IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

I have been working for more than 14 years in service companies dedicated to implementing and consulting in the area of backup and storage. This has allowed me to work with a multitude of backup environments. I have worked in Unix, Linux, Windows, and VMware environments, with all kinds of databases, applications; environment backup contingency solutions (DR) - formerly through "double copy" and tape management offsite; replicating storage pools via disk systems, and the databases of the backup server itself. Lately, I have been using node replication in on-premise environments and replicating against the server located in the IBM cloud (Softlayer).

Yields are a key feature. There are also very few incidents related to restores that cannot be performed. The level of product support is very high.

Integration with Windows environments needs improvement. It should be more "assisted", both at the application and database level. It remains a product that fits better in Unix/Linux environments than in Windows environments, given its configuration procedures. It needs BMR (bare machine recovery) solutions for both Windows and Linux systems.

The deduplication functionality has caused some issues as has the upload of deduplicated/encrypted data to the cloud. These errors have been solved, thanks to the power of its DB2 engine. It enables detection and correction of these problems. To date, I have not found any error that could not be resolved.

Scalability is one of the best features of this product. An IBM Spectrum Protect environment (a DB2 instance) can manage up to 4PB. Sometimes it is more practical to define several instances of DB2 (several DB2 databases, several TSM servers) on the same physical server, which drastically reduces the size of the DB2 databases.

The problem in Spain is that level-1 and 2 support, which were very good, has been moved. Now, almost all level-2 incidents are handled in France or the US. In the US there is very good support but its work schedule does not match ours.

For medium/large environments (Unix, Linux, Windows, VMware) we also propose the Commvault solution. For fully virtual environments, such as VMware and Hyper-V, we always use Veeam Backup & Replication. For a small environment with Windows and VMware/Hyper-V, we usually implement Veritas Backup Exec.

Setup/implementation requires a high level of knowledge/skill. For those with experience, the setup can be very fast, although it is true that it requires a pre-planning and sizing process.

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.

If the customer has more IBM products, as well as IBM storage, we can resort to global licensing, which can be very economical.

In principle, and whenever I can implement this product, if a customer is reluctant or has many Windows servers I choose products that are configured/installed almost entirely via a graphic interface, such as Commvault.

It is a very powerful product that offers great performance and integrates very well in Unix/Linux environments and with powerful databases (Oracle, DB2, SAP, etc.). However, it requires a middle to high-end knowledge of, and skill with, the product.

I provide architecture consultation, mission expertise, installation, upgrade, migration and, sometimes, official Spectrum Protect education for IBM.

I have a lot of examples of how it has improved different clients' organizations, but the greatest value is with a dual-site infrastructure and container storage pools.

• Forever incremental - allows TSM to optimize storage needs.
• The way it covers backup and archive needs. The flexibility of backup copy group always allows me to cover the customer's requests.
• Replication processes with container storage pools allow reduction of storage space and network bandwidth, using deduplication and compression.

The administration interface:

• should implement more functionalities that exist only in the command line
• needs improvement in how some reports are created.

Also, it needs agents that take into account more databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.).

It depends on the infrastructure and the requirements, but from an overall viewpoint, and in light of my experience of 15 years with TSM, I rate Spectrum Protect at eight out of 10.

This product handles backup issues in all areas and tasks, both stand-alone and various cluster options, replication.

Spectrum Protect does not just improve our work, it saves the infrastructure of more than one enterprise in the event of hacker attacks, administrative errors, and a variety of other failures.

The main feature of this product is a flexible architecture and functionality that allows you to solve problems of any complexity and scale. Most importantly, it is not just a product that simply makes a backup, but it restores and saves a large number of services in critical situations. By the way, it works fine with different types of clouds, supports S3.

I think it makes sense to think about Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization because Red Hat has better backup.

Our primary use case is data protection. With the new version, Spectrum Protect 8.1.4 that we are running on, we have had quite a number of issues. IBM has responded well, and after about six weeks of going through a performance tuning with them, we are back on top of our backups and things are running well.

Our old system, which is running Tivoli 7.1.7, uses VTL with tape library behind it. We are actually migrating off of it and going to the new environment, which is Spectrum Protect 8.1.4 on Power s822 AIX server. This is back-ended by a V5030 disk array. We have 12 flash modules for the OS and for a portion of the TSM installation. However, the main bulk of the directory container pool is on two 92F expansion frames off of that V5030 array.

