IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

Spectrum Protect's best feature is that I can use it practically anywhere, on any platform, and for any servers or clients.

I've been using Spectrum Protect for twenty years.

Spectrum Protect's stability is good. We have experience with big companies that have a huge number of objects, and it works fine with sixty to seventy terabytes per day.

Spectrum Protect is scalable, you just have to be careful when migrating data and so on.

IBM's support hasn't been so good in the last few years.

The initial setup is complex,and requires planning.

Spectrum Protect is not a cheap option.

I advise anybody considering implementing Spectrum Protect to make very good plans before starting, know your backup requirements, and test the restore. You need to plan a backup solution for a good and fast restore. I would give Spectrum Protect a rating of eight out of ten.

We have customers and retailers who have been using IBM Spectrum Protect for many, many years, so all our sales over the last five years have been renewable sales. I'm a reseller and partner, so I provide this solution. This solution is deployed on-premises. 

In the past, one of the most valuable features, and the biggest advantage, was the incremental forever feature. Not many other backup vendors provided that. In the pre-virtualization environment, it was very robust and simple technology, especially writing to tape. 

IBM Spectrum Protect could be improved by making the installation easier. Once it's implemented, it's okay. 

IBM started lagging behind when things started moving to storage and cloud-based solutions. Even though they've recently released updates that give cloud-based protection, personally, I still believe they are not up to par with the likes of Rubrik. 

The entire product is a little bit clumsy because they have co-joined two different products, so it's complex. Even from a sales/explaining to people what it does point of view, it's complex. Whereas, if you take more current products, it's a single box solution. You reel it in, you fire it up, you do a couple of points and clicks, and off you go, whereas the IBM system is seriously complex. There's a lot of training involved and it's a massively difficult product to sell at this point in time. 

I have been working with IBM Spectrum Protect for over 20 years. 

This solution is stable. 

This solution is scalable. 

IBM support has always been reasonably good. They've got a worldwide network and they've been doing it for many, many years, so I can't fault them from a support point of view. Whenever there had been a problem, we had various people working on resolving it. 

IBM Spectrum Protect is very complex to install—it's not a simple installation at all, which is why there's always professional services attached to a Spectrum Protect sale. 

The amount of technical people you will need depends on the size of the environment, but in an environment with about 800 VMs and a couple of Unix machines, you need at least two administrators. 

We implement this solution for customers. 

Customers need to pay for licensing in order to use IBM Spectrum Protect. The customers that have been using it for a long time are okay and happy with it. From a cost point of view, it's better for them to renew their licenses than to go through the difficult process of changing a backup product in their environment, and migrate from one product to another. 

Currently, we have moved away from Spectrum Protect, and towards Rubrik. Rubrik has been my product of choice over the last two years, at least. Even with the recently released updates that give cloud-based protection, I still don't believe IBM Spectrum Protect is up to par with the likes of Rubrik. Of the customers who still use IBM Spectrum Protect, we only have three left—there used to be a lot more. 

I currently rate IBM Spectrum Protect a six out of ten. 

The advice I would give to anyone considering starting to use IBM Spectrum Protect is to use Rubrik instead. I've always been a very big proponent of Spectrum Protect—years back, I used to be a trainer for IBM as well, so I really like the product—but at the moment, I just think there are other solutions that work better. 

It is a very good and mature enterprise product. Once it is set up and everything is put in, you don't have to manage it. It actually runs automatically by itself.

In terms of features, they've got it all covered. The features they have are quite good. The only downside to it is that it is for an enterprise or big organization. In my opinion, it is not for a small business. 

I have been using this solution for more than 15 years.

If you want to get the maximum benefit out of it, you should be a big organization. In my opinion, it is not for a small organization. 

It depends on the experience that you have. Instead of Windows, we've mostly implemented it on a UNIX-based platform, such as AIX, or Linux. So, you need someone who has the skills to manage these platforms. Apart from that, Spectrum Protect itself is a great product.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. 

Our primary use case for IBM Spectrum Protect is backup. 

The IBM Spectrum Protect feature I find the most valuable is how fast it is. 

They should introduce more features for virtualization platforms and backing up IBMs. Backup speeds should also be improved. 

I have been using this solution for about a decade. 

IBM Spectrum Protect is stable. 

IBM Spectrum Protect is scalable. 

Technical support is okay. We have not had many issues with them. 

The initial setup at a new sight is straightforward. It takes about a week. 

IBM Spectrum Protect is expensive. 

We use IBM Spectrum Protect for data backup purposes, i.e. for people, administration, and file-level backups.

We did have a challenge with one of IBM Spectrum Protect's systems. For some funny reason, it was not coming up because of the stability. We were able to restore, but it started us thinking about improved backup services. 

Two weeks ago, we were able to restore services as quickly as possible in a production environment. We were able to kickstart and provide services on that particular server to customers, which saved us a lot of embarrassment.

Otherwise, we would have been down due to power supply issues we had in our production environment. Some of the services were misbehaving. We had to do a majority stop and IBM Spectrum Protect was a big plus for us.

The fact that we can take the backup straight onto tape is the most valuable feature. IBM Spectrum Protect is very valuable for me because you don't necessarily need storage on-prem or on a production system. 

IBM Spectrum Protect has its system for taking a backup. It has a backup option on the outside also that makes it easy for you to do a restore.

Technically, I've not used the latest version. What can be improved is the graphical interface and user-friendliness of the products. Secondly, they can make it also more available for other sub-regions so that we can pick up some courses on it. We need to improve our knowledge base on their products.

