IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

We use IBM Spectrum Protect as a backup solution. We do so with robots, each pair robot, making use of the LCO tapes. 

I find the solution somewhat difficult to use with virtual environments or VMware. 

The ability to schedule myVM on operation center should be addressed. 

Setting up the server is not easy; really difficult, in fact. It requires some skill sets. 

Automation should be added in the next release.

It is difficult for the Windows team, as it cannot make use of the solution. 

IBM Spectrum Protect is a big solution. As such, I have been using it for four years. 

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

I feel support to be good and they have resolved all issues of mine which have arisen. 

I did not use a different solution prior to IBM Spectrum Protect. 

Setting up the server is not easy; really difficult, in fact. It requires some skill sets. 

In my previous job, I handled the installation independently. However, we currently have support, as well as the central architecture and the manager sites. When it comes to the initial setup or an upgrade, we work in tandem with their support.

We definitely need certain people to maintain the solution. In respect of just storage, a backup engineering team can work with the IBM Spectrum Protect solution. The Windows team cannot make use of the solution, which poses a challenge for it. 

I am not in a position to comment on the licensing terms, as this is handled by the central team. 

We are the client. At the moment, however, I am focusing on the project involving our migration and upgrading from Spectrum Protect 1.6, dot 7 to spectrum version 1.8. 

The solution is not deployed in the cloud, but onsite. 

I have experience working with TSM and have trained on the old versions of TSM 6.

Our team exclusively uses the solution. 

We are talking about a stable solution which boasts good performance and security.

I rate IBM Spectrum Protect as an eight or nine out of ten. 

I used IBM Spectrum Protect for backups and archiving.

I find the whole product useful. The backup archive client, snapshot, spectrum for virtual environments are beneficial features.

IBM could improve by decluttering its product lines. There are too many clients, too many names, and overall too many products. They have to decide for the virtual environments, are they going to stick with Spectrum Virtual Environment or Spectrum Protect Plus? They have to decide on this, a final decision. IMB is trying to catch up with Veeam but they have to declutter a lot of products or sub-products that they have.

In a future release, it would be a benefit to have the ability to add an application as a storage target, as a storage pool. Additionally, they should add more functionality to the administration for the Operation Center.

I have been using IBM Spectrum Protect for approximately three years.

I have found IBM Spectrum Protect to be highly stable.

IBM Spectrum Protect is a scalable solution.

IBM provides good support.

I have used other backup solutions, such as Veeam.

The installation of IBM Spectrum Protect has become easy for me but was not always. It's not as easy as others, such as Veeam. But nevertheless, I think it to be more robust than Veeam, and more realistic. The only option for a very small deployment is to use the Windows platform, but you cannot have a very small deployment as a blueprint on the Linux and on AIX. They have to create a very small deployment blueprint for the AIX and for the Linux.

The price of IBM Spectrum Protect is expensive. However, there are a few packages and it is unclear because, for the entry suite they have both options, which are the back-end storage capacity and the front-end storage capacity.

It's really difficult for you as a client to decide the exact size of how many kilos you have to purchase because it really depends on the after operational capacity and after the compression.

My advice to others wanting to implement this solution is if they have a critical enterprise application, then I would recommend TSM. If they have a small network of many workstations rather than servers, then maybe Veeam will be more suitable.

I rate IBM Spectrum Protect a seven out of ten.

We have a very small footprint. We only use it to back up a couple of servers that we could not move over at this time. I only use it to back up two servers and very large academic systems and number cruncher systems, which isn't the best way to do that, but we do use MN backup with it. Previously, we used to use Spectrum Protect for disaster recovery (DR), but we don't use it for disaster recovery anymore.

The MN backup for a cluster is most valuable because it has made backing up the GSF as a zero-file system easier.

I like its stability a lot. Over the years, I very rarely had a problem with it.

It can be improved for large file systems with many files. Spectrum Protect can restore large files very well, but if you're restoring millions of little files, it is not as great.

