We performed a comparison between Dell Data Protection Advisor and IBM Spectrum Protect based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Backup and Recovery Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"This is a stable solution."
"It generates very detailed reports, which makes things easier when it comes to IT auditing."
"It has a lot of stock reports. I believe over 300 canned reports, which for the most part meet a lot of generic needs."
"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."
"The deduplication is probably the most valuable feature of that requirement."
"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 solution is really scalable."
"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."
"In general, the solution is quite user-friendly. The GUI is very nice."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the centralized enterprise backup."
"You can do restores very quickly. You can mount a drive and restore it right from the drive."
"Nothing beats this solution for file backup."
"We have been using it for several years, and it is quite reliable and predictable. We are quite comfortable with this solution. They're coming up with new features as well. It has good scalability, and it provides good integrations with business-critical applications or databases, such as SAP HANA. It works as expected, and we don't see any issues."
"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."
"They should empower their customers with the ability to upgrade this solution as long as it's in the same major release."
"It is difficult to manage the solution with the available tools. You need to know exactly what are you are doing."
"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."
"It's a bit difficult for first-time 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."
"It should have the ability to break down the data that's being backed up. It should have better reporting."
"The main admin console from the UI cannot do anything in the product. It just allows us to maintain, maybe, 30% to 40%. For the rest, we have to use the command line."
"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."
"They took some of the funding off of it for a while. Therefore, instead of being a market leader, they took their position for granted. Then some competitors developed new bells and whistles that they advertise, and due to that lag a few years ago, there are not the resources to explain the differences."
"When it comes to virtualization in IBM it's not perfect."
"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."
"Its price can be better. It is very expensive. Its interface is very old and not user friendly. They can improve its interface. Their support can also be better. My clients are not very satisfied with the support because they are not really quick."
Dell Data Protection Advisor is ranked 46th in Backup and Recovery Software with 5 reviews while IBM Spectrum Protect is ranked 11th in Backup and Recovery Software with 45 reviews. Dell Data Protection Advisor is rated 7.2, while IBM Spectrum Protect is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Dell Data Protection Advisor writes "Easy to use, flexible, configurable dashboards, and effective script capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Protect writes "Great stability, reliability, and scalability, but very difficult to manage and get support". Dell Data Protection Advisor is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Dell Avamar, Dell NetWorker, Veritas NetBackup and Rubrik, whereas IBM Spectrum Protect is most compared with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, Veeam Backup & Replication, Commvault Complete Data Protection and Cohesity DataProtect. See our Dell Data Protection Advisor vs. IBM Spectrum Protect report.
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