IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

The most valuable feature is the breadth of what it can do in an environment for backup protection of data. It's very scalable. Customers can adopt a Spectrum Protect solution at an entry level.

As their environment grows, the solution will grow with it. They don't have to worry about purchasing additional vendor solutions to meet their backup and storage needs.

With a single solution, a customer can manage all their data from a backup protection perspective. I think, single-handedly, the way that it does their backup is quite unique. It incorporates data reduction during all stages of the backup process. Customers can manage more data without incurring additional licensing costs.

I would like to see IBM take the solution more into enabling customers to work with cloud solutions. While they are making great strides to do that today, I think there are some areas for growth required in that area.

In addition to the hypervisors, whether it's VMware or Hyper-V, there are still some areas that I would like to see continued. So to sum up: Handling with the cloud and the hypervisor.

It's a very stable solution. It's been around for a very long time. Because of all that length of time it's been in use, it has become a very, very stable product.

IBM does a great job of innovating and keeping the product current with their new roll-outs and new updates to the solution to meet the ever changing needs that customers are facing today in managing and protecting their data.

It's really scalable. Great scalability.

I personally have never used support, but we work with customers who do. We find that their support, on the average, is very good.

We look for stability when first considering solutions. IBM, overall, brings the greatest set of solutions that can tackle a customer's storage needs. This is not just from a data protection perspective, but through the whole lifecycle of managing their data. IBM has a full spectrum of solutions they can bring for customers' needs.

I would definitely do the research. Part of that research should include the IBM Spectrum Protect solution.

One of the benefits they should always look at is the total cost of ownership of any solution. I think that's where Spectrum Protect really shines. You need to look past just the software costs.

There are also going to be hardware costs, training costs, and services involved with it. You'll find that with Spectrum Protect, the total cost of ownership of implementing and maintaining the solution is going to be less than other vendors.

I use it for the disaster recovery backup archive. It is performing very well.

Spectrum Protect is running under AIX on a Power system. We have a SAN volume controller in front of two generation three XIVs and two IBM tape libraries (all Fibre Channel attached). We have two sites. 

It protects our data. That is what it is there for.

We cannot live without it, since it gives us the confidence to move forward knowing our data is safe.

The most valuable features are reliability, capacity, and performance.

I'm sure there are some areas of improvement, because no product is perfect- but I can't think of any right now.

Regarding stability, it's been rock solid; very stable. I've never had a problem with it.

I've never had issues with scalability. It scales very well.

It has scaled with us over the last 25 years. We are a community college with about 40,000 students and roughly 5000 to 6000 employees. It is growing, though not as much right now. The economy is good, and we grow when the economy is bad. The exact opposite of everybody else!

Technical support is pretty good. It is doing fine, but you pay for it.

We have been using it for a long time. I don't know what we had before.

The setup was straightforward, but it is a complicated product. It was a lot more complex to set up so long ago. There were just a lot of moving parts with a lot of pieces to it.

For vendors, I want good technical support, but I also want honest sales people. I want somebody who is going to tell me the straight truth, and whether or not it's a product that I should buy. I don't want it similar to selling me a car or something. I want somebody who will be honest with me.

I would also like a product that scales and is reliable. It should be able to handle the amount of data that we backup every night. I go back to being reliable.

I would highly recommend it to anybody that would like to buy something like this.

If it fits them, I would say "Get it." It is not the right product for everybody. No product is for everybody. However, this is a very good product. If they have a need, like I did, then it is the right solution.

The ability to seamlessly migrate storage sub-systems underneath IBM Spectrum Virtualize.

Being able to migrate off and release storage without impacting the client at all.

The ability to migrate seamlessly between clusters, such as between Spectrum Virtualize clusters.

It is very good, very stable.

Scalability needs some work in some areas. The number of volumes needs to be increased drastically. That's number one.

Technical support on the product is very good.

We were using Direct Attached DS8000 before and we switched for scalability.

The setup was pretty straightforward.

Don't go with EMC. Go with IBM. Go with this product. Absolutely. It's a very good product compared to the competitors.

For me, the fact that we can do inline deduplication and compression with Spectrum Protect itself, where before we had to use other products.

It simplifies our backup environment to one product. Cost is also much, much cheaper because you not only save space, because you're deduplicating and then compressing on the storage end. You are also saving on the licensing, because the license is after deduplication and compression.

Right now, we are in it for container pools and such. The ability to have an active-active, where you no longer have to go in and do modifications if your primary site goes down and your offsite needs to do the primary backups.

It takes a lot of manual work to go in and update all the records and run a bunch of scripts. I would like to see that becoming more automated and with more intelligence in Spectrum, so it can then detect what is down.

When my client comes to you to back it up, he not only comes to you for restores, but it should be able to do a backup without having to modify the state of the node registration.

There are features that it came out with, such as the directory container pools, which brought it back up to where other products we were using are currently at. Namely we were using EMC Avamar in our remote sites, because they were much more RAM friendly. Now, in the past year and a half with the directory container pools, version 7.1.3, brought TSM up to that level. I'd like to see that performance increased.

I can't comment on stability. We are only now doing testing. It was stable, but now we're rolling it out into production. We are just starting to get our feet wet in production sites.

We have it in two to three sites right now, and we're deploying it in about 10 to 15 sites. We should actually be up to almost 30 sites by the end of this year.

We haven't had any need for support. We've been working directly with our technical sales rep for any problems.

