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

"The solution is highly stable."

"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."

"The command-line interface is good."

"It is a really scalable solution. We can scale it up. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten."

"From a tech perspective, utilizing deduplication is one of the most valuable features."

"It has increased our security, scalability, and high availability."

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

"The most valuable features are the stability and also how it's seamlessly integrated with other IBM offerings."

"The D2D2T archive of my PACS data improved after I put Spectrum Protect 8.1.4 into production."

"Scalability is pretty much unlimited."

"Scalability: Our customers are able to grow the product without having to buy additional hardware, so it is very scalable."

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

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

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

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

"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."

"It needs better connectivity with other non-IBM application hardware and non-IBM platforms."

"I want a better user interface, support, and integrations."

"They need to reduce the complexity and make the learning curve easier."

"We need everything cloud. Strong support for cloud services. S3 connectivity, which is mandatory for us in the future along with this integration of Spectrum Copy Data Management or Spectrum Protect services together with these Spectrum Protect Plus functionalities, e.g., hardware, snapshots, and Copy Data Management. They should come together in one solution."

"The usability of IBM Spectrum Protect could be improved, specifically additional features to the product in the operations center. Additional reporting facilities and stronger reporting tools such as build dashboards would be beneficial."

"This solution does not have good support for virtualization and a hyper-converged environment."

"It does not do too well in our virtual environment."

"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."

"This solution is very expensive."

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

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

"IBM ProtectTIER is an expensive solution."

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

"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."

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

"Spectrum Protect is not expensive, and it is simple to use."

"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."

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

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

"The solution is expensive."