IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

We use Spectrum Protect as our core product for backup and recovery of all our servers, and has started to use this for our office workstations too.

IBM is a partner-friendly company which has open API that one can use. In our case, we have built solutions which have helped many customers who use API to protect databases and applications with Spectrum Protect that IBM doesn't protect today. For example, MongoDB , MariaDB , MySQL , PostgreSQL, Firebird, Progress OpenEdge , SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise , and SAP IQ Server. See www.ligtas.org.

Space efficient data reduction, using progressive incremental forever in combination with deduplication and compression. IBM philosophy is to not backup data that has not been changed

I would like to see a way to have "always on" implemented. In this way, if an error happened on the primary backup server, there would be a way to continue to protect the data without any disturbance. This is partly implemented today, but only in the purpose of restore.

There are normal and known limitations with stability.

It can scale from very low to very big using one instance. One can use StorageNodes (a media server) to further extend its capacity by avoiding sending data traffic to the backup server.

I have experience of many different solutions, and some of them do not exist anymore.

REELbackup was the best at it time, but was based on periodically full backups. The database was local on each server which has fantastic scalability. This product doesn't exist anymore, and would not be the best today because of periodically full backups, etc.

Networker is great with its many integrations to databases. But requires at the time when I used it periodically full backups. Newer version of the product has a way to overcome this, but requires more resources in the back-end. The database wiz in the system didn't respond sometimes which causes the backup to fail frequently. Networker seams also to not be a product that EMC and DELL see as strategic for the future.

Netbackup is great with its way to balance the data streams to get a good throughput, but requires periodically full backups at least when I used it. It has integrations to many databases.

IBM Spectrum Protect is the best of them. This solution is the best way to store backups with its space efficient data reduction technologies. In the past when tape was the main media for backup; it was very difficult to improve restore performance as the data was spread on many tapes, and collocation improves only a bit; but far from its competitors.

Today when most customers use disk or VTL this is no longer an issue. It is better than the competitors today, as only one restore is needed compared to if you have periodically full backups where you have to restore firstly it's full and all its incremental backups.

With help from partners ('LIGTAS') to IBM you can also have block level incremental forever for databases. Another great function is incremental restore which restores only the data that has been changed to the point in time selected. This also exists for databases with help from partners to IBM ('LIGTAS')

In the past, it was complex to set up the solution. But today, it is easier with its graphical interface.

We can now be sure that we have a valid insurance, and has used this several time to restore individual objects which help our implementation of new products etc..

Use capacity licensing. It's easier and cheaper.

• Commvault
• NetBackup
• Networker

Be sure you follow the blueprint guidelines.

• Backup
• Archive
• Restore

We currently backup about 400 clients using traditional incrementals forever as well as another 350 using VE incremental forever.

IBM Spectrum Protect is a robust tool which allows us to backup pretty much any environment, virtual or physical, and create offsite copies of all our data for security and recovery purposes.

• Incrementals forever
• SnapDiff functionality
• VE

The ability to do dedupe in the product is nice to have. We currently have a VTL appliance with dedupe functionality. We will be exploring the SP features in this area shortly.

Easier configuration of some of the products, e.g., VE comes to mind. 

Perhaps some better documentation, which I believe was better in the past.

Scalability, it lets your company grow without losing confidence.

Significantly reduced recovery time.

All departments.

19 years.

No.

No.

Very good.

Yes, policy of growth and utilization of the structure.

The planning and its structure all went smoothly.

Use licensing "FRONT END".

No.

Have the right advice through and get a specialized partner.

The deduplication and compression are the most valuable features.

We can get lots of storage space. Storage is a big problem. Deduplication gives me a lot more flexibility so I can do more backup in the same storage space.

I would like to see:

• More flexibility
• More features
• More scalability. I would like it to work with different storage solutions.
• There's a limitation with the cloud container. That is a limitation in terms of what it can do with the cloud.
• I would like them to increase functionality in cloud containers.
• Easier to learn: It's too complex. It takes long time to learn.

I would like more feature on Inline dedupelication.

