IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

It is for enterprise backup and recovery. I support customers who use this product for their enterprise backup and recovery.

I have small customers with about 40 cartridge libraries, then I have others who have petabytes of data and using everything under the sun. This is another good feature of Spectrum Protect; it does it all.

I support a customer base of about 25 customers. So, I support probably 50 instances.

It provides our customers with the comfort of having reliable enterprise data protection. 

Some of the new advanced features are definitely more into cost savings, e.g., dedupe compression, so doing more with less.

Scalability: Our customers are able to grow the product without having to buy additional hardware, so it is very scalable.

For Spectrum Protect Plus, I would like to see more enhanced reporting features and integration with Spectrum Protect. 

In terms of Spectrum Protect, usually the IBM features are ahead of where the customers' demand is, so I generally do not even install the latest version for at least a year. Therefore, I think they are doing good with this product.

It really depends on the hardware that you are running it on. If you run it with the right resources, it can be up for years on end.

It scales from very small to very large. It is easily the most scalable product out there.

I use technical support quite often, calling in PMRs for customers. Support is really good, as I have never had to close a PMR with them having fixed the problem. Also, they are very responsive.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward and easy to implement.

Customers will look at other vendors in the enterprise backup space: Commvault, NetBackup, Veeam, and other similar solutions.

Most of my customers have already been Spectrum Protect customers. Therefore they are happy with the product. The new implementations that I have done, they have generally chosen Spectrum Protect for its scalability and reliability.

I would absolutely recommend Spectrum Protect.

It has a tried and true tested ability. It has been around for approximately 30 years. The roadmap is definitely aligned with where businesses are going, e.g., cloud support, virtual backup support, etc. In the eight years that I have been a business partner, I have lost one customer that switched off of the platform. This was not because they were unhappy with the product, but from an acquisition,

Primary use case is backing up data in order to restore our customers, if needed. The performance right now is okay.

Our on-premise infrastructure is comprised of two tape libraries (3500), each staffed with about 55 TS1150 drives, and approximately 5000 cartridges. The snapshots are taken on NAS filers, as they are EMC VNXs, and Spectrum Scale. It is there that we take the snapshots. For buffering, we have some V7000s in place, but all in HPE Blade enclosures. We previously had virtual tape, but not anymore.

We do not lose data. That is why we are using this product and have a backup in place.

• We can scale. Today, we have an average backup volume of 100TB a day. 
• It is reliable; it works. 
• We have a good cooperation with IBM. 

The features should be a little bit closer together. 

If you take Spectrum Protect into account, and you have it along with restrictions to Spectrum Archive by means of LTFS, this is also something which should be made better within the overall product's program.

The stability is very nice. The only thing that IBM should improve with the program is the licensing. We have a little engine in place. However, if you use Power PC and you have big engine in place. then you have some restrictions to the versions. This should be remedied. 

This would be a real improvement: The product to gather storage on the one hand, and storage for backup on the other hand.

It scales until the next frame must be purchased.

The growth plans are given by the user. In science, you never know what the next step is. We are struggling against newer experimental setups. This is great for the scientists, but if you double the resolution size for microscopy, it ends up with a lot of more data on our side. However, we serve our scientists, so we just purchase new.

The support levels at IBM are very good.

The initial setup and infrastructure were done within days. It was an okay process. There was nothing negative about it.

The license model that they have at IBM, which is due to volume, from a certain volume onward is not the right license model. Right now, we have a better license model. This is the model that we had at the end of last year.

There was a call for tender for an overall storage renewal, and IBM easily won out versus its competition. 

If you are looking for a reliable solution, it is okay. If you are looking for just backing up some smaller clients in a small business unit, so there are probably other competitors around. 

We sell and implement it for customers. It performs very well, though every product has room for improvement.

Our customer's on-premise infrastructure is comprised of flash storage, spinning disks, tape, virtual tape, virtual servers, and snapshots. For storage, we see SAN, iSCSI, NAS, flash, slower disk, SATA, and Near Line (NL) SAS. Some customers use virtual libraries.

