IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

I used IBM Spectrum Protect for backups and archiving.

I find the whole product useful. The backup archive client, snapshot, spectrum for virtual environments are beneficial features.

IBM could improve by decluttering its product lines. There are too many clients, too many names, and overall too many products. They have to decide for the virtual environments, are they going to stick with Spectrum Virtual Environment or Spectrum Protect Plus? They have to decide on this, a final decision. IMB is trying to catch up with Veeam but they have to declutter a lot of products or sub-products that they have.

In a future release, it would be a benefit to have the ability to add an application as a storage target, as a storage pool. Additionally, they should add more functionality to the administration for the Operation Center.

I have been using IBM Spectrum Protect for approximately three years.

I have found IBM Spectrum Protect to be highly stable.

IBM Spectrum Protect is a scalable solution.

IBM provides good support.

I have used other backup solutions, such as Veeam.

The installation of IBM Spectrum Protect has become easy for me but was not always. It's not as easy as others, such as Veeam. But nevertheless, I think it to be more robust than Veeam, and more realistic. The only option for a very small deployment is to use the Windows platform, but you cannot have a very small deployment as a blueprint on the Linux and on AIX. They have to create a very small deployment blueprint for the AIX and for the Linux.

The price of IBM Spectrum Protect is expensive. However, there are a few packages and it is unclear because, for the entry suite they have both options, which are the back-end storage capacity and the front-end storage capacity.

It's really difficult for you as a client to decide the exact size of how many kilos you have to purchase because it really depends on the after operational capacity and after the compression.

My advice to others wanting to implement this solution is if they have a critical enterprise application, then I would recommend TSM. If they have a small network of many workstations rather than servers, then maybe Veeam will be more suitable.

I rate IBM Spectrum Protect a seven out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

Primary use case is for data protection and data backup. I work with the following:

• On-premise solutions for customers.
• Building solutions for our managed service, which uses Spectrum Protect as a backup data protection for primarily DIAX Power Systems platform.
• Virtual workloads in our data center.

It performs great and is working wonderfully.

Our on-premise infrastructure is mostly spinning disk right now. Tape is on our plans towards the future. I have come to the conclusion that we need to make sure we add tape into the solution, because archive seems to be a big, important piece, especially since Spectrum Protect is moving as a product. Going forward, we will find it being more as a long-term retention repository than it used to be in the past.

We have two Spectrum Protect instances. We have work redundant ones in our managed solutions center that we offer for our solutions provider. For my on-premise work that I do as a consultant, I take care of instances on and off for various customers.

As managed solutions provider, it has been really useful because it scales bigger than a lot of other products. It allows us to consolidate costs on the back-end, making it somewhat more cost effective for us, while still being able to scale bigger for our larger customers that buy solutions from us.

The biggest thing is its enterprise-wide type of architecture. It supports a lot of different platforms. This is useful for us.

There is not much that they do not have already. 

Integration with some applications in the healthcare field could be added, as that is a big part of our business. I just recently learned that Spectrum Protect Plus has integration with Epic. They are planning on implementing it. It is on their road map, and that seems to be the right direction. 

IBM has a good direction, making sure they address the things that they discuss with us as a service provider, and looking to provide better products to our customers.

It is super stable. This is one of the reasons that we like it as a solutions product.

It is extremely scalable. This is why we like it, because a lot of other products require a more complicated deployment as the environments get bigger. 

Spectrum Protect keeps things rather simple, because as long as we build the core system, it can scale with the hardware, essentially. We use Power Systems for our servers. Therefore, it can scale massively, as well as the application. Thus, we keep our costs low.

The solution will definitely meet my customers' growth requirements. However, the challenge I have is that customers are becoming more homogeneous and need diversity less. This has worked more for us as we take on workload for them, but I have a lot of customers who used to need five or six different types of enterprise integration: workload, virtualization of different platforms, etc. However, this all seems to be getting more homogenized. Therefore, the need has been going down from what we have seen previously.

Most commonly, we call technical support for performance related issues, if we run into something which is a weird anomaly, we will call them up. 

They have recently added support tickets specifically engineered around performance. This has been very useful for us when we run into issues where customers are looking to try to squeeze a lot more horsepower out of older system.

The initial setup is a little more complex than some of the other solutions. The younger, backward products out there are much easier to implement. 

