IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

We use it to back up all of our midrange enterprise systems. It performs exactly the way we need it. We don't need anything more, don't need anything less. It has always done the job.

Our infrastructure is on-premise. We have a bunch of Microsoft servers and VMs, but mostly what Spectrum Protect covers is our Power systems. We have roughly 30 servers that we protect at this point. We do backup a few Linux servers as well, because our group actually covers that area.

It provides upper management peace of mind that we can recover, if needed. We have never had a problem (knock on wood) of recovering anything via Spectrum Protect. Whatever we backup has always been there. It is a good product.

I like the new GUI. It makes things really nice. The previous GUI that they had was slow, and it did not have enough information on it. Therefore, they have truly improved in what they are offering. It is moving into the main stream, like all the other backup solutions are. 

I also like what I am seeing with some of the new features which are coming out.

Stability is very good.

We have approximately 30 servers right now. It will always be our solution for our midrange Power boxes. As we grow with Power servers, we are going to stay with Spectrum Protect as it is growing with us. We are going to upgrade a bit more aggressively than we previously have, because we are excited about the newer stuff coming out.

For technical support, you just call the 1-800 number, tell them your customer number, and voila, they are there. They have been pretty responsive.

While I was not involved in the initial setup, new releases and implementation have gone smoothly. I have never had problems.

We had another product brought in to take care of the other side of the Microsoft servers and VMs. They thought about dragging us into that as well and getting rid of Spectrum Protect. I said, "We don't need something that complicated. Spectrum Protect is a perfect fit for what we need."

NetBackup was previously running, but they have moved to Commvault, and I said, "There is no way that I am going to CommVault. It is too expensive and complicated. Spectrum Protect is not expensive, and it is simple to use." 

Even some of the people in our group, like our DBAs and non-technical people, can restore some stuff themselves via Spectrum Protect. They don't always need me. That is how simple it is. That is what I like about it.

I would recommend Spectrum Protect, especially for use with Power servers.

Inside my company, we are using Spectrum Protect worldwide to back up all our server systems. We have it in use at our data centers and remote locations.

We have a cloud strategy. Our strategy now is to develop a solution for our customers to have a middleware also in place; a portal where we provide services independent if the site is internal on an external cloud. Therefore, we plan to give external cloud services to our customers.

We have a lot of IBM equipment, mainly in our SAP environment. We are using storage solutions: XIV storage solutions, all-flash solutions based on A9000, and using POWER System servers in S/4 HANA. We are now using ESS storage and power servers, and also using equipment from other companies, especially in the Intel world.

We have a long history using Spectrum Protect. We are working close together with IBM development to make solutions happen that we need and solve issues very fast.

• The product is very stable.
• Performance is mostly perfect.
• We have been very satisfied with the product.

We need everything cloud. Strong support for cloud services. S3 connectivity, which is mandatory for us in the future along with this integration of Spectrum Copy Data Management or Spectrum Protect services together with these Spectrum Protect Plus functionalities, e.g., hardware, snapshots, and Copy Data Management. They should come together in one solution.

Coming from the last issue we had, the requirement was to have snapshots in place for our fast recovery of our SharePoint environment. With the original Spectrum Protect, this was not possible. After IBM provided the product, Copy Data Management and now spectrum protect provide a solution resolving this issue to have a fast recovery in place. That was the main issue with Spectrum Protect.

We have been waiting for solutions for approximately one year.

Scalability is a given because we have solutions for our data centers, mainly in the tape area, and tape drive-based solutions. We have disk-based solutions at remote sites. We are using containers and replication for central data centers. Therefore, scalability is given, and we are completely satisfied with it. Our group manages the infrastructure for the company.

We have maybe 500 remote locations, then we have six data centers with multiple solutions. Therefore, we have maybe 600 to 800 Spectrum Protect instances.

We always grow by an average of 30-35% per year. It is not always in new server systems. It is an increase in backup storage, but very often we have to add new Spectrum Protect systems, too. We feel the product can grow with us.

We are very happy with the technical support. We work very closely together with IBM using their Support Center, but we have a strong contact in their development teams, and we have dedicated people from IBM working with us.

I think the initial setup with IBM was easier for us because we have a strong relationship with them. We have a history of working together for about 15 to 18 years using Spectrum Protect.

At the moment, we are using Spectrum Protect Plus. We already tested CDM for SharePoint though there were some issue with it, and we plan to go live with Spectrum Protect Plus at the end of May this year.

It allows us to backup and have the DBAs manage their own backups and our retention period. It reduces the work on our part while we get the backups completed.

