IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

The valuable features for me are Disaster Recovery Manager, Replication and and File Device Class for ease of recovery.

I’m a consultant. I provide installation and technical support and help to customers. TSM provides ease of use for customers to recover from any type of data disaster.

Once the product is installed and configured correctly, it’s easy to use. But for the average user, the product is extremely difficult when compared to other products.

15+ years

I’ve been doing this for 15 years. Deployment and installation for me is fairly easy.

Unless run on Windows or an undersized machine, the product is fairly stable.

This scales quite large.

Depends on the type of support the customer purchases. But overall IBM’s first line of support is pretty bad. Not very knowledgeable and take forever to return a call and ask for the same information over and over.

Poor at the first level.

No other products used.

The set up is complex unless you know the product.

It usually takes a week of consulting to implement. That can cost 10-15k plus the cost of the product.

No other options have been considered.

Hire an expert to install and configure it and get some training to make it run.

I think Spectrum Protect's interface is not so user-friendly, but the interface is not so friendly. Some of the functions are too complicated. I prefer a simpler solution.

I've been using IBM Spectrum Protect for about one and a half years.

IBM Spectrum Protect is stable.

IBM support is friendly, knowledgeable, and they always respond quickly. They've always been able to find the cause of my problem.

It's pretty hard to install IBM Spectrum Protect, and the whole procedure is not that simple. It takes maybe eight hours or a whole working day, and one person can handle the deployment. Right now, we have three or four users working with it, and there are one or two technical staff who take care of the maintenance.

I rate IBM Spectrum Protect six out of 10. Maybe I would recommend it to others.

Overall the solution is fairly complete.

The installation process could be simplified. However, the tool is comprehensive and if the installation is too easy, then the tool itself will be too simple as well. I do not see any pain points. The only issue I see is the pricing, it is expensive.

We have been using the solution with the last 12 months.

It is a really capable tool. It is the best solutions on the market regarding recovering and the way it functions.

The scalability is really good. It is very capable, it has high availability, multiple backup servers, many posts, and workloads.

The installation is complex. It is a comprehensive solution as IBM has evolved from the TSM and Tivoli Storage Manager. It has multiple integrators, allowing it to communicate with most of the kinds of workloads. It is not easy to deploy.

We usually had three people doing the deployment. The solution uses multiple integrators, for example, they integrated with Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft, and Bare Metal. You will normally need one senior deployer, and a senior analyst to deploy it. If the individual that is going to do the deployment is a high-level senior person, he can do it by himself depending on experience. If there is not a senior person, you are going to need more than one to assist.

The solution is expensive.

The solution is capable of connecting to the cloud, public or private, but we are currently using it on-premises on this particular project.

I rate IBM Spectrum Protect a nine out of ten.

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.

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.

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 diversity and flexibility of the application. No matter what the problem is, I can solve the problem any number of ways based on the customers’ requirements.

It scales.

In terms of room for improvement, I would like to see better interfaces.

I'm not allowed to talk about features I want to see in the future. I have an NDA with them. The things that I've asked for are already on record.

It's one of the most stable backup applications I've ever used.

They continue to make enhancements that allow it to scale even larger and higher. They also added additional capabilities to the software that allow it to grow within the industry.

We have used technical support and they are excellent.

We used NetWorker.

I was involved in the installation. I've set it up hundreds of times. It is a complex setup. You have to do your planning for your environment. Once you have the plan, the setup is easy. But the planning is the hardest piece.

We looked at NetBackup, Backup Exec, and there were a couple of other ones that we looked at.

My advice is to hire me and I’ll install it for you. We knew it was time to invest in a new solution because backups are crucial for our environment.

When looking for a vendor, we look for service, scalability, and stability.

The solution is mainly used for backup of data and customers' infrastructure, such as, for example, backup of databases, Oracle, SQL, a backup of the self server, a backup of SharePoint et cetera.

It's very hard to say which feature is most valuable. It's a complex product. It's not possible to say what is most valuable.

The solution is mostly stable.

The product scales well.

The solution offers good cloud extensions.

The technical support on offer is pretty good.

The user interface could be better. It could be more intuitive or more user-friendly.

The initial setup is complex.

It's not a good option for smaller companies. It can be a bit expensive.

I've been using Spectrum Protect for maybe seven or eight years. It's been a while.

There are some troubles, however, definitively it's a very stable product. There aren't too many issues with bugs or glitches. It's pretty reliable.

This solution is more suitable for medium and large infrastructures, in my experience.

While it does depend on the environment, for the most part, the solution scales easily. The operating system, hardware, et cetera, make it compatible with all the vendors.

I've been in touch with technical support on four to seven occasions. It was very valuable, speaking IT IBM support. It was okay. They helped me. I'd say we are satisfied with the level of service that has been provided to us.

We also concurrently use Veeam and HP Data Protector.

If I compared it to, for example, Veeam, Veeam is more valuable for a cloud environment and it's not suitable for the physical environment. Spectrum Protect is a complex product and it's suitable for both the cloud and physical environments. Veeam, however, has a better user interface. There's no perfect product. Basically, some products have more advantages in one area and others in other areas.

The ease of the setup depends on the infrastructure, however, mostly it's a complex process as it's not so easy to deploy Spectrum Protect when you compare it to the other products.

You have to know the customer infrastructure and you have to know what they need, and what they want to do. It's important that their requirements are clear. Even when you deploy according to these requirements, it's very complex. 

The solution does have automatic maintenance services, however, it needs an administrator on the system engineering corrections. It's not required not every day, however, from time to time, you'll have to check the logs and everything.

For small customers, it can be a very expensive product. It's much more suited to larger organizations. It's expensive in comparison to other solutions, and it doesn't make sense, cost-wise when you are a small company.

We are a service provider and a business partner with IBM. We have just come out with the latest update and other customers with the specific version. It depends. We have various customers.

It's a good product overall.

I'd are it at a nine out of ten. We've mostly been very pleased with its capabilities.