IBM Spectrum Protect needs improvement, but I'm sure they looked at some of these issues in the latest version. There are continuous improvements in the application.

IBM Spectrum Protect has been stable. On power issues, they blamed some supplier parts of the company. We had problems almost two or three times a week. It cost some of the companies to malfunction, so we labored for two or three days in repair work. 

For backups, it took us about almost a week or two weeks to fix that.

In terms of the scalability, with the latest version of IBM Spectrum Protect, now they have all these cloud features available. It makes it easier for you to plug into.

We have about 10 main users. We have three or four unrestricted users. For deployment and maintenance, about four or five guys on the ground. 

The product is very extensive. We've implemented it about three or four years ago. At the moment, the number of sellers in production increases every day, day in and day out.

We keep on spinning up new services and all we do is onboard the new servers. We've not had any complaints because of capacity. It has been able to serve our clients' purposes.

I'll give IBM Spectrum Protect customer support a seven out of 10 because I'm still not able to take the VMware environment backup. 

Commvault is very user-friendly. From one point you can do all of your restores. You can even restore a backup that was taken by a CMS. We were using Commvault previously.

The initial setup of our IBM Spectrum Protect install was not straightforward. We needed some experts to come down and do it. They could have given us the instructions so that we could have done it here ourselves.

We had some folks from outside for the implementation, which was done in three weeks. That includes implementing the backup test. 

IBM was the vendor. They did well. It's working fine.

My company is a bank. As part of meeting the auditing requirements for banks, we use IBM Spectrum Protect. It can encrypt the backups as well, which helps us to meet our legal requirements for banking. We are seeing a return on investment.

I was with a different organization. We were using Symantec products.

I hope that all users go in for the latest version of IBM Spectrum Protect, which is cloud-based. They should equally ensure that everything comes together well. This should help in case they have all of these challenges like ours, i.e. where power is a major issue.

I rate IBM Spectrum Protect with a seven out of 10 because of our inability to pick a backup of a trusted VMware environment. When the VMware environment is collected, we cannot take a backup. We cannot take VMware backups for that environment.

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.

Our primary use case is to have tape back ups of our open system environments.

It has performed decently. There are certain gaps with the technology where we have issues, such as with our PO and our TO. 

Our infrastructure is on-premise. It is comprised of a tape library (TS3500), tape cartridges, tape drives, and then Spectrum Protect. 

We have three Spectrum Protect servers.

The scheduled backups ensure we meet the requirements for our business, and we keep backups of certain environments.

We have scheduled backups whenever we want.

I am not the one that manages stability on a day-to-day basis on my team, but from what I have seen, it is pretty stable overall. We do encounter issues every once and awhile, just with any product. 

Scalability is poor. As you get to bigger environments, this is where our gaps have been introduced. As we have grown over the past couple of years, the gaps have become more apparent. For example, RTO is a huge gap for us. If we had a disaster scenario and had to recover a bunch of stuff from tape, the RTO would be too long for us.

The more we grow, our gaps will become more apparent. For future needs, as we grow, Spectrum Protect will become a less viable solution for us.

Technical support through IBM whenever we have issues is always pretty good.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

For similar sized companies, I would probably recommend they look at different solutions. For a smaller company, it is probably a viable solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Check to see if it meets certain business requirements.

We are actually implementing our own private cloud and using Spectrum Protect to back up and replicate the backups to a secondary site.

With Spectrum Protect, you can use any type of disk to back-end the repositories. It gave us the flexibility to use whatever storage we wanted at our secondary site. On our first site, we have really high performing variable disks, and at our secondary site, we have a lower performing tier. On the cloud, we have an even slower tier.

Most valuable features are:

• Good tape integration
• The node replication to a secondary site.
• The ability to use S3 Data Store as a repository.

I would like to see integration with Copy Data Management, which is an IBM product. That would be really nice. Right now, these two products are siloed, so if these two become integrated, the product would become a bit of a powerhouse.

With stability, we have had some challenges. There have been some issues around some of the functionality around reclamation. In the reclamation jobs, there has been fighting over the backup jobs. With Spectrum Protect, you have a reclamation job that takes space back from tapes which are no longer needed, and we' are having a challenge with that right now. 

We are having a balance issue between the reclamation and the backup function. It has to take the space back from the tapes before it can record to those tapes, but sometimes those two processes are overlapping.

This is in the process of being resolved. We are currently working with IBM support and the IBM engineering teams to resolve the issues.

We have not really had a chance to properly scale it, but I imagine it should be fairly straightforward in terms of growing it out, e.g., we spec'd out a server that was really powerful.

In terms of scalability, the next thing should be adding additional storage.

We currently have one Spectrum Protect instance, but in the future, there will be at least three or more.

The support is really good. They are very responsive. There is a PMR set up, and we are working directly with the engineering team, who are actually coding the product.

The initial setup was not complex. It was really straightforward. It has been a lot easier as of late to do these implementations.

We chose IBM Spectrum Protect, because they actually have something called MSP pricing, which means managed services provider pricing. The pricing was attractive, and it seems to be a platform that IBM is totally investing on in terms of new functions and new capabilities. 

We seriously looked at Commvault. We also looked at Veeam and another third-party.

The way it works is customers can host their applications on our cloud, and we basically charge them to backup those products. We wanted something that could do that and we have the skill sets in-house. That is how it came about that we purchased Spectrum Protect. It is pretty much a function of wanting to backup primary workloads running on our cloud.

Most important criteria when selecting a backup:

• Resiliency
• Integration with tape
• Integration with cloud.