IBM Spectrum Protect vs Quorum OnQ comparison

"This solution has improved our organization through better file and database recovery."

"It is a very stable solution."

"Disk-based implementation of a data protection solution for multiple sites is a better fit for my complex data protection needs."

"Regarding stability, it's been rock solid."

"It is very stable. A plus is to use POWERAge for the SNR copy of the Spectrum Protect, then it is more reliable."

"Every time customers make a change or we have made a change, then they use the product to do a cloning and refreshing. They are happy that they get good performance something changes."

"We can scale. Today, we have an average backup volume of 100TB a day."

"We have been using it for several years, and it is quite reliable and predictable. We are quite comfortable with this solution. They're coming up with new features as well. It has good scalability, and it provides good integrations with business-critical applications or databases, such as SAP HANA. It works as expected, and we don't see any issues."

"Being able to spin up a machine in a sandbox is amazing because it allows us to test things that we otherwise would not be able to do."

"I have used the BMR (Bare Metal Restore) in several emergencies and it has absolutely saved my bacon."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."

"One of the most valuable features was the usability, since many of the features were very straightforward. The backup and restoration process was also very fast. Although we weren't able to fully test the scenarios, one of the features was that we could have it restored on a remote site. However, since we were on-prem, we weren't able to test the remote site restoration."

"From a disaster-recovery point of view, one of the things I really like is that I can test the virtual copy of the physical server on a test network and compare the servers side-by-side, without interfering with the production network. So I can see and make sure that the latest copy of the server is the physical copy of the server, without interfering with production."

"Quorum OnQ has taken the guesswork out of backup/recovery and disaster recovery."

"The change in the way that Quorum processes data has made a tremendous improvement in backup and replication times. While the familiar interface remains, the underpinnings have been finely tuned and the speed is incredible. My large Exchange Server went from 5- to 6-hour backups down to 22 minutes."

"One of the biggest features is that, even on the absolutely run-of-the-mill box, if I lose any one of my servers I can automatically bring it up virtually on the physical onQ Quorum device."

"It can be improved for large file systems with many files. Spectrum Protect can restore large files very well, but if you're restoring millions of little files, it is not as great. At one point, we tried to implement the VMware module with it, and it was awful and terrible. I don't know if that has improved. If it hasn't, this would be one big improvement."

"I need to have more than two instances working together. I need a worldwide grid able to have replication between three, four, or five instances."

"IBM Spectrum Protect does have a lot of the features that we need, but I think they need to improve their backup virtualization and backup for container."

"Any feature that is compliant with virtualizing the application should be improved."

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

"The software is complex; setup is complex."

"It does what we need it to do, but it could be better with VM backups. It could be better integrated with virtual machines or VM backups, but that's why they have their Plus out now. Plus version is more geared toward VM backups. The regular version is more for endpoint clients."

"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 price of Quorum OnQ could be improved. We were exploring the product in terms of having a partnership with the distributor so that we could operate as a service, but for our own use, within the company, we couldn't justify the price unless the servers would become an option later on. The upfront cost of purchasing a license for the hardware is quite steep."

"The user interface needs to be improved."

"I would like to see iSCSI support added so that NAS storage servers could be protected. We heavily utilize NAS storage and the risk there is minimal backup options. Currently, we are backing up NAS to NAS which is costly and slow. Being able to integrate NAS server backup would be the last item on my Quorum bucket list."

"Quorum OnQ's user interface is not very attractive and should be made more attractive."

"It feels to me like it's going to be a little bit more work than I originally anticipated when upgrading the appliance. I haven't done that yet so I can't speak from true experience, but I went through the project plan and it feels to me like there's quite a number of pieces and components and things that have to be done. Quorum is going to manage the rollout, but in starting the initial conversation there were a lot of unanswered questions"

"I would really like it if they followed comparable products from other vendors and had an option where you could offload to tape. I know it sounds incredibly antiquated, but the benefit I see is that there would be a better air gap than you have with backing up to an online source."

"The price is high and could be more competitive."

"We found that some of the live SQL databases we were backing up would be inconsistent when we would restore them."

"Licensing can be either complicated or simple depending on what type of licensing you wish to use and what works best for your environment."

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

"The licensing fees are on a yearly basis, which for us it is about R400,000 (approximately $27,000 USD)."

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

"Licensing IBM Spectrum Protect can be somewhat confusing for new users due to the options available, such as licensing on a capacity or per server basis."

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

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

"The solution is not cheap."

"The pricing is about $1,400 a month. It's a little bit on the higher side. But it's one of those situations where time is valuable for me. So if it costs a little bit more money for me to have a solution that just works and requires less of my day-to-day management, I'm willing to pay a little bit more."

"The cost is higher than other software and services, but it is an absolute must-have."

"When we quote the price of Quorum to customers, they find it expensive."

"The solution’s pricing is economical."

"The total for our current solution's licensing is about $14,000 for 12 servers for three years."

"When we first got the Quorum the licensing was different."

"I am not sure how much it costs, but I know it's expensive."

"The upfront cost of purchasing a license for the hardware is quite steep."