IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

My primary use case is to back up our data to tape to outsource storage to protect us against any sort of cryptoware attack. We are using our DR recovery scenarios, basically for protection we are backing up to tape. We also back up the disk first. 

Our environment consists of two primary data centers with IBM storage in the thousands along with older and newer generations, and we have backed up everything to TS4500 already. We are still trying to move away from TS3500, but we are working on that. We have a mix of all sorts of databases and Exchange.

One of the recovery methods used to help troubleshoot all of our operations for contractors or the lower tiers, it meets that. Therefore, we are able to run it in an enterprise quite easily with one or two resources. All of the automatic tape deck functions are done well, too. We are able to connect two separate sites relatively easily without any problems. 

Once it is completed properly, it is low maintenance. Most of the functions do not require much deliberation. It is all the blueprints and technologies laid out, and it is straight forward.

The version that we had when I first started made it look really bad. We are talking about commands that should have run in two seconds, but instead took four to eight hours. Other components were sluggish. I noticed it as soon as our database improved. 

Because the database was slow, everything was very unresponsive. I did not know if I was doing anything wrong or if the system was not performing. With support, we were able to get up to a working version. 

Now, we are having issues with some of our underlying hardware. We require a lot of support, which has given us more scripts to get data out to the databases. In my 15 years experience of experience with backups, though not with Spectrum Protect, I could not get enough data out of the system to figure out what is going on. 

It is very scalable for my need, especially when you can just buy the hardware attachment. It is very fluid. To increase, as long as all the performance issues are taken into account, you can add as much you want. You can really scale it up in a lot of areas. The only issue I have with scalability is for the small offsite locations. You have about 50 different companies and you would never consider using Spectrum Protect in them. 

Our primary use centers are using Spectrum Protect instances. We run two Spectrum Protect instances.

We have spec'd out our build, and the cost of it can work quite easily today for our future needs.

I find the Level 1 and Level 2 support spend 80% of the time communicating the same information that I have already provided. 20% of those leads get a resolution. 

Because of our current case, I have had to open multiple cases and had some stagnant delays when answers did not fit the problem we had. It is normal in the industry to have to reach out to our customer rep to get proper support. 

It is not just for the IBM product, but it is on par at the top tier level. We receive the proper amount of attention once the proper communications are opened up with sales. On the lower tiers, I'm reasonably better off without creating communication with support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We used a third-party provider to set up the solution. The only problem is the speed of picking it up. There have been some sizing issues now, and we are dealing with those. Afterwards, we can move it forward.

We have been at our size for a few years. We are not really looking to battle the licensing costs, as this is our primary system.

I do not know who they evaluated.

I would not recommend Spectrum Protect at this point.

We use it in the retail banking environment because of regulations. For our databases, we have to back up the catalogs every 20 minutes.

We have a very complex environment, meaning from VM to PC arrays, with all the types of databases which are available on the market. In terms of volume, we have stored around five petabytes of data. We use tape on both cloud and on-premise environments, though we are going to discontinue tape because of its limitations.

We just started to backup cloud environments, so we are looking for solutions in order to backup the VM at the ESX level. On the other hand, because of our constraints, we have to have an agent in our VM for our database backup in order to meet regulation requirements.

Historically, we have a very good team of administrators who know the product perfectly and are able to manage it on a day-to-day basis.

I need to have more than two instances working together. I need a worldwide grid able to have replication between three, four, or five instances.

The problem with Spectrum Protect is you can do anything with it, so you can also do bad things. While it is a very good solution, you have to provide a good quality of care to your administrators. One other challenge of the bank is examination, meaning that most of our administrators now are not located in France, but in India or Bangalore. This causes a lot training time, but it is not useless time.

It is perhaps one of the best products on the market. It does a good job.

I have never had any scalability problems with it.

In retail and management, I manage around 30 Spectrum Protect instances at this time. The company is planning to grow and I expect the product to handle it.

Because we have experts inside our company, we have only contacted technical support a few times. We requested high-level support, because each time we have a problem, it is a real problem, like sometimes a feature problem of a product.

We are not so happy with the technical support because dealing with them is not easy. We have a very complicated environment, therefore I understand for a support person that it is not easy to troubleshoot it. Generally, our problems are with the product's designs and we cannot Google the answers/solutions.

I was not involved in the initial setup since it happened before I joined the company.

The primary use case is backup and disaster recovery.