Right now, we have four separate instances that we are monitoring today.

With data deduplication and compression, we are reducing our overall storage footprint for our disk histories. Therefore, we are reducing the actual cost of the disk for our data protection and data backups.

The most valuable features of the new version are directory container pools with inline data deduplication and compression.

It seems like they are a little behind on the integration to Azure Cloud as well as Amazon. Some products are there, but not everything is there, and these seems to be with all products. Even Azure themselves as we are looking to migrate, they do not have the functionality we need. Then all of a sudden, it is there with the next order.

It is very stable for us. So far, the only time it has been down is when we actually had to take it down.

This remains to be seen because we are actually going through a cloud migration process. We are looking at options which will allow us to tier out the cost as well as put another Spectrum Protect in the cloud for data protection backup out there.

With our transition and initiative to go to Azure Cloud, Spectrum Protect's functionality is not there yet for native Azure Cloud integration. We have found out that it is definitely in the road map for native integration to Azure. It is just whether or not it will be there on time for us.

We have used technical support. We had a few performance issues coming up with the new version. IBM jumped on the issues very quickly, got people on the team, and we have been able to work through them.

Everything from the OS installed to provisioning the disk to installing the Spectrum Protect software was neither straightforward nor complex. There were a few bugs and hiccups along the way, but nothing that a seasoned admin could not overcome.

We also evaluated Commvault.

I would have to see what their actual long-term strategic direction is first. If they want to remain on-premise, I would probably recommend Spectrum Protect. If they wanted to go on cloud and a more immediate time frame, it may comedown to Commvault, who already have native books set up as a service within Azure and Amazon Cloud.

Main criteria for selecting Spectrum Protect: We have had IBM Spectrum Protect for a number of years, so vendor stability is one thing that we look for being a government organization. Then obviously, the next one is cost.

Our customers have on-premise infrastructure mostly using tape libraries. We do have a company using a virtual tape library. Though, t customer does not have many benefits from their virtual tape library, as the infrastructure is majority over the AIX file of Spectrum.

In my country, we manage 25 solutions. In all countries, we manage 200.

Maintaining recovered data.

• Mainly backups
• Replication
• Exporting the data from another data center.

Any feature that is compliant with virtualizing the application should be improved. Also, the product should be improved to save more space.

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

The product is scalable. However, the customer's infrastructure is usually not scalable. Therefore, the environment (server, tapes, etc.), not the product, limits the scalability of the customer.

Technical support is usually effective onsite. My work is with IBM systems.

I would rate offsite technical support as average. The PMRs should be faster.

I would recommend the product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Price
• Easy tool management
• An operating systems which works
• Capacity of encryption. 

Primary use case is for data protection and data backup. I work with the following:

• On-premise solutions for customers.
• Building solutions for our managed service, which uses Spectrum Protect as a backup data protection for primarily DIAX Power Systems platform.
• Virtual workloads in our data center.

It performs great and is working wonderfully.

Our on-premise infrastructure is mostly spinning disk right now. Tape is on our plans towards the future. I have come to the conclusion that we need to make sure we add tape into the solution, because archive seems to be a big, important piece, especially since Spectrum Protect is moving as a product. Going forward, we will find it being more as a long-term retention repository than it used to be in the past.

We have two Spectrum Protect instances. We have work redundant ones in our managed solutions center that we offer for our solutions provider. For my on-premise work that I do as a consultant, I take care of instances on and off for various customers.

As managed solutions provider, it has been really useful because it scales bigger than a lot of other products. It allows us to consolidate costs on the back-end, making it somewhat more cost effective for us, while still being able to scale bigger for our larger customers that buy solutions from us.

The biggest thing is its enterprise-wide type of architecture. It supports a lot of different platforms. This is useful for us.

There is not much that they do not have already. 

Integration with some applications in the healthcare field could be added, as that is a big part of our business. I just recently learned that Spectrum Protect Plus has integration with Epic. They are planning on implementing it. It is on their road map, and that seems to be the right direction. 

IBM has a good direction, making sure they address the things that they discuss with us as a service provider, and looking to provide better products to our customers.