It has to ability to backup DV2, Oracle, and Informix.

I'd like to see some benefits to help manage it. With a big installation, we don't have the performance characteristics that we maybe should have. We've come up with a cookie cutter approach, where you would just spit out the same thing time after time.

I would like to see something that maybe a beginner, or intermediate professional could do, in order to give me a set of tools to answer questions and spit out what I should have.

It doesn't integrate with storage pools, with a normal pool. I'd like to see that.

It's very stable. We've been having problems with keeping enough storage on the floor, but as far as the product goes, it's really no problem.

Scalability is fine, as long as you bring up the right server. We have some Linux servers that don't scale as well. Our AIX servers work much, much better. We're backing up about a petabyte a night.

Technical support is good, for the most part. It's rather difficult to get through to all the representatives before you hit Level-1 or Level-2. But they are very responsive nowadays, unlike in past years.

We were using TSM for about 30 years. We switched over to NetBackup for a while. We then switched back to TSM, primarily because NetBackup didn't support Linux on Z.

The installation is better. It's basically a push button thing. You set it up, start a script, and start answering questions. The graphical interface is a lot better than setting it up manually, because it will do everything for you. Now it does an automatic check to make sure that you have enough space and your authorization is there before actually doing the install. In this way, you don't get through an install, or partway through an install, and then fail.

Do your homework. See what you have on the floor, what your road map says you're going to do for databases, systems, and platforms. Get IBM to do some evaluations for you and come up with a better product, whether it ends up being IBM or something else.

When selecting a vendor, we look for stability of the product and support mostly. Nothing's perfect. They're always coming out with new things. Their container storage pools are better. It's basically a setup and forget it.

We are using it for backup and restoration. We also have agents for Oracle. Unfortunately, we are not using it for virtual restoration, like VMware. That part is controlled or set up inside the Veeam software.

We like IBM Spectrum's versioning capabilities. It lets us specify how many versions of a file we want to keep and for how long. Also, the archive component of the software helps us a lot. Let's say we have a department that needs 10 versions of one file that need to be kept for at least six months. So with IBM Spectrum, we can set rules that will respect what has been asked of us. For example, we can set it to save 15 versions, and if the file is deleted, we need to keep the last version for at least six months. 

We need better protection from ransomware or the ability to identify ways we can protect ourselves from ransomware. Having backups is one thing, but specifically, we need methods to recover if we have a ransomware attack. If we could find a way to detect and alert us if specific data has been encrypted (except the ones we choose), that would be a good selling point.

We've been using IBM Spectrum for the past 20 years or so.

HAProxy is highly stable.

HAProxy is scalable. There's nothing that we cannot do with it. The entire IT department has access to it, so that's upwards of 100 users.

IBM support is great. 

Twenty years ago, we had the file server, and we were using tapes. It was a local software. At one point, we switched to the Unix machine — the AIX machine — which could not support the same software. We had an IBM system, and IBM had a solution called ADSM, so we used that on the AIX machine. And since the product was good, we deployed it on Windows Server.

We've been using IBM Spectrum Protect for a long time, so we've acquired the experience over time to deploy it. Installing it would be straightforward for us because we know the product. However, it might take a week for someone new to the platform to get it up and running. We have four people responsible for maintenance, and they're mostly system admins. 

Price and storage are an issue no matter which software you are using. It depends on what our customers ask for. If they want the sky, they will have to pay for it. It all depends on what they need. How much it does cost. The pricing depends on what products you intend to. For example, it's one price if you are using an agent for Oracle, but the price is different if you are only using basic backup and restore. It could be $15 to $25 for one license. It's very complicated. Licensing is a pain.

I rate IBM Spectrum Protect eight out of 10. The advice I would give to prospective users is to take stock of the value of your data. Spectrum is like insurance. Ask yourself how much it will cost you to restore the whole thing and get it back online. A backup solution isn't just a cut and paste of one file. It's a data recovery setup. I recommend doing your homework. When you decide what you want to do, search for the product that will deliver it. 

I'm an IT analyst and we are customers of IBM.

One of the benefits for the company is that if a major error has been made we're able to restore to a backup prior to when the error occurred.

The most interesting feature is without a doubt the 'management classes'. A management class allows us to configure the number of previous versions of each file that we want to keep as well as the number of days that we want to keep them. Thanks to the way in which the management classes can be assigned to file, the possibilities are endless.
To my knowledge only SP offers this flexibility.

