We compared Acronis Cyber Protect and IBM Spectrum Protect based on user reviews in five categories. We reviewed all of the data and you can find the conclusion below.
Features: Acronis Cyber Protect is lauded for its versatility, comprehensive malware protection, and effortless data retrieval. IBM Spectrum Protect is highly regarded for its ability to integrate with tape libraries and its customization options. Users also praised Spectrum Protect for its compatibility with various products, scalability, and stability. Cyber Protect could improve its ability to back up SQL databases, reduce resource usage, resolve conflicts, and improve management features. IBM Spectrum Protect could improve its integration with cloud services and make its interface more user-friendly.
Service and Support: Some users had positive things to say about Acronis customer service, while others were dissatisfied with delayed responses and limited real-time support options. IBM’s customer service is described as high quality, friendly, knowledgeable, and responsive. At the same time, some said the support process can be lengthy.
Ease of Deployment: Some users thought Cyber Protect was simple to deploy, but others considered it challenging. IBM Spectrum Protect's initial setup is challenging and demands skilled professionals to configure multiple parameters and features. This process can be time-consuming.
Pricing: Reviewers say Acronis Cyber Protect is affordable, but some noted that the pricing could be more transparent. IBM Spectrum Protect is considered expensive. The pricing model is complex, taking into account factors like processor type and volume.
ROI: Users say that Acronis Cyber Protect is a worthwhile investment, saving money while safeguarding critical data. Users have realized benefits from IBM Spectrum Protect’s data protection and retrieval. They appreciate its ability to reduce storage requirements with larger tape sizes.
Comparison Results: Acronis Cyber Protect is a versatile solution that saves customers money and enables easy data recovery. While reviews of Cyber Protect were generally positive, there were mixed reviews about support, pricing, and setup. Users also said it could improve its SQL support and management capabilities. IBM Spectrum Protect is a reliable, customizable solution that allows smooth integration with tape libraries. At the same time, some say that the user interface could be more intuitive and Spectrum Protect could integrate better with the cloud.
"It is a very stable solution."
"The administration is pretty flexible in terms of defining a multi-tenant type of setup."
"The best thing about it is that we can back up pretty much everything we want to. We don't have to have multiple solutions. It can back up any physical or virtual server, including servers in Azure. It can back up SharePoint, OneDrive, and G Suite. Everything we need to back up can be backed up, and that's why we like it."
"The most valuable feature is the extra protection, especially for the backup."
"The most valuable feature is its ability to back up and recover our production environment from ransomware."
"Universal Restore is valuable to us."
"The ability to clone backups."
"Consistency and reliability. The interface is easy to understand and consistent across applications. While not 100%, it is a very reliable backup solution."
"We are talking about a stable solution which boasts good performance and security."
"Its flexibility is valuable. It is a very flexible solution. There are always more ways than one to do something. It is a software solution, which means you can buy your own hardware and expand it whenever you want. You are not boxed in or locked into something you've bought and outgrown. You can always expand it."
"The most valuable features are compression and de-duplication."
"It has to ability to backup DV2, Oracle, and Informix."
"We've found the product to be quite stable and the performance is very good."
"The file-restoring feature is the most valuable."
"Everyone wants a full backup. It gives them safety and peace of mind, like an insurance policy for that rainy day when they may need to restore a system."
"Our customers have come to trust IBM."
"Their support process can be quite lengthy...This is an area that needs improvement."
"The solution's error handling can be improved specifically for Linux errors."
"I've had some issues with the understandability of the interface. I think if they had someone with expertise in user interfaces to look at this, they could clean up the user interface."
"I believe that the next release should be easier to configure as this one is difficult to configure even the easiest of tasks."
"We have issues with the SQL databases which are a little shaky."
"We have sometimes issues with the child copies and other similar functions, but it's normal with any backup solution. We need to fix those issues first in order for us to be able to do the backup properly."
"I wish Acronis had a feature that would allow me to set an expiry date for customers when I send them Acronis, such as when I create a customer workload or gigabyte."
"I would like to see better centralized management, because I use it across multiple clients. To have a console that centrally manages them would be nice."
"IBM Spectrum Protect could be improved by making the installation easier. Once it's implemented, it's okay. IBM started lagging behind when things started moving to storage and cloud-based solutions. Even though they've recently released updates that give cloud-based protection, personally, I still believe they are not up to par with the likes of Rubrik. The entire product is a little bit clumsy because they have co-joined two different products, so it's complex. Even from a sales/explaining to people what it does point of view, it's complex. Whereas, if you take more current products, it's a single box solution. You reel it in, you fire it up, you do a couple of points and clicks, and off you go, whereas the IBM system is seriously complex. There's a lot of training involved and it's a massively difficult product to sell at this point in time."
"It has a lot of areas for improvement. Its reporting for job completion or incompletion can be improved. It should also provide a granular recovery, ease of operation, data life cycle management, and media management. It should support a backup in such a format that in case of a disaster, one can start the virtual machine out of the backup itself. Its reliability can also be better. It is also expensive, and their support is also poor."
"Its management part can be better and simplified. It is kind of a beast as compared to Commvault or Veeam, but they are more user-friendly. They are also easier to learn, whereas Spectrum Protect definitely takes time. They should simplify it. Our teams are pretty comfortable with it because we have been using it for a long time, but from the perspective of a new user who is evaluating or using this solution, it is definitely more complex in terms of manageability. Its monitoring could be improved so that it can even monitor the jobs that are scheduled by external schedulers. There are situations where a database team might decide to use their own schedulers, but currently, Spectrum Protect is not able to catch those jobs in the Operation Manager console."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in IBM Spectrum Protect, especially regarding its support for virtual environment backups."
"They should introduce more features for virtualization platforms and backing up IBMs. Backup speeds should also be improved."
"The features should be a little bit closer together."
"If IBM could provide a partial module, that would be great."
Acronis Cyber Protect is ranked 10th in Backup and Recovery with 117 reviews while IBM Spectrum Protect is ranked 17th in Backup and Recovery with 146 reviews. Acronis Cyber Protect is rated 8.2, while IBM Spectrum Protect is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Acronis Cyber Protect writes " Good backup solution but challenges with the stability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Protect writes "Performance and recoveries are better, and customers are happier with performance". Acronis Cyber Protect is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, Azure Backup and Commvault Cloud, whereas IBM Spectrum Protect is most compared with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, Veeam Backup & Replication, Commvault Cloud, Rubrik and Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain). See our Acronis Cyber Protect vs. IBM Spectrum Protect report.
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