1. Move data from one container pool to another container pool
2. Move cloud storage container to another cloud storage container
3. Currently, Inline deduplication you can copy to tape but cannot restore any data. I know it is in road map to restore from tape
4. If the Inline deduplication has a issue, You need to restore whole container pool before repair command is issue.
5. If your container pool is very large means few 30 to 40 TB. It can days to restore container pool. If you like to restore to another location, You need lots of space. That can be issue.

Stability is 50/50. They come out with fixes, but then they break some other stuff. I am constantly fighting with them to fix some new stuff. As they put out the new patches, they break something else. It's very complicated product, so they can't cover every possible scenario.

The scalability is extremely good.

I use technical support all the time. I would evaluate them depending upon who is helping me and what kind of problem is being dealt with. Sometimes it's frustrating, because I want to go to Level-2 support. Sometimes they take too long to go to Level-2. It then took them too long before they called me back. They have to improve the process to call back right away.

We knew it was time for a new solution because we were using Backup Exec before and it was not meant to be an enterprise backup solution. We were looking for some kind of enterprise backup system, and we had too many backup solutions.

We had one for ERX, one for Linux, and one for NetWare. We used NetWare and Windows, so we had to consolidate all the backup solutions into one backup solution.

We found that TSM was the best, as we can back up any OS.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward.

NetBackup was on my shortlist. Back then, they were not running on Windows and they ran on Unix. I was not a Unix guy for too long, and I wanted to feel comfortable with the OS. I came from a mainframe background. It's more flexible, and it can back up a cross-platform backup to any platform. That's a good feature, and they have it. You don't need a different backup solution and a different OS for each platform.

It depends upon the company and what they're looking for. It's an expensive product, but it works really well. You can install it on any platform. It's not a perfect product. There's always bug and there's always something going on.

When selecting a vendor, we look for support, how long they have been in business, and how often they do product upgrades.

Well, apart from restoring data which has been inadvertently deleted or corrupted, we also use Spectrum Protect in conjunction with Spectrum Scale.

As the tape storage pool for HSM (inactive) data, this leaves a stub file in Spectrum Scale's GPFS file system and moves the file data to the LTO6 tape based storage pools -- so it vastly reduces the cost of the overall services, whilst maintaining Nearline access to the files.

a. Incremental forever
b. We have approximately 4.5PB’s of front end data and a 12 hour backup window.

However, by backing up only the changed data, we average around 75TB per night. If we had to do full backups, even occasionally, we would not be able to complete the backup within 12 hours, or we would have to make a large investment to fit a full backup within the 12 hour window.

• Reporting
• Ease of use

No, we have found it to be an extremely reliable system.

No, scalability is one of its key capabilities.

Local in country L2 is average. Offshore L3 is okay, but not as good as they used to be.

Yes, it wasn't scalable enough, and client support was not as extensive.

You do need to know what you are doing to setup the platform, so invest in doing the design work upfront before deploying.

At scale, the consumption license (per TB) is very expensive, so generally, licensing the hosts running the software (both Target and Source), this does mean you will need to work out the PVU for each client, but you can use the License Metric Tool to make this easier.

That was really too long ago to be of any use. However, I would suggest that at scale today, only Commvault and now Veeam, would be the products to compare it against.

Make sure your people have the right skills. You have a design, setup your automation policies so it doesn’t need manual intervention, and have your admins investigating and resolving the exception.

It builds confidence to recover from a variety of disasters. It really keeps our data safe and lets us manage what is important to us and our customers.

Flexibility and Scalability. Sturdy software for potentially large environments. Because of the flexible parameters, everything can be fine-tuned to the customers’ needs in their environment.

If customers have problems or requests and they file a PMR/ESF (Problem Management Record/Electronic Service Request) to IBM, they can present a weblist of when this problem/feature will be solved/released depending on the amount of other customers having the same request. (People can vote on how useful/problematic new features/items listed by other customers are and thus create a higher priority.)