We've noticed that restoring massive number of files is a time-consuming process and should be improved. We found a way to deal with it by using the 'no query restore' where the restore operation is done on more than one thread and is restartable as opposed to the 'query restore' which is a single thread process. The 'no query restore' needs setting a few parameters for the node in order increase the number of resources that will be used by the restore process.
In addition, we've found that this is not the best solution for backup and restore of virtual machines. Even with Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environment which could be improved a lot. I believe they're working on that with the new product Spectrum Protect Plus.

Finally, the licensing is complicated and could be simplified.

I've been using the solution for 15 years. 

Scalability becomes somewhat limited with the growth of the database, but we are still able to run with only one instance on one database, although we are reaching the limit. We have thousands of users. We have three network administrators dealing with the solution. I'm an analyst and the others are service administrators. 

We haven't used technical support for quite a while but when we did use them, they were very good. 

Deployment is a difficult question because we've been using the product for so many years that it's simple for us. I think implementation for the server and the node is simple but the configuration is a little complex. Part of the issue is that there are so many features and if you want to use them all, it needs to be via configuration. There are a lot of configuration parameters in Spectrum Protect. To add a new computer to the server takes a minute. To deploy a new server might take a day or two. All our deployments are done in-house. 

The cost is high and the license is complicated. You have to figure out which license best suits your needs. It's not as simple as Veeam or the other software products we use. We need an ILMT license with IBM. We have a computer dedicated to compute the license we need for our IBM project. We pay an annual license fee of somewhere between $100,000 and $150,000.

I recomment this solution if the need is to be able to quickly recover one or more files destroyed by mistake a few weeks ago. We must ensure that the configuration meets the needs of the users. The best advice I can give is to read the tutorial provided by the IBM documentation. And for anyone administering the backup, they should perform restore tests regularly.

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

However if the needs are to be able to quickly restore a cloud infrastructure, there is undoubtedly better solutions.

Spectrum Protect is performing well, and the primary use case is just for backups to provide recovery. It is not the first point of recovery for the customer. However, it definitely prevents our customers from going out of business, because they need to have a backup.

On the backup side, we use ProtecTIER Virtual Tape recoveries. On the customer side, the front-end side of it, they recently moved to all-flash storage, not IBM storage. They have got a mix of old servers, which are physical. There are a mix of Sun, AIX, VMware, and Hyper-V, so there is pretty much everything across the board at the customers.

Generally, the happiest users are Oracle users. What they like about the platform is that they have received organic benefits in performance from the backup system and also as their platforms have upgraded over the time. Therefore, every time customers make a change or we have made a change, then they use the product to do a cloning and refreshing. They are happy that they get good performance something changes.

The ability to migrate between media over a long period of time. My customers are long-time users, and they have benefited from being able to move between tiers, e.g., L Tier 5 from L Tier 6 and/or L Tier 7. They have been able to do this within the product.

More support for non-mainstream databases, in particular PostgreSQL, SQL, and MySQL. I would also like support for snapshots of non-IBM hardware. I have read some future statements, and it seems that this is coming, though.

Sometimes, there is a perception that it is a legacy product, and some customers are less keen to take on the more innovative features. Therefore, we have some customers who are running on the current version of Spectrum Protect and use all of the current features, and some customers who consider it a legacy product. However, they are a bit stuck in the way that they use the product, only using the old style features.

I have worked with it for 15 years. I have found it to be very scalable. Where I work now as a business partner, our customers use it. I have some small customers and some large customers, and it works well. Where I used to work before, we ran backup as a service, and we had about 21 instances of Spectrum Protect running. It was just reliable. That is my experience.

The customers who are doing workloads in the cloud are choosing to have cloud-based backup strategies. It is an area in the product where our competitors may have better offerings right now, but the people who are moving to the cloud, if they are doing it well, are choosing not to have their data in the cloud be static. They are using the cloud to spin up a workload and spin it down. Thus, the workloads are being provisioned as opposed to needing to have static data in them. Therefore, the real value is the code which generates the machine running in the cloud, and we backup that.

I have used technical support a lot over a long time. There are two sides to it. I find quite often with the Level 1 and Level 2 support that I struggle with time zones. Sometimes depending on where the support is coming from, there can be barriers in understanding the problem. 

Usually when I get up to Level 2 or Level 3 support the technical capabilities are really good, and I also find that if I need a point solution to a point problem, they will find code and build code for my problem. This has been very good. They won't just say, "We are looking at fixing that, you may need to wait a year." They will come out and help you fix a problem. However, the first day of interaction at Level 1 is not really very good.

