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BDRSuite Backup & Replication vs IBM Spectrum Protect comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

BDRSuite Backup & Replication
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
65
Ranking in other categories
Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (7th), MSP Backup (1st)
IBM Spectrum Protect
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
17th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
149
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of BDRSuite Backup & Replication is 0.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Protect is 2.2%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Redha Benlaksira - PeerSpot reviewer
The ability to maintain multiple restore points is critical because it lets customers choose to restore their data to an hour or a day ago
BDRSuite is better than competing solutions because it can protect, back up, and recover data. A feature called live migration allows you to recover the same data in different environments. For example, I can back up the data from a VMware machine and restore it to a Hyper-V. You can also create repositories and back up environments to a cloud platform like GCP and AWS S3 buckets. BDRSuite allows you to back up virtual machines hosted on an EC3 instance or Microsoft 365 mailboxes, SharePoint, etc. The solution allows us to recover data instantly. We can recover all our data in under 15 minutes. In a virtual environment, we can recover a virtual machine and all its data in under 15 minutes. It's the same for a NAS, SAN, or DAS disk. The ability to boot instantly enables customers to maintain their business operations without interruption. BDRSuite's ability to maintain multiple restore points is critical because it gives customers the option to restore their data to an hour or a day ago. They can choose a full, incremental, or synthetic backup. Incremental backup makes sense if you are backing up the same data daily and you want to save space and network resources. It only backs up the differences or updates in every block. I've worked with lots of backup solutions, and BDRSuite is the easiest to use. It's simple to install and create backup jobs. It doesn't require many tasks to install the solution. You can easily back up and restore from one console
Syed Habib - PeerSpot reviewer
Manageable and comprehensive and integrates robust backup features for core banking
It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dashboard from Browser Spectrum. This is why I am searching for another solution. The product also lacks any centralized graphical user interface (GUI), such as Jarek Pod, and I am limited to using a console-based text user interface, which my local partner handles completely.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I enjoy the ease of the UI and how simple it is to use compared to other products."
"The compression, encryption, and deduplication features all work fine."
"We invest in the backup so the continuity of the data is not affected."
"The most valuable feature is its ability to copy quickly. We have about 12 terabytes, and trying to copy that volume size through the file structure would take a week. BDRSuite has a different approach to copying and is much faster."
"BDRSuite is better than competing solutions because it can protect, back up, and recover data. A feature called live migration allows you to recover the same data in different environments. For example, I can back up the data from a VMware machine and restore it to a Hyper-V."
"The product is very reliable and works well out of the box; many of our customers are buying it."
"We only use BDRSuite to back up two VMs in our current environment. It helps us with maintenance, monitoring, etc. We are satisfied with BDRSuite so far and plan to add a few more VMs in the future, including Citrix VMs and XenServer."
"The scalability is good. It can scale. Adding a new server to a foreign location is easy."
"It is scalable beyond anything my customers ever aspire to."
"High availability (HA): It is one of the best features."
"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."
"With the new features that we have added, it has made a difference as far as faster recovery and speed."
"The product is very stable."
"It is more efficient than most traditional backup solutions."
"Good deduplication and compression features."
"The ability to do dedupe in the product is nice to have."
 

