has been copied back to original place.

Replication services would be nice. If these could be enhanced to be always on so multiple storage backup services could be added as a cluster pool. This would provide a better availability service.

It would be great if the API could add functions to check storage pool details using the client-side API.

It would be great if there would be an API to add new licenses using the client-side API so the licenses can be reviewed using QUERY LICENSE. Then, new licenses could be added using the REGISTER LICENSE command.

More than 20 years.

the solution is stable and all the fixes and patches are well tested before rolled out. workarounds are being published if bugs exists early bug fixes can be shipped earlier for clients has emergent needs (eFix) change list is being published at each release

the solution scales frmo small setup to enterprise hosting many thousands of clients. Competitors need more resourses, as it has difficulty to host the inventories, of manage the amount of data If needed, one can add storage agents, which can be used to off load data transfer, so that the data goes over these agents, instead of being sent to a central server

support is great

We previously used Dell EMC NetWorker and switched because:

• More storage was needed to manage data protection.
• It was more difficult to manage traffics, as it uses RPC, and more ports needed to be opened in the firewall.
• The solutions sometimes does not respond on "push/pull requests".

being working with ADSM, TSM, Spectrum Protect for several years, and the setup becomes more easier nowadays

we used an in-house team

By changing to this solution, we saved not only a lot of license costs, but also 450% storage cost (without space reduction techniques) + 450% additional using space reduction techniques

IBM provides an open license policy, which is more like a gentlemen's agreement.

One can go with either a PVU licensing model or a capacity based licensing model. Either solution does not block the usage, if over used.

NetBackup.

The perfect solution with a robust, scalable, open architecture.

Many additional plugins are available on the Global Solution Directory.

The solution is primarily used for backing up all of our servers and data. We also use it for a lot of driving data.

I'm new to the company, so I don't know if I can answer how the solution has improved the organization.

The archiving feature is the most valuable aspect of the solution.

Although I am not a technical user, I would say the cloud integration features could be improved.

I'm fairly new to the company, however, I've been using the solution for probably just over five years now.

The solution is very stable. We haven't faced any bugs or glitches. There haven't been system crashes. It's reliable. An organization won't have to worry about stability.

The solution is highly scalable. An organization that needs to expand the services should be able to do so without any issues.

The solution doesn't have a high user count. Rather, it is used by our IT department to protect our organizations' data. No end users would have access to it. About 10-15 people from our storage and data protection team have access to it currently.

Technical support is great. they're very knowledgable and technical people. We've been satisfied with the level of support they've provided. It's been very good. We've had cases in the past where they've been able to help us overcome issues effectively.

I wasn't at the company at the time the solution was implemented, so I don't have knowledge as to if the solution is difficult or straightforward to set up.

I don't have any information about the pricing of the solution other than to say it's a little bit higher than we would like.

We are always looking at different solutions. For example, we are looking at Cloud Work, Cohesity, and Rubrik. We're very early in the process of evaluating them, so we don't have clear differentiators yet. It's too early to discuss a comparison of features.

We're not partners with IBM. We're just customers. We have a good relationship with the company, however, we are not reseller partners.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's a great solution, and we've been very happy with it, but it does lack cloud integration features. If it offered that, I'd rate it higher.

I use it for the disaster recovery backup archive. It is performing very well.

Spectrum Protect is running under AIX on a Power system. We have a SAN volume controller in front of two generation three XIVs and two IBM tape libraries (all Fibre Channel attached). We have two sites. 

It protects our data. That is what it is there for.

We cannot live without it, since it gives us the confidence to move forward knowing our data is safe.

The most valuable features are reliability, capacity, and performance.

I'm sure there are some areas of improvement, because no product is perfect- but I can't think of any right now.

Regarding stability, it's been rock solid; very stable. I've never had a problem with it.

I've never had issues with scalability. It scales very well.

It has scaled with us over the last 25 years. We are a community college with about 40,000 students and roughly 5000 to 6000 employees. It is growing, though not as much right now. The economy is good, and we grow when the economy is bad. The exact opposite of everybody else!

Technical support is pretty good. It is doing fine, but you pay for it.

We have been using it for a long time. I don't know what we had before.

The setup was straightforward, but it is a complicated product. It was a lot more complex to set up so long ago. There were just a lot of moving parts with a lot of pieces to it.

