IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

Most of our customers use it for backup. It performs very well.

Most of my customers are still doing the traditional disk storage backed by primarily tape storage on on-premise infrastructure environments. A few are doing disk only, and that will probably continue to grow, but most of our customers use tape. For their use cases, they find it suits their needs.

We currently manage dozens of Spectrum Protect instances.

For most of our customers, it is more efficient than most traditional backup solutions. It can also scale from a very small environment to a very large, multiple-tenant environment.

The incremental forever backup, which makes it more efficient than any other solution that does not use this scheme.

Continue the incremental improvements that they have been doing all along. There is not any one big thing right now that my customers can think to do. 

The Spectral Protect Plus addresses the VM inside of things and is a huge improvement. This is the main thing everyone has been seeing.

It has always been very stable.

It is scalable beyond anything my customers ever aspire to.

We expect the product to meet our growth needs.

For the most part, once you get them the right information, technical support is very effective. Getting them all the necessary diagnostic information is still very painful.

I do the initial setups of the solution. The initial setups are complex still. This is maybe the one weak point, getting it setup, but this is where I help.

Most of my customers are coming from old NetBackup type of environments. What I see a lot more now is Commvault, and these two being the other two main competitors.

I would recommend Spectrum Protect.

Pay attention to the backup, because it does matter in terms of the efficiency and scalability of the solution. A lot of other approaches are not as effective.

Customers main criteria for choosing Spectrum Protect:

• Efficiency
• Scalability.

Our primary use case is for database backups. It is performing okay. 

We are probably moving to NetWorker, because we want to use one platform for all of our backups. Right now, we use Avamar for virtualized environments and Spectrum Protect for databases. We want to get to one platform.

We have two main campuses with three petabytes of storage. We use virtualized tape, IBM product TS7700 Hydra. Those are all replicating, and we also have our Spectrum Connect and Spectrum Protect databases being replicated using Remote Mirror between sites (about 130 kilometers apart). Right now, the database (300 to 400 gigs) is sitting on some flash on a EMC VNX behind an SVC.

It is just a backup. It has not changed anything.

It allows us to have one interface. Our database administrators can schedule backups themselves. We can freeze and start databases for consistent backups. Also, we can have different schedules for whatever they need, whenever they want.

We would like to see bare-metal restorers.

There are some things that it is not doing too well for us. It does not do too well in our virtual environment. We have had to move away from it because of this.

Stability is good. We have some trouble with Clients, but I think all backup products have problems. They just have different problems.

It is pretty scalable. It will scale to anything. There have been no problems. 

Technical support has been good. Except sometimes, there will be some performance problems and no one knows what is happening. We end up spinning our wheels. With a couple of performance problems, we have ended up having to rebuild the database because everyone will eventually give up. 

Everything is normally good. If we have had a problem with our Client, they respond right away.

I do not know who else was evaluated when we were looking for a solution.

Now, we have NetWorker, Avamar, and Spectrum Protect. So, we have two and a half too many backup products.

What it does, it does excellent. I would recommend the product.

We chose Spectrum Protect because everything we had was IBM. At the time, it could do everything; all the environment. Everything that we had could go into Spectrum Connect: There were some P7s, Windows, and that was it.

Spectrum Protect is a primary backup product that is used for physical and virtual servers in the open systems world.

One of our customers is using a cloud strategy, but it is on-prem cloud. So, it is cloud object storage.

Some of our customers are going to VTL (IBM and non-IBM). I have one customer who will be going to a Spectrum Scale environment for their backup. The Spectrum Scale environment is doing spinning disk, and they migrated off of a VTL product onto it. These are major two infrastructure environments that I have seen.

Most of my clients have been running Spectrum Protect for a long time, so they have been running it for years. If they have migrated off of it, they migrated off of it because of its lack of virtual environment functions.

• The speed of backup
• The amount of data that it protects with very little storage by doing incremental forever.

Its availability has been excellent.

Scalability is pretty much unlimited.

One client with a distributing environment has 130 to 140 instances. Another client has probably somewhere between 10 to 15.

I have not personally used technical support. The feedback from my clients has been pretty positive. 

I do have one customer who does not tend to stay current, and that causes issues. Anytime you are not very current and call in with an issue, it is hard to get it resolved. It will depend on how far back you go though.

