IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IBM Spectrum Protect is stable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our primary use cases for IBM Spectrum Protect are for data backup and archive and high performance solutions.

I would not say that IBM Spectrum Protect is a product like any other product. We have selected this product because we want to standardize. One way they have improved our organization is through the stability of the solution and the availability of the product.

There are a lot of features within these products. One of them is for data backup and protection and the other one, the Spectrum Scale, is for parallel storage as a data storage solution.

All of these features are very important.

IBM Spectrum Protect does have a lot of the features that we need, but I think they need to improve their backup virtualization and backup for container. But overall, they meet the requirements and they're okay.

In terms of what I would like to see in the next release, I think better reporting. Today the reporting lacks some of the features, interface, et cetera. If they increased that reporting and made it user friendly, it will be good.

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

We have different versions. For the file system, the Spectrum Scale, we are using version 5 and for the Spectrum Protect we are using version 8.

IBM Spectrum Protect is stable.

IBM Spectrum Protect is scalable.

There are about two to three direct users for the backup who are the admins.

For the Spectrum Scale file system, we have more than 500 users who use the file system with two admins for staff to deploy and maintain. Of course with backend for both from IBM.

This solution is being used heavily because we are a 24/seven shop, so it's heavily used and we always go and refresh the technology.

Technical support in the region is average. But overall, when we talk about IBM, when they get the right resource for you, they bring the best resources.

We have been with this product for a long time. I know initially it was difficult, but after the team built the experience, things started to be straightforward. So initial setup is complex, but maintenance is average, it is not that complicated.

It was complex because of the learning curve, for people to know more about the product, how to handle the product and the features. That's where the complexity comes from. But once people get the knowledge of how to handle the solution, it can be very straightforward.

Because we have done multiple installations, the initial took a couple of months if I recall correctly. The last installation for the backup was done four years ago and I remember it took two weeks to configure and have everything up and ready. For the Spectrum Scale, it took less than two days because we're getting the appliance model that comes as a total solution - hardware and software preconfigured.

We deployed it by ourself.

When it comes to data protection and data retrieval, most of the time, the projects that you protect cost money. So just retrieving and protecting these projects are a key value. It's like the insurance in my opinion.

We have a yearly maintenance license.

We always look at alternatives, but there are certain things you do as a strategy because you want a certain standardization and there are things you do as a temporary setup for a project or two projects. So we have both actually. We have a lot of products and there is always an alternative to them.

Before choosing IBM Spectrum Protect we evaluated solutions from EMC, from Commvault, and from Veeam. We selected IBM because it meets all our requirements and we have been using it for a long time. Shifting to a new technology comes with the price which includes support, training, development, et cetera. So that's why we continue to use IBM.

My advice to anyone considering IBM Spectrum Protect is that they need to do a thorough study of the market. They need to look at the company's resources to determine if they have the capacity. If they are new to Spectrum Scale, there is a learning curve that they need to go through, and from my experience, it is more than if you go with Veeam or to Commvault. But if you're already established and you have that and you pass that stage, then it's worth continuing with IBM. But you need to negotiate the license pricing. It takes time to negotiate pricing with IBM.

The main lesson that I learned from dealing with IBM is that you always need to have alternatives. There is a reason for it. You have to have an exit strategy. Because IBM, once they see you are hooked up to their solution, they will go and unfortunately, they do this, they will try to raise their pricing. So if you are not ready for that with good negotiation skills, you will be paying more.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give IBM Spectrum Protect an eight.

The reason for the high score is the availability of the solution. If you have mission critical functions, IBM is one of the companies that you trust. They do not release a product unless it goes through a lot of testing. And when it comes to data protection, you can count on them. If there is a bug, if there is any issue with the product, they always maintain it, which is very important when it comes to critical data backup.

Our primary use case is for Windows machines and SQL servers. I'm a senior systems engineer and we are customers of IBM.

In general, this is a good product. Specifically, I like the deduplication and compression features.

Replication of data could be improved and made a little easier to use. 

