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Commvault Cloud vs IBM Storage Protect comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 2025

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

Commvault Cloud
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
111
Ranking in other categories
eDiscovery (3rd), Cloud Backup (2nd), Disaster Recovery as a Service (3rd), File Archiving (1st), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (3rd), SaaS Backup (2nd), Threat Deception Platforms (1st), Container Backup Software (1st)
IBM Storage Protect
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Commvault Cloud is 5.5%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Storage Protect is 2.0%, down from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Commvault Cloud5.5%
IBM Storage Protect2.0%
Other92.5%
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Cassandra Cinar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides excellent visibility and helps reduce costs and time
We use intuitive administrative tools that readily reveal the volume of backed-up data. Our Commvault CommCell servers alert us to failed backups and provide detailed information. This transparency allows our managed service provider to easily grasp our pre-established thresholds and readily scale up with new technologies. We're highly satisfied with Commvault's automated data security and management policies. They meet our stringent requirements for secure and private data storage, including anti-ransomware protection and encryption. Notably, they also ensure compliance with GDPR for backups stored in Europe and other regions, fulfilling our regulatory obligations. Threat Scan's ability to scan backup data for threats is invaluable because it proactively identifies and neutralizes certain viruses and threats that may originate from our G Suite or be reported by our security incident response team, preventing potential outages. Commvault provides excellent visibility across our entire organization's data. They perform regular health checks, informing us of areas of strength and offering recommendations for improvement. These recommendations may include upgrading to newer product versions or addressing issues identified during the checks. It is important for our organization that Commvault provides a unified platform for recovery across cloud, on-premises, and software-as-a-service workloads. This is particularly important because many of our existing cloud environments rely on basic backups that are insufficient for our needs. Commvault empowers us to address this issue. We have implemented it not only in our own operating company but also across the corporate structure, rolling it out to virtually all AWS users. This is because the standard backup methods, such as snapshot backups, fail to meet our stringent requirements for recovery, service level agreements, and crucial functionalities like threat detection and other security features. Commvault ensures a robust and comprehensive backup infrastructure that satisfies all our essential needs. It has improved our organization by ensuring we meet our infrastructure requirements, adhere to our vulnerability methodology, and achieve service level agreements for both backup and storage requirements. The quarterly risk analysis allows us to effectively manage the lifecycle of both data and backups. It also sheds light on the types of data and backups we have, providing valuable insights. Commvault's risk analysis is one of the tools we use to meet our compliance requirements and implement the necessary controls for immediate security policy action. To ensure comprehensive data protection and comply with international regulations like GDPR, we rely on Commvault alongside our established financial systems and SOC-compliant practices. Commvault has helped us reduce our organization's data management costs by 75 percent, particularly for long-term backups. We ditched tapes and virtual tapes thanks to Commvault, replacing them with a fully disk-based backup system and cloud backups in AWS and Azure. By implementing Commvault, we've significantly reduced our backup times. This is achieved through a combination of incremental backups and data aging. Aged data is then moved to cheaper disk or cloud storage, ensuring cost-effective long-term retention while still meeting our recovery SLAs. While the overall time savings may be around 10-15 percent, the main benefit is not keeping everything on expensive primary storage and efficiently aging it out. Consequently, retrieving data from the Azure bucket typically takes five days or more, reflecting our agreed-upon SLA. It has reduced our recovery point objective, allowing us to store more backups. However, new regulatory and compliance requirements mandate that some backups cannot be deleted and must be retained indefinitely. To address this while still improving efficiency, we've implemented solutions for long-term data storage and improved data management practices. Commvault has helped our organization not only decrease our threat detection time but also improve threat prevention to such an extent that we often avoid facing the full impact of a threat altogether. By preventing these incidents, we're often unsure of the precise amount of time saved, but the benefit is clear: we don't need to activate disaster recovery mechanisms. It has not only helped us reduce our recovery time objective, but it has also ensured that our backups and long-term storage are secure, thanks to its comprehensive capabilities. In terms of total cost of ownership, Commvault has enabled us to significantly reduce both hardware and media costs for storage and backup. After factoring in encryption and compression, the total savings amount to close to 80 percent. It has been able to reduce downtime, but having a quick recovery plan and policy and SLAs that are published are met regularly.
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

"The embedded deduplication engine is really good because we use a Near Line SAS disk as a repository for our backups, and we don't need to pay for another appliance such as a Data Domain or Quantum so that we can have hardware-based deduplication."
"The solution has the fastest backup and better licensing."
"The use of hyperscale storage hardware and Commvault software has allowed us to create a large storage pool and achieve significant savings in our back-end storage costs."
"Commvault's Command Center is one of the best solutions out there. You can rely on Commvault solutions for the most complex and most demanding environments."
"The features I find most helpful in Commvault are its ability to perform incremental backups and significantly reduce backup times for our diverse multi-architecture, multi-environment environment."
"There are many valuable features of Commvault HyperScale X giving many possibilities to complete jobs."
"The solution is easy to use and the duplication is quite good."
"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."
"You can protect your data and keep it for long durations, without it spending too much time on the local disk."
"Its flexibility is valuable. It is a very flexible solution. There are always more ways than one to do something. It is a software solution, which means you can buy your own hardware and expand it whenever you want. You are not boxed in or locked into something you've bought and outgrown. You can always expand it."
"It is very stable after deployment and will perform in a steady state."
"One of the features which is most interesting in Spectrum Protect is the ability to scale out to great environments. This is something that not many vendors have on the market."
"The best point about IBM Storage Protect is that it can use IBM tape environments, which we still use and will continue to use in the future."
"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 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."
"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."
 

