IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

My primary use case for this solution is for large data backup.

This is a very mature product. It has been around in the large data set. People widely use this product and it helps our organization for backing up the petabytes of data.

This solution does not have good support for virtualization and a hyper-converged environment.

We use it for physical and virtual servers, especially when we are talking about IBM Power architecture.

• Deduplication
• Compression

But really, today, all features are available from all vendors. We can ensure incremental backups, full backups, differential backups. These are not specific to IBM. All other products contain the same features. But when I'm backing up a Power server, I feel more comfortable with IBM Spectrum Protect because it's the same vendor.

The solution is not complex, it's very easy to configure agents or VM backup and restore. Upgrades from one version to another are very fast and the product is very stable.

I really haven't noticed that something is missing. There is a central console for all backups and restores. Perhaps if they could add replication to a second site or third site from the same console, that would be helpful. Currently, we have to connect to another console.

I'm very comfortable with it. I see that the product is very stable. It's a good product.

It's very scalable. We can start the product with 10 machines and we can manage more than 1000 machines. There are no limitations with respect to adding agents. The only thing we need is the addition of some resources for the backup server. For example, we can start with a backup server with 16 gigabits of memory and when we add many jobs and many agents to the backup, we have to add some resource tools to the backup server.

Technical support is very good. When we submit a ticket, it will be resolved in a short timeframe. I believe the technical support is managed today by Watson, although I'm not sure. Watson for IBM Support Center is a machine but today it's the best support of all vendors we interact with. It's better than other vendors because we communicate with the machine and, from the database, it resolves all tickets in a short time.

In this case, we received recommendations, a short-list. IBM was on that list. We went with IBM because we have many IBM Power servers. There are some work loads for PowerVM and IBM knows the architecture of PowerVM better.

Initial setup is very easy. If there are updates, there are recommended actions.

There may be an advantage to going with IBM in terms of pricing. They have a pay-as-you-grow policy, so there is no need to take one license for the entire datacenter. You can start with small licenses and then grow, and pay, as you use more.

EMC and one other.

I rate it a nine out of 10. It's a good product, simple to use, simple to configure, and we get very good technical support.

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.

Disaster Recovery Manager, TDP Backup Vmware, TDP Oracle, TDP Exchange. Flash Copy Manager.

Easy, relieable, Scalable Backup Solutions to save data and recovery.

Tape management.

9 years.

No issues.

No issues.

No issues.

10/10.

10/10.

No.

Vendor team.

Increase RPO, and reduce RTO.

Symantec Backup Exec.

This product handles backup issues in all areas and tasks, both stand-alone and various cluster options, replication.

Spectrum Protect does not just improve our work, it saves the infrastructure of more than one enterprise in the event of hacker attacks, administrative errors, and a variety of other failures.

The main feature of this product is a flexible architecture and functionality that allows you to solve problems of any complexity and scale. Most importantly, it is not just a product that simply makes a backup, but it restores and saves a large number of services in critical situations. By the way, it works fine with different types of clouds, supports S3.

I think it makes sense to think about Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization because Red Hat has better backup.

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.

• 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.

The archiving functionality of data.

With this product we are able to save a lot on costs and on expensive storage.

Reporting, alerts when things go wrong.

More than 8 years.

Integration issues which were resolved immediately.

So far we have not encountered any issues (knock on wood).

No issues with scalability.

We are satisfied with IBM support.

We are satisfied with IBM support.

Yes, straightforward.

Vendor team and they were very skilled.