The first criterion is the product. Second, customer service is one of the top of benefits to have, especially the technical support. They need to have knowledgeable people to talk to without having to always keep restating what your problem is. It gets kind of tedious and boring. Having that more streamlined and having more access to developers and the higher-level support when needed is my top requirement.

The initial setup was straightforward. Just follow the blueprints. They are very well written and that works pretty well.

We evaluated EMC Avamar, which we were using. We were using TSM (previously TSM, now Spectrum) in our data center, but not in our remote sites. We actually moved away from them five years ago, because Avamar was better. We evaluated Veeam, CommVault, NetBackup, and others.

Do your research. Don't just look at one product. We evaluated three or four different products.

• Performs backups on multiple platforms
• Reliability
• Speed

For our company, disaster recovery is, of course, the biggest benefit.

I would like to see more GUI. The command line is fine, but if I had more GUI, that would be good. Also, I would like to see better reporting.

I've been working with it for the last three years, and I recall maybe once or twice when we had issues. So it is very stable.

For the company where I provide support, they are kind of "hold-back". But we could do more with it. They are just not giving us all that we need.

The technical support is very good.

I wasn't involved in a previous solution at all.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

Use it.

It allows us to backup and have the DBAs manage their own backups and our retention period. It reduces the work on our part while we get the backups completed.

It has to ability to backup DV2, Oracle, and Informix.

I'd like to see some benefits to help manage it. With a big installation, we don't have the performance characteristics that we maybe should have. We've come up with a cookie cutter approach, where you would just spit out the same thing time after time.

I would like to see something that maybe a beginner, or intermediate professional could do, in order to give me a set of tools to answer questions and spit out what I should have.

It doesn't integrate with storage pools, with a normal pool. I'd like to see that.

It's very stable. We've been having problems with keeping enough storage on the floor, but as far as the product goes, it's really no problem.

Scalability is fine, as long as you bring up the right server. We have some Linux servers that don't scale as well. Our AIX servers work much, much better. We're backing up about a petabyte a night.

Technical support is good, for the most part. It's rather difficult to get through to all the representatives before you hit Level-1 or Level-2. But they are very responsive nowadays, unlike in past years.

We were using TSM for about 30 years. We switched over to NetBackup for a while. We then switched back to TSM, primarily because NetBackup didn't support Linux on Z.

The installation is better. It's basically a push button thing. You set it up, start a script, and start answering questions. The graphical interface is a lot better than setting it up manually, because it will do everything for you. Now it does an automatic check to make sure that you have enough space and your authorization is there before actually doing the install. In this way, you don't get through an install, or partway through an install, and then fail.

Do your homework. See what you have on the floor, what your road map says you're going to do for databases, systems, and platforms. Get IBM to do some evaluations for you and come up with a better product, whether it ends up being IBM or something else.

When selecting a vendor, we look for stability of the product and support mostly. Nothing's perfect. They're always coming out with new things. Their container storage pools are better. It's basically a setup and forget it.

Incremental forever philosophy.

The benefits are that it's an efficient, scalable, and reliable product that provides what it is supposed to provide.

I would like to see better cloud integration. The big thing is the ability to better integrate with the cloud.

The current cloud integration is good and improving. The conference provided insight to some interesting and useful cloud directions that I was not aware of when we spoke. But in response to your question, I would like to see more (is better - right?) functionality. One notion is to provide self describing backup data which can be picked up by a second Spectrum Protect server in an ad-hoc manner. This could provide a simple means of DR recovery without requiring a DB Restore or existing replication configuration.

Another, similar notion would be an ability to create cloud based backup sets or client images which could be retrieved directly to a client without a Spectrum Protect server. There would be some serious security considerations for both of these ideas and their use case may be too small to realistically consider. I would like to say that I did meet some sharp folks who work in Spectrum Protect Development and they do like to think outside the box and they seriously consider input from their user community.

Stability is very good.

Scalability is excellent.

I've used tech support. Tech support is usually pretty good. Sometimes it takes a while to get past the first level, but once you do, know that they're just doing their job. They are very knowledgeable people who will do everything they can to reach out to you and make sure that they resolve the problem.

Understand how the incremental approach can be better than other solutions. It's a very good solution. It has some improvement to go, but compared to anything else out there, it's the top of the pack.

I guess it keeps everything under one umbrella. So there are fewer products to deal with.

It covers all the different operating systems. If you need backup, it can pretty much do everything.

I would like to see it simplified. Depending on what client you're talking about, there are lots of different features. There's instant recovery that it doesn't have. For the database side, it does not have object level recovery. There are just a slew of things that are lacking feature-wise. But the biggest problem is the complexity.

The stability is lacking. From the client side, which is my focus, it's very complicated.

It doesn't have the features that a lot of other products have. It seems like they're always three to five years behind what other companies are doing.

It's very hard to use. It's not user-friendly. It's not designed with the administrator in mind.

I think from the server side, it scales very well. The client side is much more difficult to deal with. It's a lot of hands-on work with the client.

I have used tech support, and I would rather chew off my left arm than have to deal with tech support.

I was involved in the installation and it was complex in every aspect.

We are actually looking for different solutions right now.

I would do a lot of research on all the vendors before I made a decision. It's expensive, it's hard to use, and takes a long time.

The most important criteria when looking for a product is simplicity. We have a set of criteria for every client in terms of what it has to do. Being the backup window, the recovery is the most important thing. So make sure it can do the recovery the way you want it done, i.e., fast.