IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

My primary use case would be that I use Spectrum Protect for Exchange at the moment. It is working really well. These is a little bit of a learning curve with it, but I am finding it to be good, as Exchange now is migrated into SIP versions. IBM needs to catch up somewhat, but from what I have seen, it is acting the exact way that I would want it to act.

We have an on-premise infrastructure comprised of flash storage, disk, and tape, working well together. We are not looking to move to a cloud strategy in the immediate future.

It is reliable. The backup solution is our fail safe. When we are required to recover data, it is there.

Reliability: It has never had a problem with backups or restores. If you store something, it is there.

The only thing that I would like to have a little more of is insight in reporting. I find that Spectrum Protect needs a lot of monitoring, and I have to actually log into the servers. I would rather be more proactive and send the information when things do not work the way we want.

I am hoping that the Spectrum Protect Plus supports Exchange. That is my primary wish, since Spectrum Protect Plus should be a single pane of glass where I will be able to monitor all my instances from.

I would like to see more technical training online. Sometimes, it is a little bit difficult to find, or that I do not really know what I am looking for as somebody who is starting off finding their learning curve. The first part of it was very long, but once I found the terms and where to look, it became a lot easier. Then. I found another gap when troubleshooting information that I needed to have. I needed to contact support to actually find that information.

So far, from my limited experience, it is working flawlessly. 

It seems very scalable and robust. It can do what we require it to do.

I currently have eight instances of Spectrum Protect installed on the servers that I manage.

Technical support is above standard in regards to the Exchange part. In our organization, we have backup administrators taking care of the exchange, and my primary function is to monitor and setup the schedules and backup. 

When it comes down to when it actually moved to the TSM part (now Spectrum Protect), we were having problems with the backup. It seemed to go well when we contacted technical support and they seemed to be fluent. They had a good response time and solved the issue.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I would recommend Spectrum Protect. It does what we require. It is robust. The support is good. 

Our customers have a more traditional infrastructure, less related to snapshot technology. We have a couple customers trending towards cloud, but they are not there yet.

Most of the customers that I work with today tend to use more disk-based solutions. Therefore, we apply the new dedupe and compression technology, using maintenance and time to give more time for the backup window and less time for the overhead related to the daily housekeeping.

• Performance
• Scalability
• Backing up virtual environments
  

Most customers still struggle with the reporting piece, especially trending and generating reports. I think it needs some improvements in this area.

It is famous for its complexity, which is a big challenge for the customers to accept. Customers are still scared about some of the history related to Command One. These are some of the challenges that customer usually complain about.

Stability depends on how well it was implemented. In most cases, we depend on the movement reference models, so we rely on the recommendations coming from the IBM development team. That is our way to success.

This depends on size and how big the environment is. If this size good, there are no issues to scale out.

I have positive opinion about support, but my customers are not always happy with the Level 1 support. Sometimes, it just takes too long for the response to come, which is probably something that needs to be addressed.

With the initial setup, if you follow the blueprint rules, there are no issues.

Our customers also look at Commvault and Veeam.

I would recommend using Spectrum Protect.

Main criteria when selecting a vendor: loyalty.

We completely back up our environment with Spectrum Protect: all databases in our environment, the files in the environment, and all the services. Performance is quite good. We do not worry about it.

We have an on-premise infrastructure. We have many hypervisors in use. We are using ESX, Hyper-V, KVM, and Power hardware. We using the SVC in combination with SSD storage. In addition, we use real and virtual tape libraries. It works well together. 

We will be closing the gap on moving to a cloud environment within the year.

The main thing is to keep the data safe and in files, keep it on tape ready for a request from a bank, and it is working perfectly with all our hardware. 

It is keeping the banking license alive, thus it is perfect for the business.

The wide variety that we have for using the software with each database and your own adapter. You can configure it, and it is quite good. Other backup software, you can be stuck to one environment and have to keep that environment.

Sometimes they have already erased information in our operational center and we need some of it for reporting to our subsidiaries if the backup was successful within the last months and which amount of data was backed up, archived, and stored. This is what the customer has interest in and we have to deliver. If the operational center could assist us, that would be fine. 

Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus, if they move together, that would be good. I heard already that we can get rid of data removal from virtual environments in the next version. The idea that Spectrum Protect Plus was dealing with appliances on ESX or Hyper-V seems good to me.

The service pack is very stable. We have had some problems about using storage agents on the X6 environment. It is not quite stable, but it is also not supported in a virtualized environment.

It is working great. Our database moves on 2.5TB and is still performing well. There are no worries about it.

