IBM ProtectTIER vs IBM Spectrum Protect comparison

"Overall IBM ProtectTIER is a great solution. It is easy to use."

"The most valuable features are the Self-Service, and the ability to search the data."

"The solution is highly stable."

"The command-line interface is good."

"The cataloging is the best feature. It takes millions of frames for the backup. It's incremental, so it takes less time to complete."

"In terms of stability, I've found it to be very stable. I've walked into the server room when it was at 60 degrees Celcius, and it was still running fine."

"I have found that the most valuable feature is useful documentation and troubleshooting."

"The business value comes from the capability to overcome data losses."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is application-aware backups."

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

"The best part of this solution is that it just works."

"The product is always stable and reliable."

"You can do restores very quickly. You can mount a drive and restore it right from the drive."

"It's very robust and has been on the market for a long time."

"The configuration wizards are still complex and hard to navigate. These should be easier to manage."

"I would like the possibility to back up the infrastructure and then replicate it upon on restart, without having to orchestrate the starting of the VM."

"The backup for a large amount of data is slow."

"IBM ProtectTIER could improve by being more user-friendly."

"Setting up the system to work with legacy equipment is a bit complex at times."

"I am looking forward to new features in the next release. One of the main features is the cloud storage integration, which was one of my main required features. I've had more difficult experiences with other platforms than with this one."

"We have run into some periods where we have found some tape issues which were causing us problems, but we resolved them. For some reason, we had a bunch of drives go offline on our disk storage (our virtual library)."

"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."

"The licensing isn't very clear. They should work to simply or clarify the cost structure."

"The solution is evolving, so it has to be evolved to fit all new types of software requirements too."

"We are not so happy with the technical support because dealing with them is not easy. We have a very complicated environment, therefore I understand for a support person that it is not easy to troubleshoot it."

"I would like to see more technical training online. Sometimes, it is a little bit difficult to find, or that I do not really know what I am looking for as somebody who is starting off finding their learning curve."

"IBM's support hasn't been so good in the last few years."

"We have a capacity-based license, which is managed centrally for all the sites of my company."

"This solution is very expensive."

"IBM ProtectTIER is an expensive solution."

"The customer can decide how they want to purchase a license. However, the price of the solution is expensive."

"That's no longer my department, but I have some past experience with licensing. It is not cheap. I would rate it a three out of five in terms of licensing. In terms of additional costs, there is management overhead. It is a complex solution and a lot of work goes into managing clients. It has gotten better over the years, but compared to its competitor, it is still heavy on management overhead."

"We pay for a terabyte license to support our backend usage."

"We chose IBM Spectrum Protect, because they actually have something called MSP pricing, which means managed services provider pricing. The pricing was attractive, and it seems to be a platform that IBM is totally investing on in terms of new functions and new capabilities."

"The product is low cost. It is very cool when we design it to using licensing based on post capacity."

"That's a hard estimate. It depends on the licensing, the hardware, and other stuff, but it is fairly expensive. It is generally more expensive than other solutions."

"It is fairly reasonable as compared to other solutions in the market."

"The most important feature which I wish to be added involves the GUI, the user interface."

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