I've been using this solution for 20 years. 

Stability is good. 

Scalability is good. 

Customer support is quite good. 

The initial setup is quite complex, but I'm familiar with the solution so it's not a problem for me. 

Licensing costs are a little high but it's not too expensive.

I recommend this solution for backup servers. We have around 700 nodes and servers. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

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.

I have seen my clients use it historically for AIX systems and for applications which are pretty robust, like Domino. I use it there, or for customers who have a lot of systems and are trying to backup everything in a certain time frame. They get this benefit and the benefits of its space efficiency. It keeps the footprint down (the space), so they will not need to continue buying more disk. 

Mostly, it is a flash database for Spectrum Protect, then as far as the user space for everything else, they are using mostly using NL drives. I do not know of anybody using flash all the way. Our customers are also using tape, too.

The great thing about Spectrum Protect is I do not have to be concerned with the latest, greatest technologies. I can still use what has been out there for some time. Traditional storage works perfectly with it.

We do have customers with cloud strategies, who are looking to put their backup in the cloud. A lot of customers talk about moving to cloud, but do not do it because of their size (too large). We are in the works with one customer looking to do this, but their legal people stopped pretty much anybody putting their data in the cloud, so that is on the customer side.

The average Spectrum Protect customer is going to be somewhere around 150 servers, and about 2,000 user company organizations or larger. They have usually dozens of terabytes to protect. Some companies have five Spectrum instances, and some have 30 or 40.

Its capability of just being able to handle legacy servers, and new and old platforms. That is one of the things about IBM, they made sure the product will continue to keep customers loyal.

The Spectrum Protect people know that they have to have the Spectrum Protect Plus product pick up and move faster, meaning getting to those features that Spectrum Protect can't do. 

I think IBM is great with software, and it will always improve. It is just the speed of getting it out there. Faster development and deployment speed would help us as partners go out there with confidence and sell more product right now.

Though, no one can fix every solution for backup and restore.

Stability is excellent. This is one of IBM's strength.

Scalability is excellent. This is one of IBM's strength.

The technical support is general. If you need more than that, you need to know someone within IBM on the technical in-depth side. We will be the transparency to do that for our customers. That is why we are there to help manage their Spectrum Protect environments.

However, if something changes at the customer's company, the environment can go into what we call debt. If you don't watch it, it can get out of hand. That is also where we come in to help our customers if they cannot find the time. A good Spectrum Protect administrator should be spending approximately an hour to an hour and a half a day just to the administration of it. If you are spending more time than that, then it is possible that you need more training on it.

I work on the initial setup with my teammates and technical team to verify the setup will work. I work with the IBM blueprints that they have online as a basis. I try to follow them as closely as possible, but they do not always fit all customers, because there are just three broad versions: small, medium, and large footprints. 

If you follow the blueprints, it is pretty straightforward, because it is all scripted out for you. We do run into something complex with each customer setup, but we have the experience to handle it.

You need to put it in a PoC and test it out if you can. A lot of companies have time and resources to do this for every product that they are looking at. They need to scrutinize every one of the competitors. 

After, you can basically configure it and script it the way you want it to work.

Spectrum Protect is often compared with Commvault and EMC for overall backup solutions, then against Veeam, and Rubrik for virtualization platforms.

Our customers have come to trust IBM. If there is ever an issue that has to be solved, IBM will throw the bench at it and make it work. If you know how to design it right the first time and you show proof that you have done it before with the customer, it will make it easier for the next customer when you go out there and try to sell them on the solution.

Backup is typically last of the things that customers want to tackle, but they have to do it sooner or later, or they will get burnt by it.

Most important criteria when customers select a solution:

• Skill and experience in the product
• Relationships
• Confidence in product.

We completely back up our environment with Spectrum Protect: all databases in our environment, the files in the environment, and all the services. Performance is quite good. We do not worry about it.

We have an on-premise infrastructure. We have many hypervisors in use. We are using ESX, Hyper-V, KVM, and Power hardware. We using the SVC in combination with SSD storage. In addition, we use real and virtual tape libraries. It works well together. 

