IBM Spectrum Protect Plus Reviews

IBM Spectrum Protect Protect and IBM Spectrum Protect Plus are new solutions. I did a lot of POCs with the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus and the SP, as well as TSM. These tools were previously known as storage managers, such as the TSM backup solution. In addition, all Veeam competitors and other hypervisor image backup solutions. All that remained was the product IBM Spectrum Protect Plus and the ability to sell it as a software, software-defined infrastructure.

The feature is known as failover protection or IBM Failover. The primary goal is to backup the recurring hypervisor environment and to create, deploy, and run a fast backup process. This is the primary goal.

We conducted a proof-of-concept on the customer side, and they found the product to be user-friendly and extremely useful.

Its quick deployment and backup are essential. It has nice features. It is user-friendly, it does not require a special environment to prepare the server-side, network side, and other components because everything is already included, similar to a bundle system. 

It is very simple to create and deploy.

It still needs to grow and add new features. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, I believe, requires time to become competitive due to a weakness in the other software products. It does not support replication appliances such as Data Domain, ExaGrid, or other DDOS targets.

The only issue is the price. That application should be supported.

I had been working with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus for two years.

I no longer sell IBM Spectrum Protect Plus because the company is with Dell. That's why I use NetWare and Data Domain solutions.

Previously, I sold the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus product under the Spectrum brand.

Spectrum is a data protection product in the Spectrum family.

In my environment, we were using on-premises, private cloud, as well as a hybrid cloud environment.

I was a reseller as well as a partner.

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is a stable product.

The hypervisor is stable, but I don't think it's easy to recover an item level, light recovery, or granular recovery restore. I believe that a simple image backup is very stable.

Technical support is relatable, and their response times are acceptable; their case and response times, I believe, are on a normal level.

I was also selling IBM backup and storage solutions. I am familiar with the Alliance product. Now I work as a solution architect for multi-vendor solutions. My primary focus is on data protection and backup technologies. Also, private cloud and SAP solutions with regard to it.

My primary responsibility is to provide competitive analysis for Pure Storage and other products from HP, NetApp, and Huawei. I also compared other backup technologies such as Data Domain, NetWare from Commvault, and others. I've been in the technical construction of service and solution architect positions for 15 years. I'm currently working on a solution, I believe, with a Dell company's titanium partner because it sells.

I would like to inform you that I replaced Veeam with Spectrum Protect Plus because the Veeam licensing model was very expensive for our customers. They also stated that backup performance and the restore process are not any faster than they are now. The most important thing to replace them is the price because IBM's software price is very competitive and aggressive to Veeam. Price is unimportant to the SPP if they want to close the deal.

The original IBM ProtecTIER is at its end of life.

The initial setup is not complicated, but I don't think it's a developed architecture. It's very straightforward.

It can take up to 15 minutes to deploy. All infrastructure can be completed in this time frame.

When compared to other vendors, the price is very competitive.

Clients prefer to buy a perpetual license, but the majority opt for a yearly subscription.

I would rate the licensing and price a nine out of ten. The price could be a little lower than that of the other vendors, but the licensing model is fine.

Yes, I recommend it, but this solution is not appropriate for every environment because some features must be developed, but in my environment, simple backup environments, such as only image backup, yes. It's perfectly functional.

I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect Plus an eight out of ten.

We used to use the solution with tapes a few years ago. We've switched to discs, and it has gotten much faster.

You can put single items back with a certain driver. It's useful for operators maybe who don't have much of a clue about the back end.

We've had some problems getting a full backup done. It's very slow and can take a number of hours, specifically when we use the exchange database. Most time it's a problem with the agent for exchange. Sometimes you have to try to restore things multiple times. It can sometimes take a whole day just to get a recovery up and running.

Working on the solution, even when it works, is quite difficult.  

You end up needing to do a lot of troubleshooting to get things to work effectively. 

It would be ideal if the solution allowed users to also pick up SharePoint, Teams, and Office 365 items. It should be able to do not just databases. That way, you can have everything, including software, both on-premises and in the cloud. At the moment, for Team, in particular, it's not possible to pick that up, potentially because it includes a lot of chats.

