IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

We use IBM Spectrum Protect as a backup solution. We do so with robots, each pair robot, making use of the LCO tapes. 

I find the solution somewhat difficult to use with virtual environments or VMware. 

The ability to schedule myVM on operation center should be addressed. 

Setting up the server is not easy; really difficult, in fact. It requires some skill sets. 

Automation should be added in the next release.

It is difficult for the Windows team, as it cannot make use of the solution. 

IBM Spectrum Protect is a big solution. As such, I have been using it for four years. 

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

I feel support to be good and they have resolved all issues of mine which have arisen. 

I did not use a different solution prior to IBM Spectrum Protect. 

Setting up the server is not easy; really difficult, in fact. It requires some skill sets. 

In my previous job, I handled the installation independently. However, we currently have support, as well as the central architecture and the manager sites. When it comes to the initial setup or an upgrade, we work in tandem with their support.

We definitely need certain people to maintain the solution. In respect of just storage, a backup engineering team can work with the IBM Spectrum Protect solution. The Windows team cannot make use of the solution, which poses a challenge for it. 

I am not in a position to comment on the licensing terms, as this is handled by the central team. 

We are the client. At the moment, however, I am focusing on the project involving our migration and upgrading from Spectrum Protect 1.6, dot 7 to spectrum version 1.8. 

The solution is not deployed in the cloud, but onsite. 

I have experience working with TSM and have trained on the old versions of TSM 6.

Our team exclusively uses the solution. 

We are talking about a stable solution which boasts good performance and security.

I rate IBM Spectrum Protect as an eight or nine out of ten. 

We are using it for backing up corporate data.

It helps you protect your data with various retention policies, as required by the business. It would help the company maintain a disaster recovery plan and be able to recover from a failure.

Its incremental forever approach is valuable, so we don't have to load tapes to do a restore.

It does what we need it to do, but it could be better with VM backups. It could be better integrated with virtual machines or VM backups, but that's why they have their Plus out now. Plus version is more geared toward VM backups. The regular version is more for endpoint clients. 

Its licensing and pricing could be improved. Its licensing is complicated, and it is an expensive solution.

I have been using this solution for over 20 years.

Its stability is pretty good.

It is very scalable.

They're decent. They're fine. I would rate them an eight out of 10.

Positive

I have only been with IBM. I'm a consultant, so that's basically what I've worked on.

Its initial setup can be complicated. You would need a certified deployment expert to configure it and install it properly upfront. It isn't for a novice to be able to set up.

The deployment duration depends on the environment, but it typically takes about a week or two. Its maintenance also depends on the size of the company. If it is a small-sized or a medium-sized company, you could get away with one admin, but if it is larger, you might have more than one Spectrum Protect server, so you'd have multiple admins.

I am a consultant, so I would be the one who does the implementation.

Its licensing is complicated. It goes by CPUs, and it is pretty expensive as well.

I would advise others to do proper planning beforehand. You should know the retention policies that you want. You should know what policies you want to set before you go into it, and you should know how much data you're going to be backing up and then make sure it is sized properly.

I'll give it a nine out of 10. It is a good product.

We use IBM Spectrum Protect for all the organization backups. When there is loss of data, we can restore it from the backup.

We have found the building, compression, backup, and the tool to save point-in-time backups to be valuable features.

The backup is very good. In other backup systems, you need a lot of storage to gain the same backup policy.

There aren't too many bugs, and it is good for storage and backup.

The high availability of the backup servers can be improved because we can replicate nodes, but the software is very complicated. It's very complicated to do backups in several clusters.

You have to do a lot of configurations to build a server, and you would need to backup and restore.

To go to new hardware, it's a project because you would need to do tests of the backup and restoration of the  DB2 database. A lot of time would need to be spent.

There are lots of configuration issues.

I think it would be good if they could improve the self service of the users.

We've been using this solution for about 20 years.

It is a stable solution.

