We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Protect and Veritas Backup Exec based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Backup and Recovery solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It provides our customers with the comfort of having reliable enterprise data protection."
"Forever incremental - allows TSM to optimize storage needs."
"Data reduction definitely reduces costs, not only software costs, but from the infrastructure needed."
"We've found the product to be quite stable and the performance is very good."
"In the past, one of the most valuable features, and the biggest advantage, was the incremental forever feature. Not many other backup vendors provided that. In the pre-virtualization environment, it was very robust and simple technology, especially writing to tape."
"What I found most valuable in IBM Spectrum Protect is that it allows you to back up physical machines, and its proxy feature lets you back up virtual machines."
"The solution can back up every kind of workload in the environment."
"The licensing isn't very clear. They should work to simply or clarify the cost structure."
"Once the solution is integrated with the Exchange, you just click Exchange to back up that file."
"Veritas Backup Exec is easily managed."
"It's quite stable, and so far, we have had no technical issues with Veritas Backup Exec."
"The solution is very fast. It does not take a long time to backup everything."
"The most valuable feature is the user-friendly interface."
"The most important feature is the variety of backup applications it supports, including ERP systems and most other programs, such as Microsoft."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to back up IBM Power virtual servers."
"The solution is good for small and medium-sized businesses."
"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."
"For Spectrum Protect Plus, I would like to see more enhanced reporting features and integration with Spectrum Protect."
"Ease of use. That has got to be the one thing that I routinely hear from clients and customers, that it's a little bit more difficult than it should be. What I'm finding is that IBM has heard that and they're responding with updated interfaces and things like that."
"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."
"I think Spectrum Protect's interface is not so user-friendly, but the interface is not so friendly. Some of the functions are too complicated. I prefer a simpler solution."
"Scalability is poor. As you get to bigger environments, this is where our gaps have been introduced. As we have grown over the past couple of years, the gaps have become more apparent."
"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."
"I should be able to backup Linux. I would like SUSE for Linux on POWER. Right now, we have to use Storex, which is a pain to use."
"The licensing packet is confusing. If Veritas could do a better job of clarifying it, that would be helpful."
"It's not too stable for client-server architecture. Center Management is not so interactive, and then there are some issues regarding the complex licensing which needs improvement."
"Enhanced support for cloud backup needs to be added."
"The solution could improve and adapt to new applications in the market so we can integrate Veritas Backup Exec with them to facilitate backup processes within these applications."
"It doesn't support the AIX platform."
"If you keep it for too long and the catalog gets really big, the application tends to move slowly."
"Veritas Backup Exec should be more user-friendly. The costs should also be much lower and it should be easier to go through the disaster recovery process."
"A web console would be great because nowadays a lot of products are web-based and you can access the console from various environments. So I would recommend bringing this feature in the next solution."
IBM Spectrum Protect is ranked 17th in Backup and Recovery with 146 reviews while Veritas Backup Exec is ranked 15th in Backup and Recovery with 71 reviews. IBM Spectrum Protect is rated 8.0, while Veritas Backup Exec is rated 7.8. 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 Veritas Backup Exec writes "Highly stable, intuitive design, and integrates well". IBM Spectrum Protect is most compared with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, Veeam Backup & Replication, Commvault Cloud, Cohesity DataProtect and Rubrik, whereas Veritas Backup Exec is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Veritas NetBackup, Acronis Cyber Protect, Commvault Cloud and Veritas System Recovery. See our IBM Spectrum Protect vs. Veritas Backup Exec report.
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