• It helps our customers protect their data, especially with stuff like ransomware, compliance, and regulatory requirements. 
• It helps them protect their data, keep it long-term, and feel pretty secure about it, basically sleeping well at night.

It is a proven product. It has a lot of features and capabilities. That is its pro and its con. It makes it a very capable product, but somewhat difficult to use.

Our customers would like to see metadata replication, tearing to tape, and more cloud capabilities.

Stability is great.

Scalability is excellent. It is a solution which needs to be designed. For example, when you design something, you usually have a more scalable solution, because you are building it into the initial plan. Therefore, it is very scalable, but the downside is that it costs money.

The product can scale. I have seen 20 to 40 percent growth per year for my customers for the next three to five years.

My customers do use the technical support, and it's getting less effective, because it is not coming from North America anymore as it used to. Now, it comes from Egypt. The English is not as good, and the support is definitely getting worse.

We live and breathe the initial setup, so the process is good.

Vendors who tend to appear on customers shortlists are Veeam, NetBackup, and Commvault.

I would definitely recommend this product, unless it is pure VMware virtualization backup.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Reputation
• Reliability
• Cost.

However, cost is probably the biggest factor for most customers.

We use it to back up all of our midrange enterprise systems. It performs exactly the way we need it. We don't need anything more, don't need anything less. It has always done the job.

Our infrastructure is on-premise. We have a bunch of Microsoft servers and VMs, but mostly what Spectrum Protect covers is our Power systems. We have roughly 30 servers that we protect at this point. We do backup a few Linux servers as well, because our group actually covers that area.

It provides upper management peace of mind that we can recover, if needed. We have never had a problem (knock on wood) of recovering anything via Spectrum Protect. Whatever we backup has always been there. It is a good product.

I like the new GUI. It makes things really nice. The previous GUI that they had was slow, and it did not have enough information on it. Therefore, they have truly improved in what they are offering. It is moving into the main stream, like all the other backup solutions are. 

I also like what I am seeing with some of the new features which are coming out.

Stability is very good.

We have approximately 30 servers right now. It will always be our solution for our midrange Power boxes. As we grow with Power servers, we are going to stay with Spectrum Protect as it is growing with us. We are going to upgrade a bit more aggressively than we previously have, because we are excited about the newer stuff coming out.

For technical support, you just call the 1-800 number, tell them your customer number, and voila, they are there. They have been pretty responsive.

While I was not involved in the initial setup, new releases and implementation have gone smoothly. I have never had problems.

We had another product brought in to take care of the other side of the Microsoft servers and VMs. They thought about dragging us into that as well and getting rid of Spectrum Protect. I said, "We don't need something that complicated. Spectrum Protect is a perfect fit for what we need."

NetBackup was previously running, but they have moved to Commvault, and I said, "There is no way that I am going to CommVault. It is too expensive and complicated. Spectrum Protect is not expensive, and it is simple to use." 

Even some of the people in our group, like our DBAs and non-technical people, can restore some stuff themselves via Spectrum Protect. They don't always need me. That is how simple it is. That is what I like about it.

I would recommend Spectrum Protect, especially for use with Power servers.

We have been using it for quite some time and see the product is developing into something that we have been asking for. Some of the functions the product used to lack have been included and are now useful.

We use the on-premise version. Our infrastructure consists of an operating system and a mainframe. The Spectrum product is more for the operating system, data productions, and our data center.

The product helps us do data protection and restoration for disaster recovery (DR).

Product features were previously not great, but they eventually evolved. There have been a lot of good improvement, so now the features are quite impressive.

We would like to see cloud integration.

The solution is evolving, so it has to be evolved to fit all new types of software requirements too.

Stability is very good.

It use to scale to IBM systems only. Now, it scales to non-IBM systems or other industry servers, like Intel. So now, scalability is quite good.

We used silo our Spectrum Protect servers, but now we are consolidating them into fewer servers because they can handle more loads.

Technical support is okay. We have IBM direct support, which has a team of resources for us to utilize.

In the beginning, it was not an easy setup. Now, the product has developed to be quite flexible and easy in its setup with some lesser ticks.