Cons

"The support is a bit slow in resolving an issue. It takes a long time to recover."
"The response time of the support could be improved a little bit. Sometimes, I need to wait for two or three hours to get support. With VMware, we can get urgent support in an hour. Other than that, I'm pretty good with BDRSuite."
"It would be a great improvement if they can give a console to control the systems. All other vendors let you simply log in to the cloud console and control everything from there, but for Vembu, whether you choose Vembu Cloud Backup or Vembu Disaster Recovery, you still need to install the Vembu software on your on-premise system and configure it from there. It would be great if I can get a cloud console to manage the systems."
"We have not been able to move our backups from one drive to another one. We can only create a storage pool. However, if we want to change a drive, it is not possible to delete one drive as long there is data on it. For this, we have to call the support. While they can solve this, it is not out-of-the-box."
"For the more sophisticated backups that do not have a set backup process, procedures that are outside of the norm, it would be nice if we had more control and did not have to use their technical support. While they're very responsive and have always come through in a reasonable time frame, we would like to be able to manage everything on our own."
"The phone [support] system is a negative five on a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst. They wanted me to leave a message. When there is a problem with the product and you call in, you want to talk to somebody or wait to talk to somebody, not leave a message."
"It is very easy, unless you know exactly what you're doing, to corrupt the virtual machines and they get locked up. Just brief detail: When you are creating a system, if you don't have absolutely every other little background processes in place, it creates Snapshots of the virtual machines. Once it does that, it then won't be able to have a backup. From that point on you have to destroy the virtual machine, which is completely counterproductive on a large system. There is a fundamental flaw in the setup that can be very dangerous, potentially."
"The solution's UI and integrations could be better."
"I should be able to backup Linux. I would like SUSE for Linux on POWER. Right now, we have to use Storex, which is a pain to use."
"Replication of data could be more user friendly."
"IBM Spectrum Protect could be improved by making the installation easier. Once it's implemented, it's okay. IBM started lagging behind when things started moving to storage and cloud-based solutions. Even though they've recently released updates that give cloud-based protection, personally, I still believe they are not up to par with the likes of Rubrik. The entire product is a little bit clumsy because they have co-joined two different products, so it's complex. Even from a sales/explaining to people what it does point of view, it's complex. Whereas, if you take more current products, it's a single box solution. You reel it in, you fire it up, you do a couple of points and clicks, and off you go, whereas the IBM system is seriously complex. There's a lot of training involved and it's a massively difficult product to sell at this point in time."
"The administration interface should implement more functionalities that exist only in the command line and needs improvement in how some reports are created."
"I would like to see the operations center be a lot more functional. It was nowhere near as functional as the admin center, and I'm doing a lot of command line with it."
"The software is very complicated. You have to do a lot of configurations to build a server, and you would need to backup and restore."
"It seems like they are a little behind on the integration to Azure Cloud as well as Amazon."
"It would be helpful if the solution included some sort of ransomware protection."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is fair."
"With the free version of Vembu, you receive three virtual machine backups. However, if you buy the NetworkBackup Enterprise version, you don't have access to the features seen in the free version. This is a situation that Vembu should solve. This caused a misunderstanding between sales and us. I was hoping if I buy the licenses, then after the trial I would not have to purchase virtual machine licenses. Maybe they should offer these three virtual machine backups as part of the Enterprise license."
"The only thing with room for improvement, as everybody says, since I'm in a home lab, would be the price for the CPU; the cost... As far as competitors' prices go, Vembu was definitely better than all the competitors I found."
"It's just the license per host with one CPU, but if I did choose offsite cloud replication, they do charge for the data. They charge per gigabyte, or something like that. They have plans."
"The product's pricing is of good value. It was much more affordable than the alternative solution to it, which was Veeam. That would be the closest competitor, and between those two, Vembu was much more affordable. It seemed reasonable for what we needed to do."
"The price for BDRSuite is justified."
"I selected this solution because it was the only one I could find for the cost that did what I needed it to do. I haven't found a competitor who does as good a job for the money."
"At the moment, I am doing Vembu for one host. My costs are about $25 USD a month for a single host up to 100 VMs."
"The platform is neither highly priced nor inexpensive. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten."
"Licensing can be either complicated or simple depending on what type of licensing you wish to use and what works best for your environment."
"The pricing is a little expensive for our current employer, so they want to move to a cheaper solution."
"We have capacity licensing. We use the front end. The capacity licensing is pretty okay on the licensing price. I used to use the old PVU-based licensing in the early environment, but now we use capacity-based licensing."
"Some of the new advanced features are definitely more into cost savings, e.g., dedupe compression, so doing more with less."
"The product is not cheap."
"Its licensing is complicated. It goes by CPUs, and it is pretty expensive as well."
"The product is low cost. It is very cool when we design it to using licensing based on post capacity."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
87%
Retailer
3%
Educational Organization
2%
Financial Services Firm
1%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
9%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BDRSuite?
The best part of BDRSuite is how user-friendly it is and how it does not require any maintenance after the initial setup.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BDRSuite?
BDRSuite is cost-effective because you can purchase a perpetual license that covers multiple environments. You only renew the support costs annually. It offers advanced features at roughly 75 perce...
What needs improvement with BDRSuite?
I had a small problem integrating VMware and Hyper-V when customers used a free VMware license to create VMs. This is a problem because many customers use the free version of VMware. There are also...
What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Protect?
It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dash...
 

Also Known As

Vembu BDRSuite
IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NASA, Intel, CISCO, PHILIPS, Atos, HEXAWARE, Motorola
CERN, Einstein Healthcare, Nyherji, Allianz Australia, TZM, ABT Online, NCT, Kindred Healthcare Inc., Cobalt Iron, TransGrid, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Cash America, Piedmont Healthcare, RWGV, Arkansas Tech University, British Columbia Institute of Technology
Find out what your peers are saying about BDRSuite Backup & Replication vs. IBM Spectrum Protect and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.