It's not a scalable solution. For example, if I need to move to a better host or if I need to move my database that gives them the metadata, then I would need to move the IBM Spectrum Protect database to another storage spot. So, I would need to do a backup and restoration of the database. There is no scalability in the backup server.

I can't move it to another host without downtime. I would need a minimum of one day of downtime to move the database to another storage spot or to move the server to another server. I can't build another host and then switch.

We do plan to increase usage because there are more backup needs.

The technical support is okay. Sometimes, they give the answer but not immediately. At other times, we have to handle a case for a very long time.

The initial setup for IBM Spectrum Protect was complex. It's not a software that you can install and do a little bit of configuration and be done. You have to know very well what you're doing with it.

It works with DB2, and you have to know what the sizing, the log sizing, and so forth are. This is the difficulty with this software.

I did the deployment myself, but it would be very difficult to do it alone. I did it because I had enough time as a new employee 20 years ago; I took it on as a project.

However, in most organizations there won't be enough time to learn about IBM Spectrum Protect yourself. It would be better to do it with a deployment company that has more experience.

I think that overall it's a good software for backup. There aren't a lot of bugs, and it's very good for storage. However, you have to be a specialist; it's not plug and play.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect at nine.

We are a technology provider and IBM Spectrum Protect is one of the solutions that we are certified in. Our customers are using it for databases and applications.

The interface is easy to use.

Better integration with other tools and databases is needed. Some examples of this are Oracle RMAN and Veeam.

I have been working with Spectrum Protect for three years.

The stability is ok. We are working with different databases and different clients, and we haven't had any issues.

Scalability is good.

The technical support is good but it isn't easy to convince somebody to use it more often because of the cost.

I have used similar products by several different vendors and I feel that many of them are better than IBM Spectrum Protect. For example, Veeam is better because it provides better protection for a physical server. They offer both an on-premises and a virtual edition.

I think that the initial setup is simple, although the solution overall is somewhat complex in terms of detail. Our deployment took one month to complete because it took time to identify the full workload.

We were able to deploy it for databases on four or five systems, some of which are not Windows-based. We have different technologies in use.

This is a product that I recommend, although I think it depends on the sizing of your IT systems. That said, there is a need to have a solution that is recognized by most companies.

Overall, I feel that this is an average product. In my opinion, there are many competing products that are better than Spectrum Protect.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

I have been working for more than 14 years in service companies dedicated to implementing and consulting in the area of backup and storage. This has allowed me to work with a multitude of backup environments. I have worked in Unix, Linux, Windows, and VMware environments, with all kinds of databases, applications; environment backup contingency solutions (DR) - formerly through "double copy" and tape management offsite; replicating storage pools via disk systems, and the databases of the backup server itself. Lately, I have been using node replication in on-premise environments and replicating against the server located in the IBM cloud (Softlayer).

Yields are a key feature. There are also very few incidents related to restores that cannot be performed. The level of product support is very high.

Integration with Windows environments needs improvement. It should be more "assisted", both at the application and database level. It remains a product that fits better in Unix/Linux environments than in Windows environments, given its configuration procedures. It needs BMR (bare machine recovery) solutions for both Windows and Linux systems.

The deduplication functionality has caused some issues as has the upload of deduplicated/encrypted data to the cloud. These errors have been solved, thanks to the power of its DB2 engine. It enables detection and correction of these problems. To date, I have not found any error that could not be resolved.

Scalability is one of the best features of this product. An IBM Spectrum Protect environment (a DB2 instance) can manage up to 4PB. Sometimes it is more practical to define several instances of DB2 (several DB2 databases, several TSM servers) on the same physical server, which drastically reduces the size of the DB2 databases.

The problem in Spain is that level-1 and 2 support, which were very good, has been moved. Now, almost all level-2 incidents are handled in France or the US. In the US there is very good support but its work schedule does not match ours.

