IBM Spectrum Protect vs N2WS Backup & Recovery comparison

"We cannot live without it, since it gives us the confidence to move forward."

"The way it covers backup and archive needs. The flexibility of backup copy group always allows me to cover the customer's requests."

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

"With the new features that we have added, it has made a difference as far as faster recovery and speed."

"Nothing beats this solution for file backup."

"IBM support is friendly, knowledgeable, and they always respond quickly. They've always been able to find the cause of my problem."

"Space efficient data reduction, using progressive incremental forever in combination with deduplication and compression."

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

"The backup and restore functionality is very easy to use and manage."

"The initial setup is easy."

"Provides easy, one-click functionality and flexible backup policies and schedules for AWS workloads."

"N2WS Backup & Recovery is very easy to use and configure backup for AWS instances."

"The product is successful with the SMB market."

"The recovery time is fantastic and proven. Also, by providing a simple interface, the solution lowers the cost."

"The backup and recovery are the most valuable features. So, our developers can work with confidence."

"The most valuable feature is the ease of use."

"The solution's ability to integrate with a cloud solution is one area that needs improvement."

"I would like to see a way to have "always on" implemented."

"They can include more cloud-enriching features. I would like IBM Spectrum Protect to have the functionality for backing up a VM directly in Azure. I would like to be able to back up a VM directly in Azure without spinning up a Hyper-V cluster and backing up the virtual server."

"Getting technical support all the necessary diagnostic information is still very painful."

"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."

"Perhaps if they could add replication to a second site or third site from the same console, that would be helpful. Currently, we have to connect to another console."

"In a future release, it would be a benefit to have the ability to add an application as a storage target, as a storage pool. Additionally, they should add more functionality to the administration for the Operation Center."

"They are behind on many things, especially security. They are catching up a little bit now, but the competitors are doing better security-wise. There should be malware detection and prevention and higher security."

"The solution has the option to take backup on-prem servers, but it's not very efficient."

"Additional features I would like to see are the ability to restore to different vendors, AWS and Azure, and/or the ability or take the information out of the AWS cloud."

"The UI is a little dated and hard to use. Some of the buttons are a bit small. You have to go into the menu to get the settings you want."

"There is room for improvement in stability."

"The GUI has room for improvement."

"The GUI could be slightly improved."

"More documentation would be helpful, especially some step-by-step documents for recovery scenarios."

"It's a global feature that the customer thinks they don't have enough tools to manage, to copy, to delay, and to classify the object file in the backup directory. So they need more tools to manage files in object directory."

"The pricing of the solution is high in comparison to other products on the market. For example, IBM and Symantec have less costly options."

"It is really expensive. Its price is not good for Latin America. Its price is good for the United States or Europe."

"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."

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

"Spectrum Protect is not a cheap option."

"The product is not cheap."

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

"We have capacity licensing. We use the front end. The capacity licensing is pretty okay on the licensing price. I used to use the old PVU-based licensing in the early environment, but now we use capacity-based licensing."

"The pricing and licensing on AWS is fine, because you can do it for smaller tiers depending on your number of instances, so it's not that scary."

"AWS adds more features and offer things for free, or cheaply. Therefore, we will be evaluating AWS Data Lifecycle Manager, because it will probably do backups. Thus, make sure the product that you are using is competitive or adds more value than AWS."

"It's very economical and worth the cost."

"The purchasing process through the AWS Marketplace is easy. Just click the button."

"It has very good pricing per instance and comes with three options, for both small and large environments, to fit your needs."

"The price is not cheap, nor is it costly."