I have been involved in the initial setup a few times. I have also migrated from one hardware platform to a different one, Solaris to AIX along with TSM (before it was Spectrum Protect). I have found it more complex then some of its competitor products, but because I have worked on the product for a while, I find it fairly simple. Now, I understand how to install it well, but it would still be complex for a novice. 

I am quite keen on getting more experience with Spectrum Protect Plus, because it seems like it is a lot easier, and that is where we will go in the future.

I have used a couple of different backup products. As a business partner, our customers do choose other backup products. Generally, I find I have less trouble with Spectrum Protect than I have had with the other backup products.

Mainly, the competition is Commvault, if they are looking at the functionality that Spectrum Protect is offering. There are some customers who go with Veeam. The reason that they go with Veem is because they have a desire to go there. When they already want to go that way, it is difficult to position Spectrum Protect as an alternative. I am really keen to see how Spectrum Protect Plus might compete with Veem in the marketplace.

As a business partner, the customer is choosing the product, and we are recommending Spectrum Protect. Certainly our bigger customers have a lot of legacy data, so they already had Spectrum Protect. Therefore, it is a fairly simple decision to maintain it. However, some of our customers go through reviews and look at options. 

We have, in our long history, lost some customers to competitors, but the reasons why did not have to do with the product. I do not think we have lost anyone because the product was not delivering.

Primary use case is backing up data in order to restore our customers, if needed. The performance right now is okay.

Our on-premise infrastructure is comprised of two tape libraries (3500), each staffed with about 55 TS1150 drives, and approximately 5000 cartridges. The snapshots are taken on NAS filers, as they are EMC VNXs, and Spectrum Scale. It is there that we take the snapshots. For buffering, we have some V7000s in place, but all in HPE Blade enclosures. We previously had virtual tape, but not anymore.

We do not lose data. That is why we are using this product and have a backup in place.

• We can scale. Today, we have an average backup volume of 100TB a day. 
• It is reliable; it works. 
• We have a good cooperation with IBM. 

The features should be a little bit closer together. 

If you take Spectrum Protect into account, and you have it along with restrictions to Spectrum Archive by means of LTFS, this is also something which should be made better within the overall product's program.

The stability is very nice. The only thing that IBM should improve with the program is the licensing. We have a little engine in place. However, if you use Power PC and you have big engine in place. then you have some restrictions to the versions. This should be remedied. 

This would be a real improvement: The product to gather storage on the one hand, and storage for backup on the other hand.

It scales until the next frame must be purchased.

The growth plans are given by the user. In science, you never know what the next step is. We are struggling against newer experimental setups. This is great for the scientists, but if you double the resolution size for microscopy, it ends up with a lot of more data on our side. However, we serve our scientists, so we just purchase new.

The support levels at IBM are very good.

The initial setup and infrastructure were done within days. It was an okay process. There was nothing negative about it.

The license model that they have at IBM, which is due to volume, from a certain volume onward is not the right license model. Right now, we have a better license model. This is the model that we had at the end of last year.

There was a call for tender for an overall storage renewal, and IBM easily won out versus its competition. 

If you are looking for a reliable solution, it is okay. If you are looking for just backing up some smaller clients in a small business unit, so there are probably other competitors around. 

Well, apart from restoring data which has been inadvertently deleted or corrupted, we also use Spectrum Protect in conjunction with Spectrum Scale.

As the tape storage pool for HSM (inactive) data, this leaves a stub file in Spectrum Scale's GPFS file system and moves the file data to the LTO6 tape based storage pools -- so it vastly reduces the cost of the overall services, whilst maintaining Nearline access to the files.

a. Incremental forever
b. We have approximately 4.5PB’s of front end data and a 12 hour backup window.

However, by backing up only the changed data, we average around 75TB per night. If we had to do full backups, even occasionally, we would not be able to complete the backup within 12 hours, or we would have to make a large investment to fit a full backup within the 12 hour window.

• Reporting
• Ease of use

No, we have found it to be an extremely reliable system.

No, scalability is one of its key capabilities.

Local in country L2 is average. Offshore L3 is okay, but not as good as they used to be.

Yes, it wasn't scalable enough, and client support was not as extensive.

You do need to know what you are doing to setup the platform, so invest in doing the design work upfront before deploying.

At scale, the consumption license (per TB) is very expensive, so generally, licensing the hosts running the software (both Target and Source), this does mean you will need to work out the PVU for each client, but you can use the License Metric Tool to make this easier.

That was really too long ago to be of any use. However, I would suggest that at scale today, only Commvault and now Veeam, would be the products to compare it against.

Make sure your people have the right skills. You have a design, setup your automation policies so it doesn’t need manual intervention, and have your admins investigating and resolving the exception.