It is super stable. This is one of the reasons that we like it as a solutions product.

It is extremely scalable. This is why we like it, because a lot of other products require a more complicated deployment as the environments get bigger. 

Spectrum Protect keeps things rather simple, because as long as we build the core system, it can scale with the hardware, essentially. We use Power Systems for our servers. Therefore, it can scale massively, as well as the application. Thus, we keep our costs low.

The solution will definitely meet my customers' growth requirements. However, the challenge I have is that customers are becoming more homogeneous and need diversity less. This has worked more for us as we take on workload for them, but I have a lot of customers who used to need five or six different types of enterprise integration: workload, virtualization of different platforms, etc. However, this all seems to be getting more homogenized. Therefore, the need has been going down from what we have seen previously.

Most commonly, we call technical support for performance related issues, if we run into something which is a weird anomaly, we will call them up. 

They have recently added support tickets specifically engineered around performance. This has been very useful for us when we run into issues where customers are looking to try to squeeze a lot more horsepower out of older system.

The initial setup is a little more complex than some of the other solutions. The younger, backward products out there are much easier to implement. 

Generally speaking, it works well for me, as a person who sells my services. It is nice to be able to be able to set something up for a customer, and have it work directly the first time, because of the fact that I have the experience. 

Typically, the competitors have been EMC or Commvault. Those are the most common ones that we have run into. 

What is probably most interesting, more recently, customers have been having conversations with me around some of these newer backup applications which are more web scale architected, like how Spectrum Protect Plus is designed. This has been a different conversation, because the customers' focus is more about ease of use, and less about flexibility and scalability. Therefore, this has been a little bit of a shift, because they have simplified so much, and what they have is their infrastructure.

Customers' most important criteria when selecting a solution:

• Robustness
• Durability
• Flexibility with storage and the Client.

It is performing very well. However, our customer feedback is the product is very complex, and mainly built for the enterprise customer. They will need to do some developments on the Spectrum Protect, especially on the Plus series. Maybe on Spectrum Protect, they can simplify it, so the admin can get more easily access the console, and generate jobs and alerts.

As a product, it is very nice. People love it, but the only issue is it requires a very unique/rare skill set. 

80% of the core business is running on-prem, and some of the applications which are add-on, go on the cloud. This is a mixture: 80% is on-premise, which is non-critical.

The problem with moving to the cloud is the government compliance agreements. The government says the data should not leave the country, or if the data is leaving Iran, it should be encrypted and no one else can read it. This is why Amazon is coming with their data center. Once it is live, all the Ministry's data should be part of Amazon and it should not go out. Those are the compliance issues with the Ministry.

We manage approximately 20 customers, except Saudi Arabia.

Especially for the banking and ministry sectors, they have core businesses running and they can't have a single bit of data corruption or data loss. This is a very important product for them, because it gives ease of access and the type of data consistency where they can rely on it and its safe on-hand. When there is a need or a disaster, they can get the information back from the archive. So, it is very much required.

The backup on real-time, especially for the virtual machine, archiving, and retrieving the reader from the backup repository and getting it online, getting it validated, then performing the data consistency check over the backup.

• I would like the users to have a better experience with the product.
• Easier recovery
• It needs better connectivity with other non-IBM application hardware and non-IBM platforms. If it can get connected with other applications, the customer would be happier because they would not need to stick to a single vendor, so they could have a backup on multiple environments.

It is very stable. It is meant for the enterprise customer's core business. I have never seen any customer talk about a system crash and not being able to retrieve their backup. 

It takes a lot of time to configure on the first setup. Once setup, you do not need to touch it again. You just need to do a formal check on possibly batch updates.

If you are attaching with IBM products, it is all compatible and very easy. Issues arise when you are working with non-IBM products. Then, you need to find all the APIs with the Spectrum Product. There are some issues with HPE and Dell, because these two do not support Spectrum Protect. You have to be on certain versions before they will support integrations.

Spectrum Protect will meet our customers needs as they grow, because as the data is growing they need to have a backup. We are talking about on-premise backup, we are not talking about cloud backup. We are discussing out of the country backup. There are tapes which are getting shipped out of the country with an encryption key. Spectrum Protect is playing a vital role, because they do the encryption. It is a very reliable, consistent, unhackable product. 

