We compared Commvault Complete Data Protection and IBM Spectrum Protect based on user reviews in five categories. We reviewed all of the data, and you can find the conclusion below.
Features: Commvault Complete Data Protection is highly regarded for its extensive recovery options and compatibility with diverse storage systems. IBM Spectrum Protect is praised for its ability to integrate with tape libraries and its customization options. Users suggest that Commvault Complete Data Protection could offer more Windows security features and a unified console. They said Commvault should expand support for container-based systems and improve its ability to archive large video files. Users also praised Spectrum Protect for its compatibility with various products, scalability, and stability. IBM Spectrum Protect could improve its integration with cloud services and make its interface more user-friendly.
Service and Support: Commvault Complete Data Protection earned mostly positive feedback for its customer service, but some Commvault customers mentioned concerns about network-related support and the need for more direct access during emergencies. IBM’s customer service is described as high quality, friendly, knowledgeable, and responsive. At the same time, some said the support process can be lengthy.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Commvault Complete Data Protection is complex, time-consuming, and may require outside help. The lack of sufficient documentation and online resources adds to the difficulty. IBM Spectrum Protect's initial setup is challenging and demands skilled professionals to configure multiple parameters and features. This process can be time-consuming.
Pricing: Commvault may need to lower its price to attract customers in certain regions and customer segments. IBM Spectrum Protect is considered expensive. The pricing model is complex, taking into account factors like processor type and volume.
ROI: Commvault Complete Data Protection offers significant cost savings. Some enterprise customers estimated that they saved between $100,000 to $300,000 by reducing labor costs, speeding up backup and recovery, and implementing remote access. Users have realized benefits from IBM Spectrum Protect’s data protection and retrieval. They appreciate its ability to reduce storage requirements with larger tape sizes.
Comparison Results: Commvault Complete Data Protection is a robust and flexible solution with the potential to save customers money, but users say the setup is too complex and it needs better support for container-based systems. IBM Spectrum Protect is a reliable, customizable solution that allows smooth integration with tape libraries. At the same time, some say that the user interface could be more intuitive and Spectrum Protect could integrate better with the cloud.
"It's very user-friendly. It supports a wide range of workloads. It's quite easy to use, it's very powerful and it's scalable."
"The solution provides us with a single platform to move, manage, and recover our data across on-premise locations. Some of the guys have been using it to move a virtual machine from VMware to the Microsoft solution, Hyper-V. They back it up and then they restore to the different virtual machine provider, and that works great."
"It's easy to configure multiple jobs and media agent locations for each server. We do offsite backups for all of our servers, but we also do onsite hourly backups of them. That has benefited us several times when we had an incident and didn't want to roll back a server an entire day."
"The product alerts the security team about threats."
"Commvault provides data protection. Their engine is ransomware-agnostic so ransomware doesn't compromise our backup data. Therefore, we can rely on their data protection to recover and back up our production system."
"It integrates redundant storage and preserves jams in a storage area, providing up to 70% compression rate."
"It runs all the tests and emails us the reports. We take daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots, and I integrate the storage snapshot scripts with the Commvault workflow. The Commvault workflow runs all the scripts and sends us the reports. It also features cloud-side reports and workflows. Commvault has many tools for backing up, restoring, and archiving things, but we use another service for our archives."
"It helped us reduce the number of servers that are required for a stable operation."
"The solution is very stable. It is one of the most important features that we look for in a product before putting it into the market and when establishing a strategy with our customers."
"Everyone wants a full backup. It gives them safety and peace of mind, like an insurance policy for that rainy day when they may need to restore a system."
"The file-restoring feature is the most valuable."
"Space efficient data reduction, using progressive incremental forever in combination with deduplication and compression."
"Incremental forever: This feature helps us reduce backup time and backup storage space."
"It is also a product that has been maturing for a long time. This is good because customers need reliability in their enterprise initiatives."
"The MN backup for a cluster is most valuable because it has made backing up the GSF as a zero-file system easier. I like its stability a lot. Over the years, I very rarely had a problem with it."
"The most valuable features are compression and de-duplication."
"I think the one thing that could be improved is the customer experience. The interface should be more user friendly."
"Endpoint backup."
"Commvault HyperScale X is more expensive for hybrid environments than traditional solutions."
"They need to improve when it comes to large, video file archiving. They're good, but they have not met my expectations as a customer in this area."
"I would like Commvault to have a feature for cybersecurity threats, e.g. securing the target backup repository. Commvault just started testing and releasing this feature, but it needs to be stabilized."
"When you deploy Complete Data Protection for past services, it's more complicated because you cannot directly back up from the previous service host. We have to build a proxy server, like a middleware, to directly access the past database server. It's complex and hard for beginners to figure out."
"I would like them not to push Command Center. It is good, but I would like them to enable all the features for the Java console. Some things are not in the Java console, like Office 365 agents. In fact, they are there, but one of the engineers had to show me how to configure it. It's not done the same as in the Command Center."
"Just to keep it running is time-consuming. There are five people on my team. Commvault was supposed to be one of the less time-consuming solutions, but in reality it takes 60 percent of our time just to keep it running, and that's not even fine-tuning it; that's just to keep it running."
"The solution is evolving, so it has to be evolved to fit all new types of software requirements too."
"It would be helpful if the solution included some sort of ransomware protection."
"Most customers still struggle with the reporting piece, especially generating reports. I think it needs some improvements in this area."
"Their support is lacking. I've talked to their developers and stuff in the last couple of weeks and they reassure me that some people have retired, and they're working on getting that bumped back up. But the support lacks a lot to be desired at this point."
"Getting technical support all the necessary diagnostic information is still very painful."
"I want to see better compression than what it currently does."
"The administration tools for GI need improvement, as the current assessment suggests shortcomings in the back-end system."
"The only thing that I would like to have a little more of is insight in reporting. I find that Spectrum Protect needs a lot of monitoring, and I have to actually log into the servers."
Commvault Cloud is ranked 3rd in Backup and Recovery with 104 reviews while IBM Spectrum Protect is ranked 17th in Backup and Recovery with 146 reviews. Commvault Cloud is rated 8.6, while IBM Spectrum Protect is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Commvault Cloud writes "Provides excellent visibility and helps reduce costs and time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Protect writes "Performance and recoveries are better, and customers are happier with performance". Commvault Cloud is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Rubrik, Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, Azure Backup and Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain), whereas IBM Spectrum Protect is most compared with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, Veeam Backup & Replication, Rubrik, Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) and Cohesity DataProtect. See our Commvault Cloud vs. IBM Spectrum Protect report.
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