It is fantastic. We have a number of clients using the product. Everybody who uses it is very happy with it. It is cross-platform, very flexible, and a great product.

One of my primary clients has a fairly hybrid solution where they use a TS4500 Tape Library as their offsite and primary data store. They are also using directory-container pools and replicating it to a near-site location which is on the same WAN.

It is something like: How does insurance make people happier? An insurance policy of sorts. You have to spend money to protect your assets. That is what this is. It does that job. That is why people like it. However, much like insurance, I am sure people dislike it for a lot of the same reasons.

There is a laundry list of valuable features: scalability, performance, mass platform coverage, etc. It is one of the few backup products on the market right now which an organization can bring in and it will serve all of their backup needs. It is a completely centralized solution and one of the three largest, market share wise, in the world (I believe).

It is a strong, mature product, which a lot of people are using, and there is a ton of support for it.

This is more something that I would have to go over with the IBM guys. There is probably a small laundry list. 

Ease of use. This has got to be the one thing that I routinely hear from clients and customers. It is a bit more difficult than it should be. What I find is that IBM has heard this issue, and they are responding with updated interfaces.

Usually, after the initial rollout, there are a few kinks to iron out, and from then on it's almost a self-maintaining system. It's generally very stable. Only when you introduce new features, options, or massive changes in your workload do you really find a major problem with the backup infrastructure. It tends to be very stable.

It scales infinitely. I have customers that are protecting less than 100 terabytes of data versus customers that are protecting petabytes of data. Provided you size your hardware solution properly, it will work with any organization.

IBM support is great. It is world-class support. They have a great system in place and they generally get the problem solved. It can take some time. If a problem requires it, we escalate it. They have to dive a bit deeper than you normally would, reading through logs, but they are always there with the next step to fix a problem.

If I'm being completely honest, setup is not easy. It's a more complex setup, but with great flexibility comes great complexity. If you want something to do things which are very complex, you have to be mindful of that in the setup process. It is not trivial, but it is very workable and the documentation is out there to get it done.

The competitors are Commvault, Veeam, or any of the other major backup players who are out there right now. It is a zero sum market. Everybody is bidding for the same customers.

In terms of why my customers go with Spectrum Protect, it is usually cost. The second most common is platform readiness. It can support multiple types of clients. It can back up your Exchange database for your email, at the same time that it can back up your user's file shares, and at the same time you can back up your virtual machines. It meets everybody's needs and that is often why IBM wins out when there is a competitive bid process.

I recommend a conversation where we sit down and spec out what the requirements are. I will always recommend Spectrum Protect. From my perspective, it is the best one on the market. That is the reason I have gone in this direction. I am fully onboard.

The main benefit is the protection.

You can protect your data and keep it for long durations, without it spending too much time on the local disk. You can send the data to an outside location. I think the main feature is that you can protect your data from disasters.

We should be talking about the capacity of the tape drives. That's the only problem. We have a system that is in petabytes. We have five frames of the tape drives and we have more than 2,000 slots. If we could compress that space in the data center, that would be good.

I was looking for what is already in the market. Everyone is getting a cloud. The product has already given us some solutions which we can use in the cloud. I think that's fine for the moment.

I think we are running the product on AIX at the moment. I think that is the most stable platform for any product.

In terms of scalability, we have been using it for the last five years and the scalability is very good. I like that.

In terms of technical support, we had some troubles when we reached out to them, especially with IBM Europe. For the last two years, we had some issues when we were trying to reach out to IBM, even in the US. This is especially the case when the call is for Level 1 technical support.

We have been working for eight years with the product. I open a call when I have exhausted Google knowledge and my personal knowledge.

The call goes to IBM and they just ask me some silly questions. That's where you have the problem. You lose maybe two or three days just to get the right person.

I have been using this product since I joined my company.

I was involved in the setup. It was straightforward.

They should go for it. The most important thing I look for when selecting a vendor is after sales support.

I found the restore operations feature the most valuable.

• A legacy backup (daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly) would be good, this means a backup plan (native in TSM Server) that would include the following points:

One incremental daily backup with a retention of 15 days, one full weekly backup (Sunday?) with a 5 week retention, one monthly backup (the last day of each month?) with a 13-month retention), one annual backup with a 10 year retention (every January 1st? or last day of each year?).

This backup plan would be integrated into TSM Server, and it would then suffice to associate the nodes with the start times.