Generally speaking, it works well for me, as a person who sells my services. It is nice to be able to be able to set something up for a customer, and have it work directly the first time, because of the fact that I have the experience. 

Typically, the competitors have been EMC or Commvault. Those are the most common ones that we have run into. 

What is probably most interesting, more recently, customers have been having conversations with me around some of these newer backup applications which are more web scale architected, like how Spectrum Protect Plus is designed. This has been a different conversation, because the customers' focus is more about ease of use, and less about flexibility and scalability. Therefore, this has been a little bit of a shift, because they have simplified so much, and what they have is their infrastructure.

Customers' most important criteria when selecting a solution:

• Robustness
• Durability
• Flexibility with storage and the Client.

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.

We use the solution for backup since we have some AIX machines and a few Windows machines.

To be honest, there aren't many features in the solution. However, it is a very robust solution.

The solution is overly complicated in terms of architecture, especially compared to other tools in the market. So, IBM Spectrum Protect should try to declutter. Also, there are even some conflicts in the functionalities between IBM Spectrum and Spectrum Protect. That's my take on it compared to the competitors like Veeam.

In future product releases, the solution should be less complicated regarding architecture.

Also, they have to stop being dependent on anything, which is CLI. I am saying this even though I like CLI. So, they have to change. The problem is that the solution originates from IBM TSM, especially because they have not even updated it in the terminology. So, when I see the terminology, it does not communicate what has happened in the solution, especially in terms of if everything has developed or if they have to update and try to find a way of transitioning from the old terminology to the new terminology.

I have been using IBM Spectrum Protect for a year and a half. I am either using IBM Spectrum Protect Version 8.1.14 or IBM Spectrum Protect Version 8.1.15. My company has a partnership with IBM.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Four engineers in my company are using the solution. It is a really scalable solution. We can scale it up. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I am trying to categorize it as a workstation, backup software, or data center backup software because they are all different. If you categorize it as a workstation kind of backup software, then definitely it's not good in scalability terms. As we are trying to evaluate it as a data center, it becomes a different story and gets complicated.

I have contacted the solution's technical support. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I haven't previously used any other products. So, I didn't know that Veeam had AIX. A huge part of my problem is that my installation is based on AIX. It would be much easier if I had a Windows installation.

The solution's initial setup process wasn't easy. It's okay to have trouble installing the server. So you may have problems installing the clients. They have a lot of documentation, and I can tell that it requires an expert to install the client itself. Even for Windows applications, it was a hassle. There are complexities with the installation phase.

Regarding the time for deployment, it took me a long time just for you now because you have to start from the planning through deployment. The setup isn't simple or straightforward. They have one document, which makes sense compared to what's available in the market now. However, it is not easy to manage and can be a hassle. It took me weeks to deploy the solution.

The people required for the solution's maintenance depend if it is only on the basic operations, then one person is enough. A professional team ready to troubleshoot would make it a different story. Two qualified people would be more than enough.

It is an overpriced solution. I rate the pricing a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is not cost-effective, and ten is cost-effective.

Once IBM Spectrum Protect restarted, we couldn't figure out why that happened. The solution's operation center made the solution's GUI, or graphical user interface, really nice. The way the operation center started making it more engaging and trying to make it good is something that made it nice.

I would recommend the solution to my foes and enemies. Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

IBM Spectrum Protect is used for the physical server databases.

I need two separate solutions for virtual and physical systems. I need IBM Spectrum Protect Plus for virtual systems and Spectrum Protect for physical systems and that's a pain. It would be an improvement if they were combined.

I have been using IBM Spectrum Protect for approximately 10 years.

IBM Spectrum Protect is highly reliable.

The scalability of IBM Spectrum Protect is good.

We are backing up approximately two petabytes of data using IBM Spectrum Protect.

I have contacted the support and my experience was good.

The initial setup of IBM Spectrum Protect is complex and the process took a few weeks.

IBM Spectrum Protect was implemented in-house. We have two people who deploy and maintain the solution.

With backup solutions, you never see a return on investment.

The price of IBM Spectrum Protect is expensive and there is only a standard licensing fee.

My advice to others is if they need a rock-solid solution this is a great solution. However, the problem is it is not future-proof because you never know where IBM aims to go.

I rate IBM Spectrum Protect an eight out of ten.