Technical support is okay, but their skills are limited.

Example: Our customer was not able to do certain activities. So it went from Level 1 to Level 2, then Level 3. Level 3 takes a longer time to bring up the batch or find a resolution. I think that is a part IBM could fix something. They should have a proper technical support team serving the customers and get issues resolved earlier.

The initial setup starts straightforward, but as soon as a customer opens the requirements for the backup because they are happy it, they will want to export their system, virtualized platform, or some applications on the databases. This is when it starts getting complex. Then you need to run multiple jobs, multiple consoles, and bring it all together. Of course, customers want to have a single console to connect all their different environments.

I would recommend IBM, but I am a business partner.

Other market competitors include EMC NetWorker, Veritas (Plus Edition), and Veeam (for virtualization).

Customers main criteria when selecting a vendor: presence in the market, and onsite and offsite support.

I have seen my clients use it historically for AIX systems and for applications which are pretty robust, like Domino. I use it there, or for customers who have a lot of systems and are trying to backup everything in a certain time frame. They get this benefit and the benefits of its space efficiency. It keeps the footprint down (the space), so they will not need to continue buying more disk. 

Mostly, it is a flash database for Spectrum Protect, then as far as the user space for everything else, they are using mostly using NL drives. I do not know of anybody using flash all the way. Our customers are also using tape, too.

The great thing about Spectrum Protect is I do not have to be concerned with the latest, greatest technologies. I can still use what has been out there for some time. Traditional storage works perfectly with it.

We do have customers with cloud strategies, who are looking to put their backup in the cloud. A lot of customers talk about moving to cloud, but do not do it because of their size (too large). We are in the works with one customer looking to do this, but their legal people stopped pretty much anybody putting their data in the cloud, so that is on the customer side.

The average Spectrum Protect customer is going to be somewhere around 150 servers, and about 2,000 user company organizations or larger. They have usually dozens of terabytes to protect. Some companies have five Spectrum instances, and some have 30 or 40.

Its capability of just being able to handle legacy servers, and new and old platforms. That is one of the things about IBM, they made sure the product will continue to keep customers loyal.

The Spectrum Protect people know that they have to have the Spectrum Protect Plus product pick up and move faster, meaning getting to those features that Spectrum Protect can't do. 

I think IBM is great with software, and it will always improve. It is just the speed of getting it out there. Faster development and deployment speed would help us as partners go out there with confidence and sell more product right now.

Though, no one can fix every solution for backup and restore.

Stability is excellent. This is one of IBM's strength.

Scalability is excellent. This is one of IBM's strength.

The technical support is general. If you need more than that, you need to know someone within IBM on the technical in-depth side. We will be the transparency to do that for our customers. That is why we are there to help manage their Spectrum Protect environments.

However, if something changes at the customer's company, the environment can go into what we call debt. If you don't watch it, it can get out of hand. That is also where we come in to help our customers if they cannot find the time. A good Spectrum Protect administrator should be spending approximately an hour to an hour and a half a day just to the administration of it. If you are spending more time than that, then it is possible that you need more training on it.

I work on the initial setup with my teammates and technical team to verify the setup will work. I work with the IBM blueprints that they have online as a basis. I try to follow them as closely as possible, but they do not always fit all customers, because there are just three broad versions: small, medium, and large footprints. 

If you follow the blueprints, it is pretty straightforward, because it is all scripted out for you. We do run into something complex with each customer setup, but we have the experience to handle it.

You need to put it in a PoC and test it out if you can. A lot of companies have time and resources to do this for every product that they are looking at. They need to scrutinize every one of the competitors. 

After, you can basically configure it and script it the way you want it to work.

Spectrum Protect is often compared with Commvault and EMC for overall backup solutions, then against Veeam, and Rubrik for virtualization platforms.

Our customers have come to trust IBM. If there is ever an issue that has to be solved, IBM will throw the bench at it and make it work. If you know how to design it right the first time and you show proof that you have done it before with the customer, it will make it easier for the next customer when you go out there and try to sell them on the solution.

Backup is typically last of the things that customers want to tackle, but they have to do it sooner or later, or they will get burnt by it.

Most important criteria when customers select a solution:

• Skill and experience in the product
• Relationships
• Confidence in product.