We evaluated other data protection products like Veritas.

We chose IBM because we had IBM in-house. This was the main reason, and also because Spectrum Protect would integrate with the IBM products better.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Cost
• Scalability
• Product features.

It is an on-premise infrastructure, not cloud, which is comprised of IBM and Oracle. In the next couple of years, we will probably look to the cloud.

Right now, we are working on send volume, IBM Controller SVC, and we also have products, like IBM Storwize V7000 and FS900 Storage.

The capacity of the storage is huge. It can be affected with all of our requirements. We also have two copies for each volumes. This makes life easier and safer for us, in cases of disasters happening and for any volume or data corruption as well.

It has increased our security, scalability, and high availability.

High availability (HA): It is one of the best features that we have.

• It needs some software upgrades to fix some of its current bugs. 
• In SVC, we need a masking view that combines with a storage group. This is collected all in terms of hosts, storage, and volume, both on the storage side and the host side. We need to combine them in one storage group in the SVC.

From a storage perspective, it is very nice. From SVC, we do have some issues with rebooting, nodes, etc. However, we are working on them. As a software-defined storage, we should face some issues like this. From storage level, it is very nice and powerful.

We have not scaled it yet, because we already have enough storage capacity. Since the scalability will be online, I know it will be fine. There should not be any downtime. 

For time being, we have enough with the storage of IBM and SVC. At least for next three years, we have enough storage with what we have already.

IBM does not have a Kuwait entity open for calls and support, but we usually work with Dubai support. They are very nice and on the spot. If there are critical issues, they will come on spot. 

I was working with a IBM different product, DS4700. However, right now, we are in different stage of technology, which is SVC and Storwize V7000.

The initial setup is very impressive. I am a system admin, but I do love learning a lot. It is a straightforward setup, and the IBM engineers are very helpful and provide me with new information each time that they do an implementation.

During the implementation phases, technical people come over from Turkey and Dubai to Kuwait and help on the implementation. This is nice. 

It has not reached any SLA. Things are good.

We manage IBM, SVC, IBM Spectrum Control, and IBM Spectrum Storage.

I would recommend the product, because the storage is very nice, especially the FS900. It has very nice features.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They are clever. They have committed in their words, implementation, their price, and the capacity (which they already offered).

We do have primary storage, which is a mix between IBM, EMC and Infinidat. We also use VMware and IBM Power servers. That is our infrastructure setup. We do not have a cloud strategy.

We have five instances of the Spectrum Protect.

We use it for our backups. That is our main use for it. So far, it has been quick to restore, and we have never had any issues. Every time we go and try to get a file, we can get it. Restores are quick and the data is always there.

• It is very robust. 
• It has been in the market for many years. 
• We can use it with any storage for the back-end to save data. 
• It supports tape, which is something that we like as a hospital.

We would like to see capabilities of long-term archiving and more support for hardware platforms.

It is very stable. We have had it for over 15 years and never really had an issue.

We are now looking at the new product. Before, it did not have a lot of options for Exchange, SharePoint, etc. With the new Spectrum Protect Plus, it seems like there will be more options and they are catching up with the market, and that is a good thing.

The technical support seems good. Sometimes you get people who are not knowledgeable, but overall, it is good. You get the issues resolved.

We were not previously using a different solution. We were looking for a solution which was robust, and the company behind it was a good, big company. We had other IBM solutions at the time, so we wanted to make sure that we stuck with the same organization. I had used a Spectrum Protect, which used to be called TSM, in other places before, and it was stable and robust. That is how we decided to go with it.

The initial setup was not difficult at all; it was very straightforward. Even though Spectrum Protect is not the easiest to use, it was not a big deal to set it up.

We will probably use it in the future since we have already invested in it, even though we are looking at other options. Financially, it makes sense to go with Spectrum Protect rather than changing to another platform.

A long time ago, we also evaluated Legato NetWorker (now EMC NetWorker).

Right now, we are going to have to look at investing in a new solution because of the change that IBM is making to a Spectrum Protect Plus. Otherwise, we probably would not have looked at changing it from the legacy one.

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.