We've been using the solution for ten or more years at this point. It's been a long time.

The solution isn't exactly stable. Sometimes you need to attempt to restore the backup multiple times as it doesn't work. It's not a seamless, trouble-free experience.

We are customers and end-users. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

I would rate the solution at a six out of ten. We haven't been completely satisfied with it at this time. The time it takes to get a backup restored is too, too long. On top of that, if you are really unlucky, you'll have to try to restore the backup many times.

We are a solution provider and we implement IBM products, such as Spectrum Protect Plus for our clients.

The testing capability is good.

It can back up both VMware and Hyper-V in one console.

It can back up bare metals servers and doesn't need an agent. There is no specific limitation for backing up to either the cloud or on-premises.

The API is very good.

The duplication and compression features are included in one license.

Replication feature is available for off site backup. New generation data backup technologies are constantly being developed for multi-cloud environments.

The feedback that we have received is nice and we have heard no complaints of instability.

We can extend the customer's backup storage, add servers, or add new disaster recovery sites. 

We have been in contact with technical support, and whenever we have a problem we open a ticket to IBM. They have supported us well for any case we have had.

The implementation and installation will take 15 minutes at the maximum.

It can be deployed on-premises or as a cloud-based solution.

The price is lower than that of some competing products.

Some of our customers are planning to replace Veeam with the Spectrum Plus software. Veeam is a powerful tool and good for virtualization, but the price is lower for the IBM product.

This is a modern technology that supports not only data protection, but include HIPAA resources and virtualization. It is a product that I recommend.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We're a bank and use the solution for backup and recovery, it's a disaster recovery enterprise solution. We're partners with IBM and I'm the Senior Technical Lead Consultant.

The most valuable features are the virtual snapshots that offer incremental backups forever. 

I don't think the solution is particularly user friendly, it requires expertise. Technical support could also be improved. Now that they're in the cloud I think they'll start enhancing with their backups. They weren't very good in the virtual world but they seem to be making more of an effort in the latest version and trying to align themselves with other backup solutions. IBM's an expensive solution so if you're enterprise you'll go with them, especially if you have other IBM products in the workplace. 

I've been using this solution for 15 years.

This is a very stable solution, but it requires a spectrum protect person working with it and not a regular admin person. In that respect, it's not very user friendly. 

It's a scalable solution but not like the products we have today. Scalability depends on setup and requires planning and architecture. If you have that then it's a scalable product.

Technical support is a bit problematic, I have good technical support within the company but if I need third level support there's nobody in Australia who can take a call for that. I wouldn't call support unless it's third level but it takes a while to get a response from them. I've been trying to solve an issue for six months. They keep sending different codes and commands that don't work. Maybe now that they've designed a private cloud it might be better. 

Initial setup of the solution requires expertise in configuration and installation, a person who has a connection to IBM or knows the product. This is not an out of the box solution. If it's not set up properly it's a nightmare to try and maintain down the line. Initial setup doesn't take a long time as long as the hardware specs are aligned but you have to know your environment and have a design. It requires planning.

Given that it's an expensive product I would suggest that if you're rich go with IBM, and if you're poor go with someone else. Most enterprise companies like to show off with these products. I've been lucky to have worked in enterprise companies. 

IBM doesn't work well on a middle-ware level when you're using solutions from different companies. I've been reading about their recent virtualisation. Once they master that, they'll probably be number one again and they seem to now be aligning themselves and starting to create a compatible product with all the clouds. 

What's caused part of the problem with IBM are their ongoing support costs. It looks like they're now changing their model and aligning themselves by creating a compatible product with all the clouds. Until now, Commvault has been the only compatible solution with all the clouds, whereas IBM has only been compatible with their own solutions. It's only now they're starting to integrate. There is an arrogance about them but lately I think they've realised that they need to be more public with their stuff and to compete with Commvault.

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. 

Our primary use for this is data protection and management using various features of the product.

