Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

IBM Storage Protect vs VxRail comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

IBM Storage Protect
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Backup and Recovery (12th)
VxRail
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
133
Ranking in other categories
HCI (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

IBM Storage Protect and VxRail aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. IBM Storage Protect is designed for Backup and Recovery and holds a mindshare of 2.0%, down 2.3% compared to last year.
VxRail, on the other hand, focuses on HCI, holds 14.9% mindshare, down 20.6% since last year.
Backup and Recovery Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Storage Protect2.0%
Veeam Data Platform10.0%
Commvault Cloud5.5%
Other82.5%
Backup and Recovery
HCI Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VxRail14.9%
VMware vSAN13.0%
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)9.6%
Other62.5%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Rami Jadallah - PeerSpot reviewer
Streamline management and integration with seamless upgrades
The primary reasons customers choose VxRail include ease of management, ease of upgrades, and integration with VMware. The hyper-converged infrastructure simplifies software and hardware upgrades. Customers prefer the single pane of glass management and integration with VMware, which makes it easier for them to proceed with decisions involving VMware products.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is a very mature product."
"It allows us to have one interface."
"Its incremental forever approach is valuable, so we don't have to load tapes to do a restore."
"Every time we go and try to get a file, we can get it. Restores are quick and the data is always there."
"Incremental forever: This feature helps us reduce backup time and backup storage space."
"The feature we have found most valuable is when you want to integrate it with a Tape Library and then do the DRM life cycle. That is when it works the best."
"SPIR is Instant Recovery for Spectrum Protect. It sends snapshots using space efficiently and blocking backups to the Spectrum Protect server. It provisions the snapshot from the backup server to the same or new server near instantly."
"The technical support for Spectrum Protect is very mature. It is very committed to giving a top-notch support experience."
"t's a very good solution with multiple options with VxRail series like based on customer requirements whether they're focused on compute, storage, scalability and high performance, etc. Whether a customer you are going to start your IT Infrastructure footprint with a limited budget, you have freedom of choice and non-disruptive expansion in the future, whether in the main data center or branches. Any idea coming in system admins mind to run this setup continuously and keep service 100% 24/7 is possible in this product line. Hyper-converged appliances allow a datacenter in a box approach, with G, E P, Vand P series."
"The assurance that my systems would not suffer a performance drop no matter where they are is valuable. I do not need any extra hardware."
"I like the new releases that Dell EMC is doing with VMware. They are allowing for flexibility across the hybrid cloud. This allows organizations to use containers and to be able to move into the public cloud, but also not have lock-in. They can come back to the private cloud when they want to, so it's creating a lot of flexibility across the stack."
"Our clients value being able to upgrade with one click or a few clicks."
"The ease of deployment and management of the solution are the most valuable aspects of the product."
"We deploy VxRail systems to provide our customers with a distributed information solution. The customer was impressed because we delivered a serious data reduction. For example, we showed them that 10 terabytes on their traditional storage solution could be reduced to 1.5 terabytes in the VxRail systems. That's why the customers also like it so much,"
"It supports VDI deployment, enabling easy use for running different platforms in similar environments."
"The implementation was quick, we used a checklist and it took approximately one hour."
 

Cons

"We would like to see capabilities of long-term archiving and more support for hardware platforms."
"There were scalability issues only in the brand new features which were recently released."
"They do not have a unified GUI, they only work on CLI and operations center, which is really complicated for the installation and configuration."
"The solution's initial setup process wasn't easy...The solution is overly complicated in terms of architecture, especially compared to other tools in the market."
"I would love to see something which allows us to do an auto restart of backup jobs."
"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."
"Our customers would like to see metadata replication, tearing to tape, and more cloud capabilities."
"Stability is very good now. It used to be rocky years ago."
"It still has some maturity to grow. It needs to be more tightly integrated with its own family of products. It has shown that it is open with the other products within the market, through its stack, but it needs to have the proof in the market (with use-cases), and it has to have the scalability with the integration."
"Right now, it's difficult for a non-technical person to participate in using the product. It could be made more consumer-friendly."
"What I find very valuable is VxRail's life cycle management. The life cycle management takes care of everything from firmware to the actual upgrading of the hypervisor and keeps everything up to level."
"The support protocols have changed after Broadcom acquired VMware."
"The fact that is based on vSAN is the main issue of this solution."
"There is a limitation on the number of nodes."
"VxRail should try to improve the pricing."
"You have to buy a new server if you want to scale up."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 product is low cost. It is very cool when we design it to using licensing based on post capacity."
"IBM provides an open license policy, which is more like a gentlemen's agreement."
"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."
"Customers need to pay for licensing in order to use IBM Spectrum Protect. The customers that have been using it for a long time are okay and happy with it. From a cost point of view, it's better for them to renew their licenses than to go through the difficult process of changing a backup product in their environment, and migrate from one product to another."
"Spectrum Protect is not a cheap option."
"That's a hard estimate. It depends on the licensing, the hardware, and other stuff, but it is fairly expensive. It is generally more expensive than other solutions."
"Use capacity licensing. It's easier and cheaper."
"More cost-effective than Nutanix."
"The solution is priced well for businesses."
"There is a permanent vSAN license included since it is required, but vCenter\ESXi host licensing should be validated in the purchase process."
"The license is a bundle with the hardware. It comes with the license and five-year support."
"The price is good."
"It's a highly expensive solution"
"It has a yearly subscription. It can be for one year, three years, or five years."
"There is a license required for this solution."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Backup and Recovery solutions are best for your needs.
873,003 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business53
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise94
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business42
Midsize Enterprise42
Large Enterprise56
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM Storage Protect?
The best point about IBM Storage Protect is that it can use IBM tape environments, which we still use and will continue to use in the future.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Storage Protect?
IBM Storage Protect is generally an expensive tool. However, with good contracts with IBM or its partners, the cost might not be so high. New customers can expect very high prices.
What needs improvement with IBM Storage 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...
How does HPE Nimble Storage compare to VxRail?
HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Vs. VxRail One of the best things about the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is the three, two, one, zero rule. That means I need three copies of my data on two different types of me...
What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?
While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an engineered system. The choice to choose which technology depends on two major fac...
What are the major differences between VxRail and Dell EMC PowerFlex?
VxRail vs. Dell EMC PowerFlex VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company to invest in. Even if the user is working with a l...
 

Also Known As

IBM Spectrum Discover
VCE VxRail
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CEMEX
World Wide Technology Inc, Renault Sport Formula One Team, 8x8 Inc, Brownes, Canadian Pacific, Canopy, Denton, EDF, Unilin, Xerox
Find out what your peers are saying about Veeam Software, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Commvault and others in Backup and Recovery. Updated: October 2025.
873,003 professionals have used our research since 2012.