• A Hardware Security Module (HSM) --

Have multiple predefined queries for HSM activity, such as migrate, recall, pre-migrate activity, and performances of these activities.

In its various forms, I have used it for over twenty years.

I did not encounter any deployment issues.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give local customer service a rating of 4/10.

I would give central customer service a rating of 9/10.

I would give local technical support a rating of 4/10.

I would give central technical support a rating of 9/10.

We used NetBackup and eVault because of the stability, the possible evolutions, and the available capacities.

Setup has always been straightforward. We always start with a simple and solid installation. We then extend the functions when the base is very stable and meets our expectations.

Implementation was always performed by an internal team. The team has knowledge of configuration and local operation and is not dependent on external entities.

We think we are seeing an ROI after 24 months.

The product has always been too expensive and not very easy to negotiate.

We previously evaluated NetBackup , eVault, and ArcServe.

Follow all the documentation and do the simple things initially. Do not define complex processes. During periods of crisis, it will be necessary to be simple and fast.

An area for improvement would be the ease of use - the GUI is not up to the mark compared to other products in the market. IBM should also move on from the mainframe mindset and evolve so that configuration does not need to be done via the command line.

I have been using this solution for eight to nine years.

I've had no problems with the stability of this solution.

Technical support for this product is pathetic - whenever we tried to raise support, it took a long time, so we had to resolve the problems on our own, especially in the production environment. 

The initial setup was complex due to the lack of a proper GUI.

This product is very versatile. However, we have now switched to EMC NetWorker as it is much easier to use and does better with data domain. I would rate this solution as five out of ten.

Its primary use case is backup and recall for enterprises. 

We were looking for an enterprise solution, and we found Spectrum Protect. It is more enterprise backup and that is what you want.

I am managing two Spectrum Protect system plus one tests.

We are not using cloud storage currently, nor are we planning to in the future.

I am working to implement Spectrum Protect Plus

• It saves you a lot of storage.
• Our performance is better. 
• Our product is running better than it was previously, which is huge.

My organization loves it, because they say it is one of the best product they have ever used.

• Deduplication
• Data compression
• There are a lot more features that we can use versus the previous product.

I want to see better compression than what it currently does. I heard that 8.1.5 has better compression. 

There are more features, but I want test earlier, therefore we can do more bugging for the compression feature.

Stability is good. 

However, depending upon what feature you turn on, you might run into more problems, then it is not stable. For example, when we started with deduplication, it was not working correctly. I spent so many hours with IBM support and development. They were not able to figure out what was going on and why. It was really a nightmare. We spent more hours working this product issue than I spent with my family.

Scalability is good. The product is so scalable and vast. 

They need to do a better job on Windows, because if you are running Windows, the scalability is more limited than AIX and Linux.

We plan to add on more Spectrum Protects in the future.

The technical support is good. I prefer talking to the Level 2 support, because I feel that the Level 1 support sometimes wastes too much of my time.

We needed a better enterprise backup because we were backing up OS-specific backup products with OS only. Thus, we had too many backup products for each OS separately. This was a nightmare to backup. Therefore, we decided to get an all-in-one backup.

The initial setup was easy, but I did struggle with it with no training as I was new to the product. I did do a good job, though.

We also evaluated NetBackup.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• OS compatibility
• Scalability
• Pricing, etc.

We have been using it for quite some time and see the product is developing into something that we have been asking for. Some of the functions the product used to lack have been included and are now useful.

We use the on-premise version. Our infrastructure consists of an operating system and a mainframe. The Spectrum product is more for the operating system, data productions, and our data center.

The product helps us do data protection and restoration for disaster recovery (DR).

Product features were previously not great, but they eventually evolved. There have been a lot of good improvement, so now the features are quite impressive.

We would like to see cloud integration.

The solution is evolving, so it has to be evolved to fit all new types of software requirements too.

Stability is very good.

It use to scale to IBM systems only. Now, it scales to non-IBM systems or other industry servers, like Intel. So now, scalability is quite good.

We used silo our Spectrum Protect servers, but now we are consolidating them into fewer servers because they can handle more loads.

Technical support is okay. We have IBM direct support, which has a team of resources for us to utilize.

In the beginning, it was not an easy setup. Now, the product has developed to be quite flexible and easy in its setup with some lesser ticks.

We evaluated other data protection products like Veritas.

We chose IBM because we had IBM in-house. This was the main reason, and also because Spectrum Protect would integrate with the IBM products better.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Cost
• Scalability
• Product features.