IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

I primarily use the backup and recovery features.

It works well with AIX. 

Sometimes we experience trouble with the backup transfer of the control files. 

The product is very stable.

The pricing of the solution is high in comparison to other products on the market. For example, Symantec costs less than this solution.

My primary use case for this solution is for large data backup.

This is a very mature product. It has been around in the large data set. People widely use this product and it helps our organization for backing up the petabytes of data.

This solution does not have good support for virtualization and a hyper-converged environment.

My first use case was a big company with 16 subsidiaries. We implemented the TSM Server, v6.1, with Exchange, VMware, Oracle, File System backup, and DRM. Today, this company uses IBM Spectrum Protect 8.1 with all items mentioned plus cloud backup with cloud containers. It's about seven years of partnership.

With IBM Spectrum Protect, 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. My life is easier and the environment administration is simple.

All features help me meet my requirements, but I love the TDP for VMware because of the web interface and the possibilities provided by this tool. It's amazing.

In my opinion, the Hyper-V and SQL Server backup could be improved. In the 2016 version there was a significant improvement, but I think IBM has a big challenge with these technologies.

In some small clients, we worked with Veritas Backup Exec, but just for small environments as a low cost option.

The primary use case for Spectrum Protect is as an enterprise back-end for companies' top database products, email, VMware, etc. We use it internally and promote that to our customers. It performs extremely well.

Our infrastructure is on-premise. 

When I help architect our customer solutions, we are primarily recommending flash for the catalog of the database, then a NL-SAS big storage bowl. We do have some tape, but we recommend going into the container bowl and replicating to a second site, whether that be a cloud container or a customer's on-premise at a second site.

I architect solutions. One of my biggest customers is managing three Spectrum Protect environments, two large footprints, and one medium footprint. Currently, they are doing two-site replication. They are experimenting with cloud containers (just in the early stages).

Data reduction definitely reduces costs, not only software costs, but from the infrastructure needed. Then, the ability to replicate second copy to cloud helps reduce their infrastructure and management costs (for that infrastructure) by being able to send encrypted, secure information over the internet.

The software-defined ability to do data reduction through deduplication and compression, as well as being able to replicate data to a cloud container.

Single store: The ability to mark an archive from my backup for long-term retention.

A lot of my customers always ask for legal holds, especially on email.

It is definitely a very robust solution. The biggest thing is follow the blueprints. IBM has done a great job documenting what the blueprints are. If you pay attention to those and follow them, you will avoid a lot of pitfalls.

The blueprints are awesome. From everything that I have see out there from competitors' products, Spectrum Protect scales significantly higher than anything else that I have seen.

Spectrum Protect will meet our customers' growth plans.

Technical support will always be a challenge. The biggest thing is you have to be very clear in defining what your needs and urgencies are. Though, they have gotten a lot better over time.

Our team was involved in the initial setup, and it was fairly complex.

The main competitors usually evaluated: EMC and Commvault. 

I would recommend Spectrum Protect.

Most important criteria for my customers when selecting a vendor: An enterprise backup solution which could cover multiple Clients, environments, and databases.

Its primary use case is backup and recall for enterprises. 

We were looking for an enterprise solution, and we found Spectrum Protect. It is more enterprise backup and that is what you want.

I am managing two Spectrum Protect system plus one tests.

We are not using cloud storage currently, nor are we planning to in the future.

I am working to implement Spectrum Protect Plus

• It saves you a lot of storage.
• Our performance is better. 
• Our product is running better than it was previously, which is huge.

My organization loves it, because they say it is one of the best product they have ever used.

• Deduplication
• Data compression
• There are a lot more features that we can use versus the previous product.

I want to see better compression than what it currently does. I heard that 8.1.5 has better compression. 

There are more features, but I want test earlier, therefore we can do more bugging for the compression feature.

Stability is good. 

However, depending upon what feature you turn on, you might run into more problems, then it is not stable. For example, when we started with deduplication, it was not working correctly. I spent so many hours with IBM support and development. They were not able to figure out what was going on and why. It was really a nightmare. We spent more hours working this product issue than I spent with my family.

Scalability is good. The product is so scalable and vast. 

They need to do a better job on Windows, because if you are running Windows, the scalability is more limited than AIX and Linux.

We plan to add on more Spectrum Protects in the future.

The technical support is good. I prefer talking to the Level 2 support, because I feel that the Level 1 support sometimes wastes too much of my time.