For vendors, I want good technical support, but I also want honest sales people. I want somebody who is going to tell me the straight truth, and whether or not it's a product that I should buy. I don't want it similar to selling me a car or something. I want somebody who will be honest with me.

I would also like a product that scales and is reliable. It should be able to handle the amount of data that we backup every night. I go back to being reliable.

I would highly recommend it to anybody that would like to buy something like this.

If it fits them, I would say "Get it." It is not the right product for everybody. No product is for everybody. However, this is a very good product. If they have a need, like I did, then it is the right solution.

We use it for our enterprise backups. By enterprise, I mean Oracle, SAP, and all other business-critical applications.

Initially, we started using Spectrum for backing up our business-critical applications, such as SAP running on AIX, and then we had Oracle RAC clusters. We also had Veeam for VMware, but then IBM Spectrum came up with their version of the virtual environment. IBM was initially not into the virtual environment, but over a period of time, they got into this.

IBM is providing us a good and cost-effective solution. We also get more robustness for daily backup where we can restore a virtual machine, just like Commvault and Veeam. 

We have been using it for several years, and it is quite reliable and predictable. We are quite comfortable with this solution. They're coming up with new features as well. 

It has good scalability, and it provides good integrations with business-critical applications or databases, such as SAP HANA. It works as expected, and we don't see any issues.

Its management part can be better and simplified. It is kind of a beast as compared to Commvault or Veeam, but they are more user-friendly. They are also easier to learn, whereas Spectrum Protect definitely takes time. They should simplify it. Our teams are pretty comfortable with it because we have been using it for a long time, but from the perspective of a new user who is evaluating or using this solution, it is definitely more complex in terms of manageability.

Its monitoring could be improved so that it can even monitor the jobs that are scheduled by external schedulers. There are situations where a database team might decide to use their own schedulers, but currently, Spectrum Protect is not able to catch those jobs in the Operation Manager console.

I have been using this solution for more than ten years.

We have been using it for several years now, and it is very good in terms of stability and reliability.

It is scalable.

We don't have any issues with technical support. They're okay, and we're fine with their support.

We also use Veeam, which is mainly for the virtual environment. IBM Spectrum covers everything. It covers virtual and physical environments and heavy databases and applications such as SAP HANA. We are using Veeam only for a subset of our environment. 

Its initial setup is complex and not very easy. The deployment duration depends on a lot of factors, but generally, one week should be enough.

It is not very intuitive, and you can't do it all by yourself. You need someone for initial deployment. We have a seller who helps us out. This solution has been here with us for years, so our team is now comfortable implementing it, but it is still not that intuitive that you can do it all by yourself.

Its licensing is complex, and its price is not really reasonable. It is on the expensive side. IBM, in general, is slightly expensive, but with IBM Spectrum for the virtual environment, they are looking into the aspect of helping customers with the cost and providing a cost-effective solution.

It is a reliable tool. It has been there for so many years. It is a good solution that provides many options. I would recommend this solution for large-scale environments with mission-critical applications running on complex hardware, such as AIX.

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

The primary use case for the solution is mainly backing up Oracle databases and critical workload AIX servers, and so on.

The Oracle database backup is the solution's most valuable aspect.

The solution is scalable.

We've found the product to be quite stable and the performance is very good.

Technical support has been helpful overall.

Generally, the implementation of virtualization could be improved. The workflow service and so on are not working properly. They have another solution, Spectrum Protect Plus, however, for me, that is a new product. They invented a new product for virtual environments as they didn't succeed in integrating it into the former solution. For me, Spectrum Protect Plus, and Spectrum Protect are not the same product. It's not a new feature for Spectrum Protect, it is just a new thing. Therefore, we assessed IBM was not able to provide a good solution for virtual environments. Therefore, we decided to use Veeam for that.

The initial setup is quite complex.

I've been using the solution for at least these last 12 months.

The stability of the solution is perfect. It's reliable and offers good performance. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. It's good.

The solution can scale well. If a company needs to expand things, it can do so with ease.

We just count the servers in terms of usage. In terms of the servers, I would assume we have more or less, about 400 servers with 1.5 petabytes of storage.

In terms of scaling, we'll remain the same more or less, however, as the databases grow, we tend to increase the amount. We don't have new features and functions that we want to integrate, however, we have new services. We are growing and likely expanding.

We've contacted technical support several times. They are always helpful and responsive. We're satisfied with their level of support.

