Dell Data Protection Advisor vs IBM Spectrum Protect comparison

"The platform's most valuable features are data protection and retention."

"The deduplication is probably the most valuable feature of that requirement."

"This is a stable solution."

"The solution is easy to use, flexible and has a lot of out-of-the-box functionality. You can configure the dashboards or you can use a script. However, to fully utilize its capabilities you will want to use a lot of scripts which you will need advanced training. The reports can be customized for many things, such as chargeback billing."

"It generates very detailed reports, which makes things easier when it comes to IT auditing."

"I can increase the tool's licensing as per my requirement with no conditions applied."

"I have never found any glitch in any Dell solution to date."

"The initial setup is very straightforward. Deployment typically takes about one hour. You just need one person to handle the deployment process."

"I love the TDP for VMware because of the web interface and the possibilities provided by this tool. It's amazing."

"In the past, one of the most valuable features, and the biggest advantage, was the incremental forever feature. Not many other backup vendors provided that. In the pre-virtualization environment, it was very robust and simple technology, especially writing to tape."

"IBM Spectrum Protect offers stable software and products."

"The platform has valuable stability."

"I find the whole product useful. The backup archive client, snapshot, spectrum for virtual environments are beneficial features."

"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 has a lot more capabilities and functions than a lot of other products. Even though it is more complex, the reason is because it gives you a lot more features. This is what I prefer, especially for a long retention."

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

"There is a steep learning curve to use the interface and to create new reports, this could be made easier. If the solution could provide more drag and drop functionality to build more advanced reports that would be very helpful."

"The functionality of the Data Protection Advisor is limited and is something that is lacking in this solution. Other solutions like CloudIQ and DDMC provide a much better outlook on how data protection should be done."

"Dell Data Protection Advisor's feature for data domain protection needs enhancement."

"They should empower their customers with the ability to upgrade this solution as long as it's in the same major release."

"The solution requires more integration with our other solutions. I know that they have full integration with VMware because it is also from EMC. However, we have to have better integration with Microsoft and Nutanix as well."

"From a service perspective, improvements are needed at Dell because when customers call, it takes a long time to get a response for calls or emails. Response time is the main problem that needs addressing."

"The product could be improved by addressing intermittent collector failures affecting status reports' accuracy."

"The stability of the solution needs improvement for stand alone users."

"It is not easy to manage like other products in the market. It is okay only if you are command-line driven. Even though the operation center is there, it doesn't provide a single view of everything. You have to, for example, use TSMManager on top of it, which gives you a far better management capability, but it is a third-party product. Its management needs to be improved. There should be an HTML or graphical interface. It is a very difficult product. For example, you have a backup policy where you want a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly policy standard. It is an old kind of system where you have to keep retention for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups, which is very difficult in IBM Spectrum Protect. In other products, in a matter of five minutes, you can configure such a policy. In TSM, it takes you one, two, or three days because you need to configure a node for each of them. If you have 250 nodes, you have to configure each node for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly retention. If you have 1,000 nodes, it is going to take you ages just to configure and register the nodes. You need to configure the schedule and the CAD daemons or services, depending on whether it is a Unix or Windows OS. Unfortunately, it is a very long and drawn-out process. You have to stop and start the services for changes to take effect. This is a very difficult part of TSM in IBM Spectrum Protect. To configure a backup policy, I should be able to select the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly options in one screen and finish it. After that, everything should happen in the background. All the backup products in the market already do that, and they are very simple to manage. This particular part of this solution has really been a major pain area for us, and unfortunately, we could not find a workaround. There is nobody at IBM who can give us a way to configure all this easily through a GUI or even scripts."

"Generally, the implementation of virtualization could be improved. The workflow service and so on are not working properly."

"The features should be a little bit closer together."

"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."

"Our new leadership has pushed us to go more toward the cloud, so we are definitely going to leverage anything we can in that direction."

"They are behind on many things, especially security. They are catching up a little bit now, but the competitors are doing better security-wise. There should be malware detection and prevention and higher security."

"In a future release, it would be a benefit to have the ability to add an application as a storage target, as a storage pool. Additionally, they should add more functionality to the administration for the Operation Center."

"The GUI has long been a problem for TSM/Spectrum Protect."

"The product is affordable."

"For pricing, I would rate Dell 2 out of 5. It's affordable."

"You need to make an upfront payment for three, five, or seven years and renew the licenses for support. We can do an annual maintenance contract with Dell. I would rate the product's pricing a six out of ten."

"It's not very expensive — I think the price is fair."

"If the customer has huge lineup of Dell Products then they receive discount on the pricing."

"You have to procure the license when you are ordering or quoting for Dell Data Protection Suite (DPS). DPS is bundled with the suite and comes with a license. However, if you purchase NetWorker separately then you will have to procure the license for DPS separately."

"The product pricing has been satisfactory, particularly with the economy of scale in our agreement."

"IBM provides an open license policy, which is more like a gentlemen's agreement."

"It is very scalable, but the downside is that it costs money."

"License-wise regarding IBM, it's licensed per terabyte. And that is after compression and deduplication."

"We worked our licensing into a capacity model, which is nice. Now, everything is much simpler to manage from a licensing perspective.​"

"The price of IBM Spectrum Protect is expensive and there is only a standard licensing fee."

"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."

"The licensing fees are on a yearly basis, which for us it is about R400,000 (approximately $27,000 USD)."

"We have been at our size for a few years. We are not really looking to battle the licensing costs, as this is our primary system."