I was involved in a migration setup. When one of our customers was moving from a VTL to Spectrum scale for their target storage, we had to go through some migrations because we switched from VTL doing the replication to using Spectrum Protect for node replication, using compression, etc. It was pretty straightforward.

We are currently looking at doing a refresh for the PowerNAS for Spectrum Protect and getting Spectrum Protect Plus in-house for our VE as well as backing up our databases, such as Oracle, DB2, or SQL.

We use all-flash for all the storage that we use for Spectrum Protect.

We do not have anything going to the cloud now. The goal is to have anything which requires a long-term retention backed up to either Amazon or Azure.

We currently use Tivoli Data Protection to back up our databases. Spectrum Protect is actually the application which backs up the file system data, then anytime you want to back up the databases you use an agent with Tivoli Data Protection (TDP) to be able to back up your Oracle databases or your SQL databases. 

Right now, we are getting  good results when we back up Oracle with TDP, but we back it up directly to the VTO. So, the goal is to get rid of the VTO and utilize the native features within Spectrum Protect to be able to do deduplication and no replication as we would do it on the VTO, because all that functionality is on the VTO. However, Spectrum Protect does not know about the VTO. So, it would be nice to be able to move that within the functionality Spectrum Protect. However, in order to do, we have to make sure we are sizing the servers correctly. This is why we are also considering using the PowerNAS, and maybe putting Spectrum Scale ESS behind it as well. 

We currently are working with our sales rep and some of the IBM techs to see how this solution would play out if we wanted to bring it in-house.

From a tech perspective:

• Utilizing deduplication
• No replication
• Getting the virtual environment backed up using Spectrum Protect Plus on all of the databases.

I would love to see something which allows us to do an auto restart of backup jobs. Right now, we have it where we have health checks, and if anything that missed or failed, we monitor those. However, we have to manually go onto the servers to execute a manual backup. It would be nice if there was something that ran behind the scenes on the Spectrum Protect server saying, "If our file spaces have not been backed up in eight hours or 12 hours (depending on the attribute status set by the customer), then an auto backup restart occurs automatically." This would be instead of having to do it manually. 

This would help us out, and also the operational teams as it would allow them to focus more on maintaining the Spectrum Protect server versus restarting backup jobs.

Performance has not been an issue. If we do move all of our Oracle and SQL databases off of the VTO on to Spectrum Protect, performance will be a huge factor because we will now a LAN-free backup to a LAN backup. This means we will be going over the network. Therefore, we need to be able to know that Spectrum Protect and our internal network will be able to handle the workload.

We do have a test environment. Currently we just upgraded our test environment to 8.1.5. We are currently testing some of the issues that we have had related to the GS Kits that were resolved in 8.1.5, as well as some issues where the nodes were not communicating back to the Spectrum Protect server providing you information on the last time it established communication with Spectrum Protect.

These issues were resolved by reading. We did a lot of googling and found some information which was on the IBM website. It gave us information in regards to the issues that we found. However, when we upgraded our production servers to 8.1.3, we actually ran into the GS Kit issues, and we had a lot of clients who still run 7.x. Therefore, we had a lot of issues from the first time it started to authenticate to the Spectrum Protect servers and the servers stopped backing up. 

One of the things we did was open up a ticket with IBM and say, 'This is what is going on." The IBM technician helped us out and ensured that we had everything in place. He made sure that we did not have that issue again when we were using it. When the Clients started communicating back with the Spectrum Protect servers, it was back on level. So the issue was resolved.

We have been impressed with the scalability.

Our environment is huge. We have a large AIX Windows environment, and it is growing every day.

If we build our servers correctly when we refresh our environment using a PowerNAS, Spectrum Protect will definitely be able to handle our growth.

We came from version 7.1.3. Based on some of the features which were offered in version 8, this was the focal point for us to say, "We need to upgrade if we want to take advantage of using container pools, start using deduplication, and no replication." 

We wanted to go ahead and start upgrading the Spectrum Protect servers to the latest code, as well as the Client, so we could take advantage of these new features.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was not complex; it was pretty much straightforward. Besides the security issues, we experiences no other issues.