A recent failure with the Spectrum Protect v8.1 client on windows 2016:
2017-05-25 23:28:30 ANS6718E: The path contains too many nested subdirectories. The maximum number of nested directories is 1400.
(This was never a problem on other windows versions and seems to be introduced in the client version on Win2k16) Will be fixed in the next client version v8.1.2.) (Will be released in a few weeks.)
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1IT18901

There were stability issues only in the brand new features which were recently released.

There were scalability issues only in the brand new features which were recently released.

I would rate technical support as follows based on these categories:

• Help in own language (Dutch): 7/10.
• Speed: 8/10
• Customer friendliness: 9/10
• Ability to solve problems: 9/10
• In-depth knowledge (Level-1 and Level-2): 10/10

Arcserve and Microsoft Backup.

The installation was straightforward, although having specific knowledge about the product can be helpful.

That depends on the environment per customer. Since there are different licensing models, it's helpful to check which best fits the customers' needs.

We evaluated Arcserve and CommVault.

Follow a basic course before you start using the product. As it is so flexible, it's helpful to cover the basics and know what needs to be done to get the most out of this environment.

The archiving ability of Spectrum Protect is second to none. Our company archives millions of files and Spectrum Protect has been the only product we found that can handle the workload, let alone handle it in the time frame that we require.

Traditional archiving. One of our revenue streams involves maintaining archives of our customers' data for very long periods of time. Spectrum Protect has proven to be the most effective solution given our requirements.

The GUI has long been a problem for TSM/Spectrum Protect. IBM has improved it a great deal, but until you can do any administrative task necessary, it will always be its weakest point.

Stability is one of its strongest advantages. It’s not the easiest product to configure, but once it is set up, it rarely has issues.

Scalability for Spectrum Protect has been another strong point for it. When I took over the team, we had just three instances in production. As we have expanded worldwide, we have grown to more 14 instances. Scalability has not been an issue as we have grown.

I think this has a lot to do with the level of support you purchase as well as the level of expertise of the administrator. If you are new to the product, their support is fair. If you are experienced and are experiencing a serious issue, their support can be very lacking and tends to be quite slow to respond.

We have used Backup Exec and Commvault in our environment in the past. Backup Exec did not scale well as the company grew. Commvault was not scaling as well and could not meet our archiving needs.

Installation of the product is much more simplified than in the past. Configuring the server itself is not something I would recommend for an inexperienced administrator to try and do on his own.

Licensing can be either complicated or simple depending on what type of licensing you wish to use and what works best for your environment. Capacity based licensing is pretty straightforward. IBM provides tools to help evaluate how much capacity you are using. PVU licensing is more complex and generally is going to be more expensive unless you have massive amounts of data coming from just a few locations.

I have evaluated NetBackup, Commvault, Backup Exec, Legato, Avamar, and Rubrik.

Have a good understanding of what data you need to back up, how long and under what conditions it need to be retained, and how you can best organize it. This will help greatly when it comes time to configure storage pools, domains, polices, and copy groups.

Besides the compression, the new feature of data replication has helped us. Based on the feature, we were able to decommission our tape media infrastructure.

The most valuable features of Spectrum Protect would be the compression and the deduplication.

I am looking forward to new features in the next release.

One of the main features is the cloud storage integration, which was one of my main required features. I've had more difficult experiences with other platforms than with this one.

It's a very stable application. It was challenging at the beginning of the implementation of the replication and deduplication, but once it was completely deployed, it has been very stable.

The scalability has been great. We were able to introduce and scale from the storage pools, as well as from all the backup infrastructures.

I have used technical support. I've been fully engaged with IBM support and they've been very, very helpful.

I've been using the same product for the last 15 years. I know it's been very reliable, so I've stayed with it.

The setup was challenging in certain areas. For the most part, based on the experience I had, I was able to accomplish it OK.

I would highly recommend the proof of concept which is one thing that IBM provides with their lab services and other types of support. Especially with the new features and the cloud integration, that will be a great opportunity to introduce the new platform.

The most important criteria is scalability and support. Support to me is key, since at the end of the day, we're providing service to the company. So far, the experience has been very good.

I have been working with it for a few years now and I've touched other types of data protection platforms. So far, Spectrum Protector has been the best.