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BDRSuite Backup & Replication vs IBM Spectrum Protect comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

BDRSuite Backup & Replication
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
13th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
65
Ranking in other categories
Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (7th), MSP Backup (1st)
IBM Spectrum Protect
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
149
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of BDRSuite Backup & Replication is 0.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Protect is 2.2%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Redha Benlaksira - PeerSpot reviewer
The ability to maintain multiple restore points is critical because it lets customers choose to restore their data to an hour or a day ago
BDRSuite is better than competing solutions because it can protect, back up, and recover data. A feature called live migration allows you to recover the same data in different environments. For example, I can back up the data from a VMware machine and restore it to a Hyper-V. You can also create repositories and back up environments to a cloud platform like GCP and AWS S3 buckets. BDRSuite allows you to back up virtual machines hosted on an EC3 instance or Microsoft 365 mailboxes, SharePoint, etc. The solution allows us to recover data instantly. We can recover all our data in under 15 minutes. In a virtual environment, we can recover a virtual machine and all its data in under 15 minutes. It's the same for a NAS, SAN, or DAS disk. The ability to boot instantly enables customers to maintain their business operations without interruption. BDRSuite's ability to maintain multiple restore points is critical because it gives customers the option to restore their data to an hour or a day ago. They can choose a full, incremental, or synthetic backup. Incremental backup makes sense if you are backing up the same data daily and you want to save space and network resources. It only backs up the differences or updates in every block. I've worked with lots of backup solutions, and BDRSuite is the easiest to use. It's simple to install and create backup jobs. It doesn't require many tasks to install the solution. You can easily back up and restore from one console
Syed Habib - PeerSpot reviewer
Manageable and comprehensive and integrates robust backup features for core banking
It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dashboard from Browser Spectrum. This is why I am searching for another solution. The product also lacks any centralized graphical user interface (GUI), such as Jarek Pod, and I am limited to using a console-based text user interface, which my local partner handles completely.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I back up one particular server with close to 1.2 TB, and the way the software compresses it is close to 600 or 700 TB. Vembu compresses it to close to 450 gigabytes, that's gigabytes. So that’s really amazing, the way in which the backup compression happens."
"The Vembu BDR product is very intuitive and easy to use."
"It was very difficult to find a product that supports Red Hat Virtualization natively and to take a snapshot of the VM or a full backup or a dump from the machine. The option that Vembu proposed, to take the machine as an image, take it from the system, is also good."
"Valuable features include Snapshots and the constant backup for SQL, application services, and Active Directory."
"Because all our servers are hosted on VMware, the VMware backup is the most valuable feature. The integration and backup with VMware are very good."
"You can restore all your data or partial parts of it. You can restore a specific version of the data. It has a lot of options for restore, so you can have the correct data that you want to restore. This is very important. You must know what you are going to restore. Otherwise, you may be overwriting correct data with other data. You must know what specific files you are restoring as well as which version. Partial restore is very important because there might be some files which are newer than the backup and some files that are corrupted. You need to restore some files from the backup, but not all the files."
"The best thing about it is that it has been adaptable to our business model. We are in industrial networking, and they were adaptable to give us offline installers and offline licenses. That has been the biggest thing. They also allow us to order the licenses on a perpetual basis."
"We are now using it 24/7 because it is serving as an online backup, and very soon, the DR will activated on the product."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the centralized enterprise backup."
"It covers all the different operating systems. If you need backup, it can pretty much do everything."
"We optimize our costs of media and storage use, thanks to the Incremental Forever backup. The TDP software provides us many ways to protect our data, so we don't need to use monstrous scripts for doing backups now."
"The solution is really scalable."
"One way they have improved our organization is through the stability of the solution and the availability of the product."
"It has to ability to backup DV2, Oracle, and Informix."
"The product is always stable and reliable."
"The product helps us do data protection and restoration for disaster recovery (DR)."
 

