We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Protect and VxRail based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Veeam Software, Zerto, Commvault and others in Backup and Recovery."It scales well. We have grown here in the last year or two, and it has been relatively easy."
"Regarding stability, it's been rock solid."
"The backup is very good. In other backup systems, you need a lot of storage to gain the same backup policy."
"Our customers have come to trust IBM."
"It is scalable beyond anything my customers ever aspire to."
"It covers all the different operating systems. If you need backup, it can pretty much do everything."
"SPIR is Instant Recovery for Spectrum Protect. It sends snapshots 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."
"The addition of the retention set feature provides a reduction in storage costs. It also reduces RTO and RPO so that you can respond quickly to your clients and services in case of data loss."
"There are so many features, but if I have to choose, I would go for scale-out upgrades and performance. Scale-out upgrades are very valuable. Typically, when customers engage in virtualization, they're committing themselves to run many virtual machines on a fewer number of hosts. They'll have five or six hosts, and they will run all their virtualization on vSphere. They could be having anywhere from 50 to 100 or even more virtual machines. Once all these go into production, getting downtime or getting planned maintenance windows is extremely difficult. It is something that typically businesses will frown upon. With VxRail, you can just go ahead and add a node without disrupting the existing environment, which works very well. That's why scale-out upgrades are a key feature. Its performance is also valuable. It delivers a very high number of IOPS for a hybrid configuration or an all-flash configuration. The processors that are available in the Xeon family are very powerful. They are multi-core with typically 2 gigahertz, 2.4 gigahertz, or higher frequency, so the performance is very much appreciated."
"I like that there is a dependency on the storage controller."
"The solution is perfect for the lifecycle management of hardware."
"It helps our servers and it is very efficient."
"The solution is stable and reliable. This is one of the main reasons why we purchased this solution."
"Offers zero-day deployment"
"The low latency and response times and having a virtualized environment within a single computer are valuable. I have no physical elements, and I can optimize or balance my data depending on the sales volume that I have in a specific store."
"Our clients value being able to upgrade with one click or a few clicks."
"The only thing that I would like to have a little more of is insight in reporting. I find that Spectrum Protect needs a lot of monitoring, and I have to actually log into the servers."
"Any feature that is compliant with virtualizing the application should be improved."
"The installation process could be simplified."
"It is not easy to manage like other products in the market. It is okay only if you are command-line driven. Even though the operation center is there, it doesn't provide a single view of everything. You have to, for example, use TSMManager on top of it, which gives you a far better management capability, but it is a third-party product. Its management needs to be improved. There should be an HTML or graphical interface. It is a very difficult product. For example, you have a backup policy where you want a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly policy standard. It is an old kind of system where you have to keep retention for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups, which is very difficult in IBM Spectrum Protect. In other products, in a matter of five minutes, you can configure such a policy. In TSM, it takes you one, two, or three days because you need to configure a node for each of them. If you have 250 nodes, you have to configure each node for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly retention. If you have 1,000 nodes, it is going to take you ages just to configure and register the nodes. You need to configure the schedule and the CAD daemons or services, depending on whether it is a Unix or Windows OS. Unfortunately, it is a very long and drawn-out process. You have to stop and start the services for changes to take effect. This is a very difficult part of TSM in IBM Spectrum Protect. To configure a backup policy, I should be able to select the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly options in one screen and finish it. After that, everything should happen in the background. All the backup products in the market already do that, and they are very simple to manage. This particular part of this solution has really been a major pain area for us, and unfortunately, we could not find a workaround. There is nobody at IBM who can give us a way to configure all this easily through a GUI or even scripts."
"It does not do too well in our virtual environment."
"I want to see better compression than what it currently does."
"Restoring massive files is a very time-consuming process."
"The product’s recovery process in terms of agent installation needs improvement"
"When it comes to maintenance, it takes 16 hours to upgrade a 12 node VxRail plus. This could be improved in the system."
"The solution should offer more integration with other virtual software. VxRail runs just with VMware, however, maybe it should integrate with Hyper-V or with KVM as well."
"The fact that is based on vSAN is the main issue of this solution."
"The technical support is good but could be better."
"There are still some features which aren't built into Cisco, like virtualized networking, that use its applications. However, these can be purchased through another product as an additional licensing cost to us."
"I would like to see Dell take a crack at simplifying the process of moving from a node to a cluster and assembling everything into the appliance. It would be great if Dell could provide a pathway where a customer could actually install it without the certifications. Of course, I can't say how you would dumb down something so complex."
"The full solution is not completely included as a bundle, such as we see with SimpliVity."
"They're getting better with their one-click upgrade. The success factor is now between 85% to 87% with the latest release. They should just continuously improve on that one-click factor and make it more seamless."
IBM Spectrum Protect is ranked 17th in Backup and Recovery with 146 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 121 reviews. IBM Spectrum Protect is rated 8.0, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Protect writes "Performance and recoveries are better, and customers are happier with performance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". IBM Spectrum Protect is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, Commvault Cloud, Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) and Cohesity DataProtect, whereas VxRail is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged.
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