We have roughly 30 instances for different purposes and different subsidiaries. We are using some Spectrum Protect servers only for library manager purposes to cover all these multiple parts, which have for storage agents and this is sometimes gets to its limit. It is not a well-known limit, but if you have more than 28,000 passes on one server, the performance decreases. That is what we found out and we try to keep it under this limit.

We are using the Technical Support, and sometimes it's a little bit annoying to come to the Level 3 support. Sometimes, it seems to me that if the Level 1 could not assist you and they did not find anyone in the Level 3, then you are stuck.

The initial setup is straightforward. The documentation is fine. There are some issues though. If you create a server, not all testings regarding fire systems are done in advance. Therefore, sometimes we have to go three rounds to fill all the gaps. This could be done a little bit better. 

I do not know who else was evaluated.

I would recommend Spectrum Protect.

Spectrum Protect Plus is covering the topic of industrial environments, e.g., X6 and Hyper-V, and this has been an open issue for years with us.

Spectrum Protect is performing well, and the primary use case is just for backups to provide recovery. It is not the first point of recovery for the customer. However, it definitely prevents our customers from going out of business, because they need to have a backup.

On the backup side, we use ProtecTIER Virtual Tape recoveries. On the customer side, the front-end side of it, they recently moved to all-flash storage, not IBM storage. They have got a mix of old servers, which are physical. There are a mix of Sun, AIX, VMware, and Hyper-V, so there is pretty much everything across the board at the customers.

Generally, the happiest users are Oracle users. What they like about the platform is that they have received organic benefits in performance from the backup system and also as their platforms have upgraded over the time. Therefore, every time customers make a change or we have made a change, then they use the product to do a cloning and refreshing. They are happy that they get good performance something changes.

The ability to migrate between media over a long period of time. My customers are long-time users, and they have benefited from being able to move between tiers, e.g., L Tier 5 from L Tier 6 and/or L Tier 7. They have been able to do this within the product.

More support for non-mainstream databases, in particular PostgreSQL, SQL, and MySQL. I would also like support for snapshots of non-IBM hardware. I have read some future statements, and it seems that this is coming, though.

Sometimes, there is a perception that it is a legacy product, and some customers are less keen to take on the more innovative features. Therefore, we have some customers who are running on the current version of Spectrum Protect and use all of the current features, and some customers who consider it a legacy product. However, they are a bit stuck in the way that they use the product, only using the old style features.

I have worked with it for 15 years. I have found it to be very scalable. Where I work now as a business partner, our customers use it. I have some small customers and some large customers, and it works well. Where I used to work before, we ran backup as a service, and we had about 21 instances of Spectrum Protect running. It was just reliable. That is my experience.

The customers who are doing workloads in the cloud are choosing to have cloud-based backup strategies. It is an area in the product where our competitors may have better offerings right now, but the people who are moving to the cloud, if they are doing it well, are choosing not to have their data in the cloud be static. They are using the cloud to spin up a workload and spin it down. Thus, the workloads are being provisioned as opposed to needing to have static data in them. Therefore, the real value is the code which generates the machine running in the cloud, and we backup that.

I have used technical support a lot over a long time. There are two sides to it. I find quite often with the Level 1 and Level 2 support that I struggle with time zones. Sometimes depending on where the support is coming from, there can be barriers in understanding the problem. 

Usually when I get up to Level 2 or Level 3 support the technical capabilities are really good, and I also find that if I need a point solution to a point problem, they will find code and build code for my problem. This has been very good. They won't just say, "We are looking at fixing that, you may need to wait a year." They will come out and help you fix a problem. However, the first day of interaction at Level 1 is not really very good.

I have been involved in the initial setup a few times. I have also migrated from one hardware platform to a different one, Solaris to AIX along with TSM (before it was Spectrum Protect). I have found it more complex then some of its competitor products, but because I have worked on the product for a while, I find it fairly simple. Now, I understand how to install it well, but it would still be complex for a novice. 

I am quite keen on getting more experience with Spectrum Protect Plus, because it seems like it is a lot easier, and that is where we will go in the future.

I have used a couple of different backup products. As a business partner, our customers do choose other backup products. Generally, I find I have less trouble with Spectrum Protect than I have had with the other backup products.

Mainly, the competition is Commvault, if they are looking at the functionality that Spectrum Protect is offering. There are some customers who go with Veeam. The reason that they go with Veem is because they have a desire to go there. When they already want to go that way, it is difficult to position Spectrum Protect as an alternative. I am really keen to see how Spectrum Protect Plus might compete with Veem in the marketplace.

As a business partner, the customer is choosing the product, and we are recommending Spectrum Protect. Certainly our bigger customers have a lot of legacy data, so they already had Spectrum Protect. Therefore, it is a fairly simple decision to maintain it. However, some of our customers go through reviews and look at options. 