We will be closing the gap on moving to a cloud environment within the year.

The main thing is to keep the data safe and in files, keep it on tape ready for a request from a bank, and it is working perfectly with all our hardware. 

It is keeping the banking license alive, thus it is perfect for the business.

The wide variety that we have for using the software with each database and your own adapter. You can configure it, and it is quite good. Other backup software, you can be stuck to one environment and have to keep that environment.

Sometimes they have already erased information in our operational center and we need some of it for reporting to our subsidiaries if the backup was successful within the last months and which amount of data was backed up, archived, and stored. This is what the customer has interest in and we have to deliver. If the operational center could assist us, that would be fine. 

Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus, if they move together, that would be good. I heard already that we can get rid of data removal from virtual environments in the next version. The idea that Spectrum Protect Plus was dealing with appliances on ESX or Hyper-V seems good to me.

The service pack is very stable. We have had some problems about using storage agents on the X6 environment. It is not quite stable, but it is also not supported in a virtualized environment.

It is working great. Our database moves on 2.5TB and is still performing well. There are no worries about it.

We have roughly 30 instances for different purposes and different subsidiaries. We are using some Spectrum Protect servers only for library manager purposes to cover all these multiple parts, which have for storage agents and this is sometimes gets to its limit. It is not a well-known limit, but if you have more than 28,000 passes on one server, the performance decreases. That is what we found out and we try to keep it under this limit.

We are using the Technical Support, and sometimes it's a little bit annoying to come to the Level 3 support. Sometimes, it seems to me that if the Level 1 could not assist you and they did not find anyone in the Level 3, then you are stuck.

The initial setup is straightforward. The documentation is fine. There are some issues though. If you create a server, not all testings regarding fire systems are done in advance. Therefore, sometimes we have to go three rounds to fill all the gaps. This could be done a little bit better. 

I do not know who else was evaluated.

I would recommend Spectrum Protect.

Spectrum Protect Plus is covering the topic of industrial environments, e.g., X6 and Hyper-V, and this has been an open issue for years with us.

The main benefit is the protection.

You can protect your data and keep it for long durations, without it spending too much time on the local disk. You can send the data to an outside location. I think the main feature is that you can protect your data from disasters.

We should be talking about the capacity of the tape drives. That's the only problem. We have a system that is in petabytes. We have five frames of the tape drives and we have more than 2,000 slots. If we could compress that space in the data center, that would be good.

I was looking for what is already in the market. Everyone is getting a cloud. The product has already given us some solutions which we can use in the cloud. I think that's fine for the moment.

I think we are running the product on AIX at the moment. I think that is the most stable platform for any product.

In terms of scalability, we have been using it for the last five years and the scalability is very good. I like that.

In terms of technical support, we had some troubles when we reached out to them, especially with IBM Europe. For the last two years, we had some issues when we were trying to reach out to IBM, even in the US. This is especially the case when the call is for Level 1 technical support.

We have been working for eight years with the product. I open a call when I have exhausted Google knowledge and my personal knowledge.

The call goes to IBM and they just ask me some silly questions. That's where you have the problem. You lose maybe two or three days just to get the right person.

I have been using this product since I joined my company.

I was involved in the setup. It was straightforward.

They should go for it. The most important thing I look for when selecting a vendor is after sales support.

We used the platform for data backup purposes.

The platform has valuable stability.

There could be various client systems and process integration included in the product.

We have used IBM Spectrum Protect for 20 years.

I rate the platform's stability a nine out of ten.

We had more than 1000 IBM Spectrum Protect users in our environment. The scalability is low for process integration. Apart from that, it provides good scalability.

There was a team of two to three administrators for deployment. Two administrators maintain it at present.

We implemented it in-house back then.

IBM Spectrum Protect has a fixed price and includes no additional costs.

We plan to switch to another tool as IBM Spectrum Protect doesn't meet our business requirements. I rate it a one out of ten.