IBM Spectrum Protect vs IDERA SQL Safe Backup comparison

"The technical support for Spectrum Protect is very mature. It is very committed to giving a top-notch support experience."

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

"Performance and recoveries are better. Our clients and customers are happier with the performance of it."

"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."

"Once setup, you do not need to touch it again. You just need to do a formal check on possibly batch updates."

"It saves you a lot of storage."

"Incremental backup is highly valuable as it allows for significant time and cost savings."

"It provides our customers with the comfort of having reliable enterprise data protection."

"The compression, because it drastically reduces the disk space."

"It has reduced our backup time and simplified our backup processes across all the servers."

"We would like to see cloud integration."

"The deduplication must be perfect, and thus should be improved."

"It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dashboard from Browser Spectrum."

"IBM Spectrum Protect could be improved by making the installation easier. Once it's implemented, it's okay. IBM started lagging behind when things started moving to storage and cloud-based solutions. Even though they've recently released updates that give cloud-based protection, personally, I still believe they are not up to par with the likes of Rubrik. The entire product is a little bit clumsy because they have co-joined two different products, so it's complex. Even from a sales/explaining to people what it does point of view, it's complex. Whereas, if you take more current products, it's a single box solution. You reel it in, you fire it up, you do a couple of points and clicks, and off you go, whereas the IBM system is seriously complex. There's a lot of training involved and it's a massively difficult product to sell at this point in time."

"The user interface needs to be improved."

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

"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."

"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."

"Make sure you check your backups on a regular basis. Backups do get missed with this tool, for whatever reason."

"I would like to see the pieces that they have put in the web only to be put into the thick client sitting on the desktop client."

"The way the filtering goes, if you filter on your view, there is no indication that you have made a selection."

"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."

"Some of the new advanced features are definitely more into cost savings, e.g., dedupe compression, so doing more with less."

"Technical support is pretty good. It is doing fine, but you pay for it."

"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."

"Its licensing is complicated. It goes by CPUs, and it is pretty expensive as well."

"The pricing is a little expensive for our current employer, so they want to move to a cheaper solution."

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

"The solution has a capacity based licensing, front and back-end license."

"The product's pricing is a good value. They have a straightforward licensing model."