We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Protect, N-able Cove Data Protection, and NetApp SnapCenter based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Veeam Software, Zerto, Commvault and others in Backup and Recovery."The tool proves invaluable in scenarios where systems need recovery, such as restoring damaged data."
"Our customers have come to trust IBM."
"The business value comes from the capability to overcome data losses."
"All other products contain the same features, but when I'm backing up an IBM Power server I feel more comfortable with IBM Spectrum Protect because it's the same vendor."
"From a tech perspective, utilizing deduplication is one of the most valuable features."
"It seems very scalable and robust. It can do what we require it to do."
"A robust tool which allows us to backup pretty much any environment, virtual or physical."
"Traditional archiving. One of our revenue streams involves maintaining archives of our customers' data for very long periods of time."
"The product is simple to use and manage. The customers have access to verify the backups."
"The most valuables feature is the alerts and monitoring that catches the failed backups."
"One of the bigger features and advantages of the solution is that it is easy to integrate with my RMM which is also N-able."
"It's extremely important that Cove provides cloud-based data protection with backup, disaster recovery, and archiving. That is a necessity for my insurance. As an IT company, my insurance would cost more if my backups were not offsite and off-network."
"For starters, this is one of few databases that allow us to backup MySQL databases, most others only support Microsoft SQL. This solution also has a very user-friendly interface accessed through a web browser. Additionally, backups can be easily configured through N-able Backup."
"The user interface is the most valuable. It gives us the ability to check everything. With more than 100 endpoints running that software, I like the ability to quickly check that everything is working correctly. That's one of the biggest selling points."
"The ease of use and the console are great."
"I know I won't have an issue if the data is there. The reliability and the confidence that we have is amazing. It doesn't matter. We've had customers have ransomware. We've had customers that have had corruption. We've had customers that have had employees destroy their data. As long as it's been backed up, I know that I can get it back and I know I have nothing to worry about. Our confidence level is very high."
"The Exchange plugin is the most valuable because we have a lot of customers that use SnapManager Exchange and have to migrate to SnapCenter."
"It has very fast backup and can handle a huge amount of data. It also enables really fast recovery."
"A feature that stands out is cloning databases. If you have a SQL database and it's huge, like one terabyte, the classical SQL way would be to do a backup-restore to create a clone of your database for test purposes. With SnapCenter now, we can clone a database but through the Snapshot technology, which means if you right-click and you click Clone, the one terabyte database is there instantly."
"The centralized GUI is the best feature, that there is only one webpage where we can see the states of all the backup jobs. We can see all the tasks that are running and we can quickly see if one fails; if they are running or have any issues. We have all that in one place."
"The product’s most valuable feature is cloning."
"Technical support has been very helpful when we have issues."
"It's integrated with VMware vCenter. You can also see the backups there and you can do a restore completely out of vCenter."
"The central pane view is the most valuable feature. You have one console where you can monitor all your jobs, as opposed to going to different vCenters."
"The solution must protect against ransomware attacks better."
"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."
"Their support is lacking. I've talked to their developers and stuff in the last couple of weeks and they reassure me that some people have retired, and they're working on getting that bumped back up. But the support lacks a lot to be desired at this point."
"We have had some problems about using storage agents on the X6 environment. It is not quite stable, but it is also not supported in a virtualized environment."
"The solution could be more user-friendly and provide better monitoring. The monitoring should be improved first since it is a higher priority."
"It might be seen as leaning towards the legacy side, missing some features of newer solutions. The main drawbacks would be its complexity and high pricing."
"It needs better connectivity with other non-IBM application hardware and non-IBM platforms."
"If IBM could provide a partial module, that would be great."
"The one thing they don't are Linux servers, it's Windows only. I understand that directive. I have another product that I use for our Linux servers and stuff, but it would be nice if they had that flexibility on the Linux side. I understand the development and the world is geared towards Windows in 365, I know that's where the clienteles are and the business and the money is."
"One area I don't like has to do with the agent that goes on the system... if a system stays offline for some length of time, say for a week or so, I may have to go back in and reinstall the agent to get it back in business. I don't know what's causing that."
"The reporting feature and functionality need improvement. We would like to see a little bit more detailed reporting that offers more CEO or C-level focused reporting options."
"There could be a possibility to create a local NAS backup for infrastructure."
"We don't use the solution’s automated recovery testing because SolarWinds made me cross. When they released it, I went, "Oh, well, that's quite good." Because if you use the system, then it supposedly spins up, and on the portal, it gives you a screenshot of the booted device. So, I phoned up, and I said, "Oh, that's really quite cool. How much is that?" They said, "No, no, no. It's all included in your license." I went, "Okay then," and went and deployed it on about half the fleet. One of the options that our customers have is they can pay us a small amount every month for us to test the recovery just to prove that it's viable, and I thought, "Well, this will do that for us. Nice." Then, in the next invoice, we got a charge for it. While It was not a huge amount, I took offense at the fact that we were told that it would be a no extra cost option that was part of our license, but it turns out that it's chargeable. Therefore, we haven't used it since."
"We would like to have better reporting."
"A feature I'd like to see would be a more customizable admin console."
"Integration with a hybrid cloud is something that I found complicated."
"There is one area that needs improvement and that's in the alerting. When you set up your SMTP alerts, it only has - and I don't understand why - the ability to send an anonymous SMTP. It doesn't do basic authentication, which frustrated me for a while until I figured out that I'm not missing something. It's just not there."
"The documentation could be a little bit better so that we could handle more of the troubleshooting ourselves, rather than having to go through support."
"Since the solution's initial setup is complex, it should make training documents available in the public space."
"The DBAs are comparing it to SMO but it doesn't have a lot of the functionalities that SMO has."
"The Dashboard view needs to be more compressed with better ease of access and drill-down features. They should also reinstate Linux filesystem backups of storage volumes (which existed in the prior version)."
"My major issue is when I upgrade. I have to touch every last client that I have in SnapCenter, and right now I have 60... They said that in another release that will get better, but right now it's not better and I've had to do this three times."
"We have experience some difficulties with our current support. We are engaging in engineering level support because some of our problems are more technical."
"Groups might be helpful for each site or data center so that we know a given data center has these resources while another data center has those resources. It's not always easy to group hosts by type."