Cons

"It takes a lot of technical expertise to implement. Commvault could increase the training it provides to customers and partners."
"For simpler environments, they have some templates for startups. Possibly for a smaller environment, they need to do more automatic configuration and selections of users who want to do backups. This is mainly for smaller environments. I would like them to have the same system fit for all environments: small and big environments. Currently, we have to do a lot of configuration of the layout, which takes time. This solution is appropriate for enterprise-level enterprise, but I would like it to be easier to use for SMB environments."
"It is a little more complicated than it really needs to be."
"Training."
"Sometimes the web page doesn't work. I don't know if it's an outage or if there is maintenance going on in the background. From time to time, Commvault will suddenly stop taking backups for some intervals."
"We had some small issues with the reporting, but that was just a matter of fine-tuning the kinds of messages we receive by email. It was a little overwhelming in the initial configuration. So we reviewed our configuration with our partner and customized the reports so that we only get the important reports. I haven't seen any big issues or things that the solution is missing."
"You can't change Metallic's retention policies without contacting the Commvault support team."
"I would rate the customer support five out of ten. Customer support has very closed departments, requiring us to shuffle between them to get one thing done because representatives have limited accessibility."
"Getting technical support all the necessary diagnostic information is still very painful."
"Easier configuration of some of the products, e.g., VE comes to mind."
"I want a better user interface, support, and integrations."
"It's difficult in terms of the configuration at set up. In our case, it required another admin, one person dedicated to the backup."
"The Hyper-V and SQL Server backup could be improved. In the 2016 version there was a significant improvement, but I think IBM has a big challenge with these technologies."
"It can be improved for large file systems with many files. Spectrum Protect can restore large files very well, but if you're restoring millions of little files, it is not as great. At one point, we tried to implement the VMware module with it, and it was awful and terrible. I don't know if that has improved. If it hasn't, this would be one big improvement."
"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."
"I would like a little more ease with the virtual platforms, because it is a huge thing that is coming up."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Commvault's pricing model and pricing structure were initially confusing, but once we worked more closely with the company, we were able to transition to a subscription license that saved us a lot of money."
"Our cost is around $20,000 per month. The previous year, it was around $30,000 per month. It now costs less because Commvault changed the licensing type for providers."
"The cost of an integrator license is moderate and its features cover most customers."
"Licensing fees are billed on a yearly basis."
"The price could always be lower."
"There is a bit of cost involved with signing up the entire solution. It's not a cheap solution."
"The pricing is far better than we had in the past. The license for Dell EMC was not too expensive, but the storage, given that Dell EMC is based on data domains, was pretty expensive."
"One of the most interesting aspects is that the licensing model can be modified. We're paying for our licensing by the client, as opposed to the size of the footprint of the backup, which decreased our cost by about 20 percent."
"Its licensing is complicated. It goes by CPUs, and it is pretty expensive as well."
"The platform is neither highly priced nor inexpensive. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten."
"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."
"We have found that the pricing is high in our country."
"Its licensing is complex, and its price is not really reasonable. It is on the expensive side. IBM, in general, is slightly expensive, but with IBM Spectrum for the virtual environment, they are looking into the aspect of helping customers with the cost and providing a cost-effective solution."
"I don't have an idea about the pricing. They send that over to someone else, but I know that one of the issues they had was the licensing costs. I don't think they were happy with how they were charged."
"The solution's pricing is fair. Price-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten."
"The pricing model of this solution is another difficult area, it's very sophisticated in the way they charge. It's based on PBU, which is a type of processor, how, many processors, and you need to put everything into an equation. However, they have different ways of charging or licensing. One way is a back-end volume or front-end volume, which is quite complicated."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business57
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise81
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business53
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise94
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Commvault Backup & Recovery?
Commvault Backup & Recovery's search utility is its most valuable feature.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Commvault Backup & Recovery?
Commvault Backup & Recovery is priced fairly, and its performance-to-cost ratio is also better than fair. I am not here trying to figure out how to get Commvault to reduce their cost by ten per...
What needs improvement with Commvault Backup & Recovery?
Commvault is a behind-the-scenes operation that's working flawlessly. So how do I know what Commvault is doing for me every month? I would like more communication informing us on what Commvault is ...
What do you like most about IBM Storage Protect?
The best point about IBM Storage Protect is that it can use IBM tape environments, which we still use and will continue to use in the future.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Storage Protect?
IBM Storage Protect is generally an expensive tool. However, with good contracts with IBM or its partners, the cost might not be so high. New customers can expect very high prices.
What needs improvement with IBM Storage Protect?
One point for improvement for IBM Spectrum Protect is security, as IBM has not been investing as much as in the past. There is a need for additional layers of security to fill the gaps, which is wh...
 

Also Known As

Commvault Complete Data Protection, Commvault Backup & Recovery, Commvault HyperScale X, Metallic, ThreatWise
IBM Spectrum Discover
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Aberdeenshire Council, Acxiom, BAM Group Ireland, Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta, CI Investments, Clifford Chance, American Municipal Power, American Pacific Mortgage, AstraZeneca, Dongbu Steel, Denver Health, Dow Jones, Emirates Steel, Penn State Health, Prime Healthcare, Sonic Healthcare, Sony Network Communications, TiVO, UCONN Health, The Weitz Company
CEMEX
Find out what your peers are saying about Commvault Cloud vs. IBM Storage Protect and other solutions. Updated: November 2025.
873,209 professionals have used our research since 2012.