At one point, we tried to implement the VMware module with it, and it was awful and terrible. I don't know if that has improved. If it hasn't, this would be one big improvement.

It probably has been 20 years since I have been using it. I started using it when it was ADSM. Now it is Spectrum Protect, which I have been using for a couple of years.

I like its stability a lot. Over the years, I very rarely had a problem with it.

It was very stable when it was on an AIX server. AIX servers are not as common now. It is on a Linux server now, and it is definitely not as stable on a Linux server as it was on an AIX server.

Its scalability is decent. In terms of usage, we used to be exclusively all Spectrum Protect, but now we're not. We just have one department that is using it, and they don't do any restores or anything like that. I do everything. Because it has a small footprint now, I am the main person who works on it, and if needed, I have a couple of other people to help out.

I would rate them as average. It totally depends on who you get. I love getting one of their support staff members named Helen. You lucked out when you get Helen. She is awesome. There is another person with whom I've worked great, but the last couple of times, I've opened a case, and I didn't even get a callback. I ended up fixing it on my own. 

I've always used it. It started as ADSM and then became TSM and then Spectrum Protect. When we were TSM, we migrated from TSM to another product, but there were just a couple of systems that couldn't be migrated. For very large academic systems and number cruncher systems, we use MN backup. We have a very small footprint of Spectrum Protect left.

It is complex. We have a complicated environment, and it took a week. We had to use the encryption key manager, which is also an IBM product called SKLM, and that had to be upgraded. It was definitely a full week, and it was not easy.

We had a consultant, and our experience was positive.

I don't have an idea about the pricing. They send that over to someone else, but I know that one of the issues they had was the licensing costs. I don't think they were happy with how they were charged.

You would really have to implement it. It is very stable, but it is complicated. You really need to get a staff member or a good consultant who knows it fairly well.

I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect a seven out of ten for functionality. I am biased because I know it so well. Over the years, we did really well with disaster recovery with it, but that was the old way of sending tapes down to Iron Mountain and the Sterling Forest site in New York. I always made it work, but that was stressful.

Protecting infrastructures and applications. We have infrastructures and applications that must be online. Some has archiving requirements that need to store data using longer retention due to legal or other requirements. With Spectrum Protect, you can adjust this to your needs.

We use this to fine tune our business requirements for the data, where we can save shorter data retention data on a storage pool with faster performance and save archiving on a storage pool with tapes to keep cost lower.

With Spectrum Protect, we were able to lower the TCO thanks to it always being incremental by design (progressive incremental forever).

Why back up data again if the data has not been changed? It has faster backups, as only changed content is sent and has less storage use.

Why restore the same content many times if you can just restore one backup?

• Faster restores as only one full backup is needed to restore. With other competitors, you have to restore fully with all their incrementals.
• We successfully lowered data storage due to its progressive incremental-forever by design (always incremental), plus its advanced data reduction techniques using deduplication with compression.
• Backups are much faster, as only changed content is sent, especially if the journaling is added.
• Restores are much faster too, as it only restore the objects needed. Other competitors restore objects from full backup, later restoring a more recent version of the object.
  

Progressive incremental-forever (always incremental):

SPFS is a file system for Spectrum Protect. A way to mount a Spectrum Protect storage pool as a mount point on your server for easier usage. With this one can protect any data using the Spectrum Protect storage.
Eg
# mount -t spfs /backup
# mysqldump > /backup/mysqldump.bkp

SPIR is Instant Recovery for Spectrum Protect. Take application consistent snapshots locally using, and sends snapshots data using space efficiently and blocking backups to the Spectrum Protect server. It provisions the snapshot from the backup server to the same or new server near instantly, so that applications can be started before all data has been copied back to original place.

Replication services would be nice. If these could be enhanced to be always on so multiple storage backup services could be added as a cluster pool. This would provide a better availability service.

It would be great if the API could add functions to check storage pool details using the client-side API.