For medium/large environments (Unix, Linux, Windows, VMware) we also propose the Commvault solution. For fully virtual environments, such as VMware and Hyper-V, we always use Veeam Backup & Replication. For a small environment with Windows and VMware/Hyper-V, we usually implement Veritas Backup Exec.

Setup/implementation requires a high level of knowledge/skill. For those with experience, the setup can be very fast, although it is true that it requires a pre-planning and sizing process.

The licensing is varied. If we have small environments (not many TB being managed) it is best to license by PVUs (depending on the number of cores of the machine). If we manage many TBs we look at licensing by capacity which allows us to use all the agents of the product.

If the customer has more IBM products, as well as IBM storage, we can resort to global licensing, which can be very economical.

In principle, and whenever I can implement this product, if a customer is reluctant or has many Windows servers I choose products that are configured/installed almost entirely via a graphic interface, such as Commvault.

It is a very powerful product that offers great performance and integrates very well in Unix/Linux environments and with powerful databases (Oracle, DB2, SAP, etc.). However, it requires a middle to high-end knowledge of, and skill with, the product.

Our primary use case is for database backups. It is performing okay. 

We are probably moving to NetWorker, because we want to use one platform for all of our backups. Right now, we use Avamar for virtualized environments and Spectrum Protect for databases. We want to get to one platform.

We have two main campuses with three petabytes of storage. We use virtualized tape, IBM product TS7700 Hydra. Those are all replicating, and we also have our Spectrum Connect and Spectrum Protect databases being replicated using Remote Mirror between sites (about 130 kilometers apart). Right now, the database (300 to 400 gigs) is sitting on some flash on a EMC VNX behind an SVC.

It is just a backup. It has not changed anything.

It allows us to have one interface. Our database administrators can schedule backups themselves. We can freeze and start databases for consistent backups. Also, we can have different schedules for whatever they need, whenever they want.

We would like to see bare-metal restorers.

There are some things that it is not doing too well for us. It does not do too well in our virtual environment. We have had to move away from it because of this.

Stability is good. We have some trouble with Clients, but I think all backup products have problems. They just have different problems.

It is pretty scalable. It will scale to anything. There have been no problems. 

Technical support has been good. Except sometimes, there will be some performance problems and no one knows what is happening. We end up spinning our wheels. With a couple of performance problems, we have ended up having to rebuild the database because everyone will eventually give up. 

Everything is normally good. If we have had a problem with our Client, they respond right away.

I do not know who else was evaluated when we were looking for a solution.

Now, we have NetWorker, Avamar, and Spectrum Protect. So, we have two and a half too many backup products.

What it does, it does excellent. I would recommend the product.

We chose Spectrum Protect because everything we had was IBM. At the time, it could do everything; all the environment. Everything that we had could go into Spectrum Connect: There were some P7s, Windows, and that was it.

Besides the compression, the new feature of data replication has helped us. Based on the feature, we were able to decommission our tape media infrastructure.

The most valuable features of Spectrum Protect would be the compression and the deduplication.

I am looking forward to new features in the next release.

One of the main features is the cloud storage integration, which was one of my main required features. I've had more difficult experiences with other platforms than with this one.

It's a very stable application. It was challenging at the beginning of the implementation of the replication and deduplication, but once it was completely deployed, it has been very stable.

The scalability has been great. We were able to introduce and scale from the storage pools, as well as from all the backup infrastructures.

I have used technical support. I've been fully engaged with IBM support and they've been very, very helpful.

I've been using the same product for the last 15 years. I know it's been very reliable, so I've stayed with it.

The setup was challenging in certain areas. For the most part, based on the experience I had, I was able to accomplish it OK.

I would highly recommend the proof of concept which is one thing that IBM provides with their lab services and other types of support. Especially with the new features and the cloud integration, that will be a great opportunity to introduce the new platform.

The most important criteria is scalability and support. Support to me is key, since at the end of the day, we're providing service to the company. So far, the experience has been very good.

I have been working with it for a few years now and I've touched other types of data protection platforms. So far, Spectrum Protector has been the best.

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.