Virtualization has helped us increase efficiency by working against data analysis almost immediately and without interrupting performance. We have experienced about an 80% savings in effort on our backups and satisfying data safety which makes us more efficient and improves our organization.

Certainly, the data protection is the most valuable feature for using the product but the secondary functions of replication, backup and recovery, are invaluable in helping to protect the validity of the data.

One of the places where the product can improve is in the interface. It is a little cumbersome to interact with and not very user-friendly. If the interface could be more simple it would make using the product better.

The only other improvement I can think of — and again this has something to do with the GUI interface — is to include other features for configuration and scheduling tasks to make using the product more simple.

We have never had a problem with the product and find it to be extremely stable. It handles loads very well and this is important for data security.

When it comes to scalability, we find that we are able to add new features and scale use of features fairly easily.

We have currently deployed the solution for nine clients and hope to continue to grow from there.

IBM generally has very good technical support if we require it, but also we are supposed to be experts, so we do not need to use their services often.

We actually concurrently serve customers using more than one option and the other option we work with is Veeam. Which we deploy depends on the customer need and their preferences.

Our experience with installations and deployment is that the installation is straightforward. It did not take more than an hour to install beside additional configurations and customizations required by the clients. The troubleshooting afterward may take more time, but usually, we can have everything in place in less than a day.

As we are the reseller or vendor we do the installations and configurations ourselves.

We only use IBM Spectrum Protect Plus with yearly licensing fees. It depends on which solutions or plan that you choose for exactly how much it will cost.

As far as advice for people who are thinking about using the product, the product is excellent and it works. I can recommend using it and that you can be satisfied.

On a scale of one to ten where one is worst and ten is best, I give the product an eight. The biggest reason why this is an eight and not a ten is the same issues with the GUI interface and that it could be easier to use.

I was using this solution at my previous job, about six months ago. The company that I am with now is planning to purchase it, although, at this time, we do not have any of these products.

I have experience with the on-premises deployment model, and it was our backup solution.

This solution allows you to create a backup using any storage, and then take another one for disaster recovery. This is something that is very important for us.

This is a multi-platform backup solution where you can take a backup from AIX, Windows, or Linux servers and restore from CD, disk, or tape. It will restore exactly, from whatever you have. It's really comfortable.

This product has no limitations.

The user experience is very bad and the interface needs to be improved. It is not user-friendly. This is not my complaint, alone, but everybody I know who has worked with this solution. In order to perform a backup, professionally, you need to use the command-line interface. By comparison, Veritas has a backup solution with a very nice user interface that is easy to use.

This solution is difficult to troubleshoot when an error occurs. It gives you an error number that you can search for in the manual, or on the internet, to find an answer, but details are not given within the user interface. Again, it is just not user-friendly.

This solution is stable.

This is a scalable solution.

We have three backup managers who work together. I am with the Linux team, and we installed this solution, but we will be handing it over to the maintenance team. As both teams work with this solution, there are five people in total.

We are backing up approximately one hundred servers. We currently don't have any plans to expand this location, so our usage here will not increase. However, we do have branches in other cities, so in the future, we expect to use this solution in each of the branches.

I have a lot of experience with IBM Spectrum Protect, and the Plus version has extra features. It includes, for example, cloud features. After we upgraded to the plus version, I did not use many of the additional features. From my perspective, I did not really notice any difference between the two versions. We made the switch because our consultants suggested the Plus version, and our research told us that it is a really good solution to upgrade to.

We actually used multiple backup solutions, but I am unable to name them.

We did not initially install and configure the Plus version. The initial setup was for IBM Spectrum Protect, and then we performed an upgrade to the Plus version.

The initial setup is complex, for a new installation, when somebody does it for the first time. It is not too hard when you have experience with it. Our deployment took approximately one day.

I and my colleague performed the implementation in-house, with some assistance from IBM.

This solution is worth the investment.

This solution is expensive, but compared to other backup solutions, it is fair.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. Unlike some other solutions, such as Veritas NetBackup where you have to pay for different licenses to use different features, there is a single license that allows you to use all of the features.