We're using Veeam for virtualization, as that aspect is not covered under IBM Spectrum Protect.

At the moment, we're happy with the features available. I can't recall feeling that there was something lacking. There aren't any new features we desperately need.

What we would like is integration between this solution and Spectrum Protect Plus. They should be one product and not two different solutions. 

The initial setup is not straightforward. It is quite complex. It's important to have the right people in place. You need good experts to manage upgrades, et cetera.

For the initial deployment, for running the system, for implementing new servers or new clients, et cetera, that is not a problem, however, the problem is really handling upgrades. That is kind of tricky.

It's a good idea to hire a consultant or integrator to assist your company in the process. It's not easy to do if you don't have the right knowledge base. 

We're just a customer and end-user.

We're using an older version, called Spectrum Protect. We are not using Spectrum Protect Plus.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've largely been happy with it. I'd give it a higher rating if Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus could either be the same product or integrated together.

Our clients use it for consolidated backup and mostly for guests on the VM.

The solution significantly improves a client's restoration times. They also do complete backups now. Some of the things clients used before couldn't really provide complete backups. In that sense, it's been great for organizations.

The solution actually does a lot. It's really powerful. The value of Spectrum Protect is it does everything. It does tape and it does disk. It's easy to migrate. You don't need any other software. It's basically an all-in-one solution, which is its most valuable aspect.

Their GUI has improved quite a bit. It's made the solution a lot simpler and less complex.

The solution has a Spectrum Protect Plus product, which is more for Windows-only VM. However, it doesn't really do tape. It requires IBM to do things to the Cloud, which adds costs. They're starting to integrate the products together. That said, right now, it's like two implementations, it's not one product.

We've tried to sell Protect Plus from time to time, however, then you need Protect if you want to do tape. It's kind of clunky. Once they integrate the products, it will be pretty powerful.

Spectrum Protect is still an industry-leading product across multiple operating systems. It still runs best on an AIX server and does remember Windows or Linux. The install base is more AIX as far as hosts because the AIX server is more powerful.

They should be able to integrate the products so that you don't have to do two system installs.

The solution should have a better way to deal with the system state files in Windows. They should do that better where it doesn't try to walk the file system and you have to use in image mode.

The experienced people still use the CLI. You shouldn't have to use a CLI to use this product.

They took some of the funding off of it for a while. Therefore, instead of being a market leader, they took their position for granted. Then some competitors developed new bells and whistles that they advertise, and due to that lag a few years ago, there are not the resources to explain the differences.

They're outsold. IBM is outsold because people do not understand the product and it had a reputation of being complex.  That said, with the new GUIs and other improvements, it's really pretty easy. The problem is they've got to deal with their old reputation of being difficult and complex. Still the GUI could still be more robust.

I've been using the solution for 20 years now. It's been two decades.

The solution is extremely stable. There are no issues with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or fail. It's reliable.

We work with all sizes of businesses from Fortune 100 insurance companies to small colleges and universities. We have all sorts of customers.

The scaling potential of the solution is huge. This is an enterprise solution compared to some of the smaller options. It also scales down when you do less than 100 terabytes. It has very favorable pricing. It's competitive with other products.

Technical support is not as good as it could be. It's not as good as some of the competitors. IBM has put more resources into it recently. However, they had a stage about two years ago where they kind-of stopped spending as much money on Protect due to the fact that they had so many other IBM products. 

Overall, I'd rate their technical services at seven out of ten. It's not too bad, however, it could be better. They are quite responsive. Now that IBM is more focused on improving the product it may improve as well.

I have some experience with Veeam as well. I really like it compared to Veeam. You don't have to have media servers. It's nice compared to Veeam that ­clients don't have to do a media server.

We've had customers who have used other solutions, however, they've been weak and not as scalable as IBM.

The initial setup is not complex. It's straightforward. It's easy.

The pricing is quite good and very competitive in the market.

I'm a reseller and a system architect. I'm not really a user. I'm a project manager and architect. However, we have people on our team that use and install it.

We're using the current version of the solution.

I'd advise other companies to not forget tape. With ransomware and everything else, it's hard. People forget tape is cheap. Tape gives you an air-gap, and, if you properly use it, you get a good hybrid solution.

Many people think it's disk only, and that's just for yesterday's restore, however, for a long-term solution, tape is so much more cost-effective.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's a full-feature product. It's hard to be perfect with full-featured products. There are compromises due to the fact that they do so much.