Cons

"There are bugs. For one month, I encountered a big issue where my storage pool could not be identified. My backups were stopped because they were not able to locate the storage pool. So, I removed the settings and started the backups again. The application is not stable. It needs some debugging and testing on the build side of production."
"They can work on their cloud solution. In these days, the data becomes too much and you have to back up a lot of data to the site. They could offer cheaper storage to their clients with the cloud, making this a single source of truth solution. In our project, we are using two service providers: One who offers our storage and another who offers the software. If they work on their cloud solution and can offer their clients lower prices for this type of storage, this would be a really good improvement."
"Vembu software runs on a Windows Server. The Windows Server has to be connected to the internet so it can connect with Vembu’s servers. It has to connect with Vembu. For some reason, if it doesn't connect, it stops working, and I don't know why on earth they do that. They require it to connect to the internet and connect with Vembu for it to continue to function. If the internet is down or if the server can't reach the internet, it stops working after a few days. That's not great because there are some people who want to do backups but they don't want to have their server accessible on the internet."
"It would be a great improvement if they can give a console to control the systems. All other vendors let you simply log in to the cloud console and control everything from there, but for Vembu, whether you choose Vembu Cloud Backup or Vembu Disaster Recovery, you still need to install the Vembu software on your on-premise system and configure it from there. It would be great if I can get a cloud console to manage the systems."
"I suggest that the dump of the database have the option to either be backed up to Vembu Cloud or be backed up to all backup sites and not only to default storage."
"The API uses a common data image to store the data for the sets, but unfortunately, it's limited to consecutive sets only. That's the only limitation I have observed so far."
"I have had issues with new client registrations. There are frequent connectivity issues to the cloud servers. Multiple times, I have had to prove to support that it wasn’t a problem on my end. It always works out in the end, but it is troubling to have the same issues repeated across different clients. Issues eventually get escalated to the cloud team and are mysteriously resolved with no changes on my end."
"The reporting can use some improvement. I still use the old StoreGrid Cloud while I'm migrating the rest of my clients over. I am able to export all of my clients' usage for the month, which I then import into my billing program. It helps me speed up the billing process. Also, I can generate a report that gives me statuses of everyone's backup, which I don't get from Vembu Backup Online either. I would like to have something similar where I can export everyone's usage at any time for all their backups, so I can use that to import them to my billing program."
"There have been scalability issues. The core product does not support scale out. We needed to create a new system and manage resources separate from the existing one."
"Ease of use."
"The previous GUI that they had was slow, and it did not have enough information on it."
"We would like to see capabilities of long-term archiving and more support for hardware platforms."
"I would like to see the operations center be a lot more functional. It was nowhere near as functional as the admin center, and I'm doing a lot of command line with it."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"Enhancements are required for backing up our virtual environment."
"We would like to see bare-metal restorers."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Previously, we used Veeam Backup, but we replaced it with Vembu. We switched because Vembu is more cost-effective. So, price was a factor."
"Price-wise, it is much cheaper than its counterparts. I like its pricing, and its price is okay. The lesser they take, the more profit we can make, but we are happy with its price. It is very affordable. We were working with a client, and they were looking for backup software and had a very tight budget. When I told them that Vembu is only going to cost around $400 to $500, they were shocked. They didn't believe me, so I showed them the website so that they can check the price themselves. Of course, if they agree to that price, we get a 15% rebate as a managed service provider."
"The licensing model is quite complicated; it's not simple. An example: If you have a physical server, you have to pay more for that license than you do for a host. It could be running several VMs and that could be a server VM as well. Then, for web station machines, there is no license for those machines and they have no desktop OS - the free version has all this functionality. Their license model needs to be looked at and simplified."
"The high availability is too expensive for our customers."
"The pricing is very good."
"The product is affordable, and we focus on SMBs for our customer base."
"The best thing about the product is the license management. It is a true managed service provider solution. It has a good price. The licensing is quite flexible, which is one of the most important things for us."
"The pricing is good. The tough part is estimating storage needs."
"The solution's pricing is fair. Price-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten."
"The licensing is varied. If we have small environments (not many TB being managed) it is best to license by PVUs (depending on the number of cores of the machine). If we manage many TBs we look at licensing by capacity which allows us to use all the agents of the product."
"It is very scalable, but the downside is that it costs money."
"Licensing can be either complicated or simple depending on what type of licensing you wish to use and what works best for your environment."
"The different license models can give good benefits to the end customer."
"It can be perceived as expensive since it is designed for enterprise use."
"The price of IBM Spectrum Protect is expensive and there is only a standard licensing fee."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
86%
Educational Organization
3%
Retailer
2%
Financial Services Firm
1%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
9%
Educational Organization
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BDRSuite?
The best part of BDRSuite is how user-friendly it is and how it does not require any maintenance after the initial setup.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BDRSuite?
BDRSuite is cost-effective because you can purchase a perpetual license that covers multiple environments. You only renew the support costs annually. It offers advanced features at roughly 75 perce...
What needs improvement with BDRSuite?
I had a small problem integrating VMware and Hyper-V when customers used a free VMware license to create VMs. This is a problem because many customers use the free version of VMware. There are also...
What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Protect?
One point for improvement for IBM Spectrum Protect is security, as IBM has not been investing as much as in the past. There is a need for additional layers of security to fill the gaps, which is wh...
 

Also Known As

Vembu BDRSuite
IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NASA, Intel, CISCO, PHILIPS, Atos, HEXAWARE, Motorola
CERN, Einstein Healthcare, Nyherji, Allianz Australia, TZM, ABT Online, NCT, Kindred Healthcare Inc., Cobalt Iron, TransGrid, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Cash America, Piedmont Healthcare, RWGV, Arkansas Tech University, British Columbia Institute of Technology
Find out what your peers are saying about BDRSuite Backup & Replication vs. IBM Spectrum Protect and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
860,632 professionals have used our research since 2012.