We started with the blueprints, which were great. The blueprints allowed us to be able to decide if we needed to use small, medium,k or large. Because we are a large environment, we used a large blueprint. Once we followed everything in the blueprint, it was a smooth transition from there.

We looked at Veeam and Rubrik, but right now, we have the two best products. We have Commvault and Spectrum Protect. Each one of them are the best at different things and each have their weaknesses. During the last two years, IBM has put out a lot of different features which have impressed us. We may be able to reevaluate some product comparisons now. As long as IBM continues to roll out new features and adjusts a lot of other customer issues out there in the industry, they will continue to stay one of the top products.

Look at all the products in the industry, then base your decision on the size of your environment. A lot of times products say that have cool things, but at the end of the day, scalability and performance are what you should be looking at. Spectrum Protect has been able to meet these particular needs for us. 

Do not let companies use you as their guinea pig.

As an IBM business partner, we are interested in helping our clients get the most out of their technology. 

For our clients using on-premise infrastructure, they usually have a mixture of workloads and a lot of databases with a lot of different operating systems. Therefore, they need a backup platform which helps them to get the most out of every piece of software that they have, not different pieces of software to back up different technologies. Spectrum Protect enables us to do that for them.

A mixture of technologies comprise their backup, as they are using incremental technology. They are using snapshot for backups, and also using CBT Tracking, which is one of the technologies that VMware has in its APIs and that Spectrum Protect leverages to do virtual machine backups. Therefore, there is a mixture of things. 

Many customers that we have are in the banking system of Columbia. For example. I estimate that 70% to 80% of the banks in Columbia, including eBanks, are using Spectrum Protect.

We now have 20 Clients with Spectrum Protect. We have a very special one with four instances of Spectrum Protect on the same Client. This is a very big bank in Columbia. They have instances in production, instances for developing environments, and instances for coverage throughout all their infrastructure. This is the biggest environment that we have, and it takes approximately 30,000 backups a month. So, it is a large environment.

We see that solution is now getting a new breath. The solution is helping new customers with sending workloads to the cloud, which helps us a lot, because they are uploading their internal and on-premise systems.

About 20 to 30% of my clients are now using cloud to upload their backups. This is very important to us, because Spectrum Protect now helps them to achieve this result.

One of the features which is most interesting in Spectrum Protect is the ability to scale out to great environments. This is something that not many vendors have on the market. 

It is also a product that has been maturing for a long time. This is good because customers need reliability in their enterprise initiatives. 

I would like to see monitoring within the platform: monitoring for storage pools and monitoring for the server's health (e.g., CPU and memory). This has been somewhat lost from previous releases because we had IBM Tivoli Monitoring for these purposes, but now we do not have anything, and it is important to cover this. 

Also, I would like to advance reporting and analytics for the platform to see how much data is coming into the platform. how much data is expiring everyday, and what tape savings we are getting through reclamation. These are important things to know, as we are lacking a bit in this area.

We have a very long road to walk. We can make a lot of improvements taking into account all the participants in the ecosystem: The developers with the business partners and the clients who help us to improve the product.

The solution is very stable. It is one of the most important features that we look for in a product before putting it into the market and when establishing a strategy with our customers. 

There are a lot of clients who are using the product for 10 years or more. We began working with them long time ago. We have been seeing the product progress and the evolution of it through time. They clients have seen that this special feature, which is stability, has not being lost with the product's evolution. We are maintaining the quality of the product, and at the same time, advancing new features. This is very important for us.

The technical support for Spectrum Protect is very mature. It is very committed to giving a top-notch support experience. I have no complaints about them. We are working mainly with the Argentina team, which is a Level 2 team who helps us in Latin America. They are very considerate and help us to get our issues resolved or questions resolved.

In recent years, there has been improvement regarding the product's setup. Now, we have an installation manager, which helps us a lot. There is no customized research. It is the same installation manager that all other IBM products use. This is great for us, as it is very simple to install patches. That was difficult previously, but now we have a streamline method to install the product. 

With initiatives like Spectrum Protect Plus, which is new, we are advancing even more with our technology initiatives.

I am involved in the whole lifecycle. I am involved in design, setup, and also the post-sales report.