We have, in our long history, lost some customers to competitors, but the reasons why did not have to do with the product. I do not think we have lost anyone because the product was not delivering.

We use it for our backup and recovery services.

Our environment is on-premise. We also do tape. However, we do not have any cloud infrastructure at this point. We have a cloud strategy in the works.

We have six Spectrum Protect instances: Three of them are disaster recovery (DR) and three of them are in production. We have grown out the three in production and are looking to add two more in the future. Spectrum Protect should have no issues accommodating this growth.

With the new features that we have added, it has made a difference as far as faster recovery and speed.

• The server application - the features in it.
• The replication part of it.
• The dedupe piece of it, which is a huge help, especially in our environment.
  

I would like a little more ease with the virtual platforms, because it is a huge thing that is coming up. We have a huge virtual environment, but it seems like it is convoluted as far as the process of planning it, then integrating Spectrum Protect. There are a lot of moving pieces, so I am looking forward to Spectrum Protect Plus. There seems to be less moving parts to it, so hopefully it will be quicker.

It is a very solid product.

The scalability is solid, provided we setup the infrastructure as needed.

If I have an issue, I will call support. I am not really impressed with the Level 1 support, but once I get past that and go to Level 2, then we will usually get some type of resolution. 

We do have really good support through our IBM rep, who will jump on it as soon as something is out there.

I was not part of the initial setup.

I have seen a lot of other backup products out there, and they are good. However, Spectrum Protect seems to encompass a broad range of things, and you can pretty much put it anywhere. You can tie it into your backup network or backup needs.

We use it in the retail banking environment because of regulations. For our databases, we have to back up the catalogs every 20 minutes.

We have a very complex environment, meaning from VM to PC arrays, with all the types of databases which are available on the market. In terms of volume, we have stored around five petabytes of data. We use tape on both cloud and on-premise environments, though we are going to discontinue tape because of its limitations.

We just started to backup cloud environments, so we are looking for solutions in order to backup the VM at the ESX level. On the other hand, because of our constraints, we have to have an agent in our VM for our database backup in order to meet regulation requirements.

Historically, we have a very good team of administrators who know the product perfectly and are able to manage it on a day-to-day basis.

I need to have more than two instances working together. I need a worldwide grid able to have replication between three, four, or five instances.

The problem with Spectrum Protect is you can do anything with it, so you can also do bad things. While it is a very good solution, you have to provide a good quality of care to your administrators. One other challenge of the bank is examination, meaning that most of our administrators now are not located in France, but in India or Bangalore. This causes a lot training time, but it is not useless time.

It is perhaps one of the best products on the market. It does a good job.

I have never had any scalability problems with it.

In retail and management, I manage around 30 Spectrum Protect instances at this time. The company is planning to grow and I expect the product to handle it.

Because we have experts inside our company, we have only contacted technical support a few times. We requested high-level support, because each time we have a problem, it is a real problem, like sometimes a feature problem of a product.

We are not so happy with the technical support because dealing with them is not easy. We have a very complicated environment, therefore I understand for a support person that it is not easy to troubleshoot it. Generally, our problems are with the product's designs and we cannot Google the answers/solutions.

I was not involved in the initial setup since it happened before I joined the company.

The D2D2T archive of my PACS data improved after I put Spectrum Protect 8.1.4 into production.

Disk-based implementation of a data protection solution for multiple sites, which is a better fit for my complex data protection needs.

They need to reduce the complexity and make the learning curve easier.

So far, version 8.1.4 is stable.

The scalability is better than my legacy TSM 7.2.

I would rate tech support at seven out of 10.

I don't see moving from TSM to Spectrum Protect as a solution swap, I see it as just re-branding.

The initial setup is better than TSM, buts still has room to improve.

If you do not have deep pockets, don't come to IBM.

EMC Avamar and Cohesity were also in the PoC.

Be careful what you wish for, and make sure the new solution will fit into your current IT environment.

It is a single point of control and administration for backup and recovery. My team and I are more comfortable with this solution. With this product, we are able to save a lot in costs and on expensive storage. It has reduced backup infrastructure costs for us.

The data archiving functionality. It is easier and less time-consuming.

It lacks reporting and an efficient alert mechanism. The GUI could also be improved.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

No issues with scalability.

Technical support is a 10 out of 10.

TSM. I liked its command-line interface. But now Spectrum is even easier for my team.

Setup was pretty good with the Blueprint design. We are trying to get more generic with these services.

We worked our licensing into a capacity model, which is nice. Now, everything is much simpler to manage from a licensing perspective.

We can move straight to a disk-based solution with the container pools, which is working well. And we are looking into cloud.

It is a well-rounded solution. It provides everything any enterprise would need.