It would be great if there would be an API to add new licenses using the client-side API so the licenses can be reviewed using QUERY LICENSE. Then, new licenses could be added using the REGISTER LICENSE command.

More than 20 years.

the solution is stable and all the fixes and patches are well tested before rolled out. workarounds are being published if bugs exists early bug fixes can be shipped earlier for clients has emergent needs (eFix) change list is being published at each release

the solution scales frmo small setup to enterprise hosting many thousands of clients. Competitors need more resourses, as it has difficulty to host the inventories, of manage the amount of data If needed, one can add storage agents, which can be used to off load data transfer, so that the data goes over these agents, instead of being sent to a central server

support is great

We previously used Dell EMC NetWorker and switched because:

• More storage was needed to manage data protection.
• It was more difficult to manage traffics, as it uses RPC, and more ports needed to be opened in the firewall.
• The solutions sometimes does not respond on "push/pull requests".

being working with ADSM, TSM, Spectrum Protect for several years, and the setup becomes more easier nowadays

we used an in-house team

By changing to this solution, we saved not only a lot of license costs, but also 450% storage cost (without space reduction techniques) + 450% additional using space reduction techniques

IBM provides an open license policy, which is more like a gentlemen's agreement.

One can go with either a PVU licensing model or a capacity based licensing model. Either solution does not block the usage, if over used.

NetBackup.

The perfect solution with a robust, scalable, open architecture.

Many additional plugins are available on the Global Solution Directory.

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.

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.

The solution is primarily used for backup and restore and also for DR, for Data Recovery in case of a disaster. We are using replication from two servers, the Spectrum Servers, so they replicate on each other. We are using it for backing up remote sites also. Basically, all the machines are downloading their backup to the Spectrum Server and from then on we are moving that data to tape units so we can have outside data of the building.

IBM allows for the versioning of the data, allowing us to have multiple versions of a file or directory of a server. 

One of the main things that I like about IBM is the versioning of the data - meaning that we can have multiple versions of a file or directory of a server. I could have 10 versions of one file and that file I could keep for as long as I want.

There is the archive for a version of the solution which gave us the opportunity to have, let's say, one full backup every month for a long period of time. Its archiving offers us good flexibility.

The solution is very stable.

We've found the scalability to be very good.

The initial implementation is straightforward for the most part.

The pricing is a bit high. It would be ideal if it was more affordable.

Generally, everything is changing so fast within the product, it's hard to pinpoint what needs to be changed or what is missing. The solution is constantly evolving.

It would be helpful if the solution included some sort of ransomware protection.

The only thing that I haven't tried yet is using it with VMware. I haven't done any tests on it. Let's say that I want to restore a VM, virtual machine, and I would like to access it in a short period of time. This is something that Veeam, for example, is doing. Veeam will permit you to start a VM and start working with it and restore only what is needed to do a prompt work. If it's possible to have the same functionality on this product, that would be ideal.

I've been using the solution since it was called under a different name. I've used it for about 20 or so years at this point. It's been two decades. It's been a while. 

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. Its performance is excellent.

The scalability of the solution is very good. A company can expand the solution if it needs to.

IBM Spectrum is used in the data center and we don't have too many users that would use the backup facilities. Everything is centralized to enter the data center.

We are not fully using the solution to its full potential at this time. I'm not sure if there are plans to increase usage. We're looking into other options to see if we can get better user-friendly functionality and better pricing.

We've been in touch with technical support. They are very good. We haven't had any issues with them. They are helpful and responsive. Every time I've talked to them, they've solved our problems.

We also currently use Veeam.

The installation is simple. You just click and follow the instruction. Where the complexity is coming up is when you decide how you want to do your backup and restore. Like any other software you have to decide how you want to do it and understand what's going on behind the scene. 

The deployment itself, with my experience, doesn't take long due to the fact that I know the product. That said, for someone that does not know the product, I would say, it will take, just to understand how it works about a week.

We have two or three people on staff that can handle any maintenance required. They are all systems administrators. 