We needed a better enterprise backup because we were backing up OS-specific backup products with OS only. Thus, we had too many backup products for each OS separately. This was a nightmare to backup. Therefore, we decided to get an all-in-one backup.

The initial setup was easy, but I did struggle with it with no training as I was new to the product. I did do a good job, though.

We also evaluated NetBackup.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• OS compatibility
• Scalability
• Pricing, etc.

It is an enterprise product.  

We can gain benefit from any advance features (incremental forever, deduplication, compression, etc.).

• Incremental forever: This feature helps us reduce backup time and backup storage space.
• Deduplication and compression: This feature helps us move away from physical tape by using disk.
• Replication: This feature help us to offsite backup data without tape. Data replication is incremental and will send only non-duplicate data.

The user interface (UI) for the admin is still not good. It is way too complicated to manage the product, as we still need to use command line. IBM launched the Operations Center (OC), but there are still functions lacking, especially since we cannot manage all our scheduled tasks by using the GUI. 

There have been stability issues. The product does not exactly have a high availability (HA) solution.

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.

I would rate the technical support as a seven out of 10.

We did not use a previous solution.

The initial setup is complex. The solution needs a designer who knows the product in-depth.

The product is low cost. It is very cool when we design it to using licensing based on post capacity.

We compared it to NetBackup. In the end, for design and cost optimization, we chose IBM Spectrum Protect.

The product may look difficult to manage, but if you need enterprise backup software which supports cross platform and you have good design and skills transfer, this product will help reduce costs.

We use it for physical and virtual servers, especially when we are talking about IBM Power architecture.

• Deduplication
• Compression

But really, today, all features are available from all vendors. We can ensure incremental backups, full backups, differential backups. These are not specific to IBM. All other products contain the same features. But when I'm backing up a Power server, I feel more comfortable with IBM Spectrum Protect because it's the same vendor.

The solution is not complex, it's very easy to configure agents or VM backup and restore. Upgrades from one version to another are very fast and the product is very stable.

I really haven't noticed that something is missing. There is a central console for all backups and restores. 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.

I'm very comfortable with it. I see that the product is very stable. It's a good product.

It's very scalable. We can start the product with 10 machines and we can manage more than 1000 machines. There are no limitations with respect to adding agents. The only thing we need is the addition of some resources for the backup server. For example, we can start with a backup server with 16 gigabits of memory and when we add many jobs and many agents to the backup, we have to add some resource tools to the backup server.

Technical support is very good. When we submit a ticket, it will be resolved in a short timeframe. I believe the technical support is managed today by Watson, although I'm not sure. Watson for IBM Support Center is a machine but today it's the best support of all vendors we interact with. It's better than other vendors because we communicate with the machine and, from the database, it resolves all tickets in a short time.

In this case, we received recommendations, a short-list. IBM was on that list. We went with IBM because we have many IBM Power servers. There are some work loads for PowerVM and IBM knows the architecture of PowerVM better.

Initial setup is very easy. If there are updates, there are recommended actions.

There may be an advantage to going with IBM in terms of pricing. They have a pay-as-you-grow policy, so there is no need to take one license for the entire datacenter. You can start with small licenses and then grow, and pay, as you use more.

EMC and one other.

I rate it a nine out of 10. It's a good product, simple to use, simple to configure, and we get very good technical support.

Spectrum Protect provided a steady state in my backup operations and confidence in restores procedures with 99% assurance.

It is the only backup software which gives retro-compatibility, resilience, and enterprise agents.

This product should be more user-friendly for newcomers.

It is very stable after deployment and will perform in a steady state.

Scalability in not an issue for this product. It is a real enterprise class backup software.

Customer service is a plus, always giving an answer with skillful personnel.

There is really good technical support.

I had different backup products. Each one is really good with similar backup needs, but with Spectrum Protect, I could get a holistic product for heterogeneity environments.

In the beginning, the product was sometimes difficult to deploy. Then, there were improvements by IBM, giving more confidence to customers.

Now, setup is really straight forward.

Implementation was made in-house for many clients, which provided me with quite good expertise and autonomy for the future deployments.

Regarding retro-compatibility of the product between versions, your data is always available and the ROI is unquestionable. Also, the different license models can give good benefits to the end customer.

Licenses have to be studied regarding a client's need. However, with Entry License, Front End Capacity or Back End Capacity, there are many choices.

I tried other products, but some of them were not suitable for enterprise class.

The product is always getting better, and it is still the most reliable backup product in the market.