Our customers always evaluate other vendors. Customers are sometimes using Veeam Backup for their virtual workloads. They may also be using some other tools from EMC. However, Spectrum Protect is the only tool that can work throughout all their technology and platforms. Therefore, they do not need separate tools for separate technologies. Spectrum Protect is the only tool which helps them do this.

IBM is most compared to Veeam Backup because there are a lot of virtualized workloads in our Clients. It is also compared with HPE Data Protector and Veritas. These are the solutions that our customers evaluate. 

The powerful reason IBM technology is good for to our customers is they already have IBM technology present. For example, they have IBM Power in their infrastructure for core business. They also have IBM applications, like IBM cloud applications and IBM monitoring applications. They want to form a stack of applications and solutions from the same vendor. It is much easier to take another solution and incorporate it into their existing solutions that they already have.

We try to help our customers, not only to be the seller, but also be an adviser to them and help them chose the best technology around

My primary use case is to back up our data to tape to outsource storage to protect us against any sort of cryptoware attack. We are using our DR recovery scenarios, basically for protection we are backing up to tape. We also back up the disk first. 

Our environment consists of two primary data centers with IBM storage in the thousands along with older and newer generations, and we have backed up everything to TS4500 already. We are still trying to move away from TS3500, but we are working on that. We have a mix of all sorts of databases and Exchange.

One of the recovery methods used to help troubleshoot all of our operations for contractors or the lower tiers, it meets that. Therefore, we are able to run it in an enterprise quite easily with one or two resources. All of the automatic tape deck functions are done well, too. We are able to connect two separate sites relatively easily without any problems. 

Once it is completed properly, it is low maintenance. Most of the functions do not require much deliberation. It is all the blueprints and technologies laid out, and it is straight forward.

The version that we had when I first started made it look really bad. We are talking about commands that should have run in two seconds, but instead took four to eight hours. Other components were sluggish. I noticed it as soon as our database improved. 

Because the database was slow, everything was very unresponsive. I did not know if I was doing anything wrong or if the system was not performing. With support, we were able to get up to a working version. 

Now, we are having issues with some of our underlying hardware. We require a lot of support, which has given us more scripts to get data out to the databases. In my 15 years experience of experience with backups, though not with Spectrum Protect, I could not get enough data out of the system to figure out what is going on. 

It is very scalable for my need, especially when you can just buy the hardware attachment. It is very fluid. To increase, as long as all the performance issues are taken into account, you can add as much you want. You can really scale it up in a lot of areas. The only issue I have with scalability is for the small offsite locations. You have about 50 different companies and you would never consider using Spectrum Protect in them. 

Our primary use centers are using Spectrum Protect instances. We run two Spectrum Protect instances.

We have spec'd out our build, and the cost of it can work quite easily today for our future needs.

I find the Level 1 and Level 2 support spend 80% of the time communicating the same information that I have already provided. 20% of those leads get a resolution. 

Because of our current case, I have had to open multiple cases and had some stagnant delays when answers did not fit the problem we had. It is normal in the industry to have to reach out to our customer rep to get proper support. 

It is not just for the IBM product, but it is on par at the top tier level. We receive the proper amount of attention once the proper communications are opened up with sales. On the lower tiers, I'm reasonably better off without creating communication with support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We used a third-party provider to set up the solution. The only problem is the speed of picking it up. There have been some sizing issues now, and we are dealing with those. Afterwards, we can move it forward.

We have been at our size for a few years. We are not really looking to battle the licensing costs, as this is our primary system.

I do not know who they evaluated.

I would not recommend Spectrum Protect at this point.

We have a lot of happy customers when we sorted our files. We had someone in admissions, and they have a file which everyone shares. There are users who have deleted or trashed files and will need to restore them, sometimes even overwrite it with a new one. They will need the old file from a particular date and the Spectrum Protect system lets you retrieve a specific date file, which leads to a lot of happy campers.

We have an on-premise infrastructure. We use Iron Mountain, then we have a tape library. We have tapes that go off-site, so we can restore for our disaster recovery solution if the premise goes down. Though, we have not had to use it yet.

The VMware/virtual people take more of the snapshots, though not too much with the main AIX boxes.

Recovering files which have been lost. You can't place a value on it. If someone loses a day's work, or they had this file that they had been keeping for years on end and now all of a sudden the data is gone, they can recover it with Spectrum Protect.