In the beginning, we had a consultant as it was a very long time ago and we did not have the knowledge we have now. However, today I would not deal with anybody from IBM. We have the capabilities we need. 

In general, at the time, we had a good experience working with them.

While it's my understanding that the solution is expensive, I do not directly handle the licensing and therefore cannot speak to how much the company actually pays to use the solution.

We are customers and end-users.

We have the Enterprise version of IBM Protect. It's not the Plus version.

My advice is not specifically for IBM Spectrum, but for any product. I would say, sit down and think about it. Think about what you want to do. There are so many options in any software. It's like getting house insurance. What do you want to do, how do you want to insure your data? It's important to understand what you want so you can see if the solutions you are looking at actually have the required capabilities.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's a very good product. It's strong. It's stable. The company's good.

Primary use case is for data protection and data backup. I work with the following:

• On-premise solutions for customers.
• Building solutions for our managed service, which uses Spectrum Protect as a backup data protection for primarily DIAX Power Systems platform.
• Virtual workloads in our data center.

It performs great and is working wonderfully.

Our on-premise infrastructure is mostly spinning disk right now. Tape is on our plans towards the future. I have come to the conclusion that we need to make sure we add tape into the solution, because archive seems to be a big, important piece, especially since Spectrum Protect is moving as a product. Going forward, we will find it being more as a long-term retention repository than it used to be in the past.

We have two Spectrum Protect instances. We have work redundant ones in our managed solutions center that we offer for our solutions provider. For my on-premise work that I do as a consultant, I take care of instances on and off for various customers.

As managed solutions provider, it has been really useful because it scales bigger than a lot of other products. It allows us to consolidate costs on the back-end, making it somewhat more cost effective for us, while still being able to scale bigger for our larger customers that buy solutions from us.

The biggest thing is its enterprise-wide type of architecture. It supports a lot of different platforms. This is useful for us.

There is not much that they do not have already. 

Integration with some applications in the healthcare field could be added, as that is a big part of our business. I just recently learned that Spectrum Protect Plus has integration with Epic. They are planning on implementing it. It is on their road map, and that seems to be the right direction. 

IBM has a good direction, making sure they address the things that they discuss with us as a service provider, and looking to provide better products to our customers.

It is super stable. This is one of the reasons that we like it as a solutions product.

It is extremely scalable. This is why we like it, because a lot of other products require a more complicated deployment as the environments get bigger. 

Spectrum Protect keeps things rather simple, because as long as we build the core system, it can scale with the hardware, essentially. We use Power Systems for our servers. Therefore, it can scale massively, as well as the application. Thus, we keep our costs low.

The solution will definitely meet my customers' growth requirements. However, the challenge I have is that customers are becoming more homogeneous and need diversity less. This has worked more for us as we take on workload for them, but I have a lot of customers who used to need five or six different types of enterprise integration: workload, virtualization of different platforms, etc. However, this all seems to be getting more homogenized. Therefore, the need has been going down from what we have seen previously.

Most commonly, we call technical support for performance related issues, if we run into something which is a weird anomaly, we will call them up. 

They have recently added support tickets specifically engineered around performance. This has been very useful for us when we run into issues where customers are looking to try to squeeze a lot more horsepower out of older system.

The initial setup is a little more complex than some of the other solutions. The younger, backward products out there are much easier to implement. 

Generally speaking, it works well for me, as a person who sells my services. It is nice to be able to be able to set something up for a customer, and have it work directly the first time, because of the fact that I have the experience. 

Typically, the competitors have been EMC or Commvault. Those are the most common ones that we have run into. 

What is probably most interesting, more recently, customers have been having conversations with me around some of these newer backup applications which are more web scale architected, like how Spectrum Protect Plus is designed. This has been a different conversation, because the customers' focus is more about ease of use, and less about flexibility and scalability. Therefore, this has been a little bit of a shift, because they have simplified so much, and what they have is their infrastructure.

Customers' most important criteria when selecting a solution:

• Robustness
• Durability
• Flexibility with storage and the Client.