This is a really strong application that I find really useful and reliable for backup, but it needs to be more user-friendly.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case would be for all our VMs. We are currently using Spectrum Protect but we're actually planning on moving everything onto Spectrum Protect Plus.

The feature I find most valuable is the offload to Spectrum Protect for long-term retention. I think the deduplication and replication are quite nice on Plus.

The only thing that I would like to see improved is the actual schedule that you get on the policies. It does not allow for being flexible, like for weekly, just day one to five, and leave day six and seven. Especially if we're running multiple policies, like if we want to do a basic weekly incremental and then later do a monthly. 

In the next release, I want to see updates on the scheduling so that we can have more options on how you schedule stuff, like allowing you to use your everyday requirement.

So far it looks quite stable and I haven't had issues yet. It looks quite fine.

I think it is scalable because you can scale upwards as much as you want to provide for your infrastructure. We are currently running it on a POC basis, so we are probably still in a pilot phase. The workload is not heavy yet due to the infrastructure. We're actually working on procurement of storage and our usage will increase. I'm currently only running three VMs, which in fact is quite big. And our immediate goal is to move 100 large VMs across. From there, we'll continue growing. We have about 700 or 800 VMs in our environment. 

We plan to upgrade to Spectrum Protect and for us it's moving forward. Firstly, backing up something on an archival level that is running on the same archival level is better. Secondly, the cost of Spectrum Protect Plus versus Spectrum Protect is much better, because I think you get around 10 VMs per terabyte licensing that you use. That will definitely be a huge gain for us.

The plugin on VMware of Spectrum Protect is totally different. So, with Spectrum Protect Plus you don't see the actual backup within the vCenter. The only thing that you see is that it creates a snap and then the backup runs totally outside of it.

The initial setup was quite straightforward and it was easy to actually set it up and start using it. The architecture is totally different from Spectrum Protect. I would like to see the commands and what's happening in the background, so it would nice to see a view of that.

The deployment was subject to the availability on the VMware side. We needed to go seek approvals and changes and things like that but the environment that I am currently using, I could deploy in a day.

Because we've got Spectrum Protect, we're going to use some of that licensing and convert it to Plus. One additional cost is obviously going to be the infrastructure that we need to buy for the solution.

The sooner you can do it and get going, the better. I rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using this as a backup solution in our on-premises environment.

With this product, we now have a reliable backup solution.

The administration is not user-friendly and needs to be improved. It is more suited to a technical person. Instead of using the command prompt for troubleshooting and administering the backup, there should be an easy-to-use graphical user interface.

The reporting should be improved. This solution would benefit from reports that included more aggregated data from the databases.

We had an incident where we were unable to recover our data, and it was very bad. The solution was already implemented, but for technical reasons and a misunderstanding, we were not able to recover our data. This detracts from their credibility.

In terms of stability, we have not seen many challenges aside from the one incident that we had, where we could not recover our data.

This solution seems scalable. We plan on adding more services and backing up more servers with it. We currently are backing up four physical servers, and twenty virtual machines. We have five administrators.

We've had many problems with technical support, and I would rate them a five out of ten. There was a lot of bureaucracy before they would send engineers to our site.

Prior to this solution, we were performing manual backups.

We downloaded the software from the vendor's website.

The initial setup was complex. Most of the work was done by an engineer from IBM. We really tried to follow the process so that we could understand it and troubleshoot if we encounter en error, but it was quite complex to follow. It is not a straightforward implementation.

The deployment took approximately two months, and there is a training period.

An IBM engineer assisted us with the deployment, and they are good at their work.

We have not yet seen ROI because we are still early in the project, but maybe we will, with time.

The licensing fees are on a yearly basis. In addition to the standard licensing fees, we paid for implementation and training. 

We did evaluate other products before choosing this solution. We had a look at Veritas and another solution that works with VMware. We chose this solution because the price is lower than that of the other two. Also, we already had their hardware, including the server and tape libraries.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to be open-minded when checking the infrastructure and technology, and then see whether this solution will be the best one for them.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from this solution is that project planning is key. You have to plan ahead for all of the various scenarios.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.