The backup feature. Everyone wants a full backup. It gives them safety and peace of mind, like an insurance policy for that rainy day when they may need to restore a system. It is not necessarily as good for migrating to a new release, then putting back a D-drive. However, for daily operations and disaster recovery, it is a big use case.

Probably educating the virtual group who are not as used to the product. Most of our expertise is with AIX servers and virtual server backups. I am doing more work these days with Identity and Oracle, why would I use the pump and dump on Oracle or would it be better if I am able to send it off-site using something like Spectrum?

It has been very reliable. 

The biggest issue is educating users. The compatibility if you put out a newer server can take backups from old Clients, but you want to keep Clients up-to-date. Some users are more proactive than others, so they won't all come and ask for the Client. It is a job that we should be educating users more about regarding when they should download it. With Spectrum Protect, you can push things from the hubs to the spokes and keep the Clients up-to-date.

I have not seen any big issues. I sometimes handle the tape library, unloading and loading tapes. and it is very predictable. 

We recently had a situation where we quickly got code, and the number of tapes exceeded the library capacity so we were waiting a while to change. We got a fix for this right away.

We only have a couple servers, but loads of nodes and Clients (hundreds of them). We have some domains, active directories, backups, and shared drives. The shared drives are big. Since driving the recovery scenario, where someone deletes something off of their shared drive, it is not just that person's data but it's a whole department's data.

The technical support has very good turnover for problem solving. They have been spot on as we received a response within a few days.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

Spectrum Protect would free up backup space that could be used from files in our databases to grow. It allows for growth of the database, so it is a good use case. However, I might use Oracle pump and dump because I am in test mode (and cheap), but if I were to put it into production, I would really have to use something like Spectrum to do that.

Main criteria for choosing Spectrum Protect: disaster recovery. It is something you seldom use, but it is big if it happens, so it is the security and insurance policy.

The primary use case is to provide backup and archive our data, onsite and offsite. It is performing very well. 

Our infrastructure is on-premise; nothing is in the cloud. We are utilizing things like spinning disks, flash storage, tape, snapshots, etc. We are still sending tapes outside. 

It has a lot more capabilities and functions than a lot of other products. Even though it is more complex, the reason is because it gives you a lot more features. This is what I  prefer, especially for a long retention.

I have not implemented the most important feature yet: node replication. I can have a hot Spectrum Protect server under the DR site instead of having to build one up like I would have had to before.

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. I grew up doing command line, so it is fine for me. For people that are younger, they want to do everything on their smart phone, and running hundreds of commands is not the answer. Therefore, more functionality for things like creating tape drives and tape libraries, as the functionality is not at the operations center yet. If the operations center had been fully functional, I would have probably given it a rating of a 10.

So far, so good. I am looking to find out, in the future, what the stability is going to be and the best way to architect what we are designing to do.

Everything so far has been really good. It is very scalable.

I am managing two instances of Spectrum Protect.

The technical support has been really good for both Spectrum Protect and IBM Storage. The support team has very responsive. I want to be talking to somebody who can help me and knows more than me, which is the case with IBM technical support. So, their support has been very good.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward because it was really old school. Now, with the whole new design of where we are going, I am involved from ground floor up.

The product is more complex and can be pricey, but you are paying for one copy of the data as opposed to other vendors. For example, if I have five copies of the data, I will be spending a lot more money. Switching to one vendor, it will cost over a million dollars to give us less functionality, which is why we did not do it.

Going to IBM Tech University Conference saved me from making a major purchase of the wrong thing, which was very helpful.

We evaluated Commvault, NetBackup, and Axiom (until they were purchased by a competitor). We also looked at Rubrik. We prefer Spectrum Protect, and even though we have looked at its competitors, we have never switched.

I would recommend going with Spectrum Protect. That is what I would tell them now, and I have, I have former coworkers using other products that ask me about designing a hot site, because their product does not do it.

Main criteria when selecting a vendor: Something that would allow us to be able to have it onsite. For the other vendors who we looked at, you would still have to build up a new server or new environment, and hopefully have a backup of your database. In this case, I can switch from a primary to a secondary, back and forth, instead of spending weeks, maybe months, producing a tape library. Now, I do not have to do that.