We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Protect and IBM Spectrum Protect Plus based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Users are split on which solution is best. Both perform well and function appropriately. Spectrum Protect is mature, stable, and robust. Spectrum Protect Plus is moving toward a next-generation product that offers more flexibility, improved features, better scalability, and ultimately provides more of what enterprise organizations desire for the future.
"Data archiving is easier and less time-consuming."
"Scalability: Our customers are able to grow the product without having to buy additional hardware, so it is very scalable."
"The solution is not complex, it's very easy to configure agents or VM backup and restore. Upgrades from one version to another are very fast and the product is very stable."
"It is also a product that has been maturing for a long time. This is good because customers need reliability in their enterprise initiatives."
"It is very stable. A plus is to use POWERAge for the SNR copy of the Spectrum Protect, then it is more reliable."
"You can do restores very quickly. You can mount a drive and restore it right from the drive."
"When I have to do disaster recoveries, I can do it with this tool."
"Disk-based implementation of a data protection solution for multiple sites is a better fit for my complex data protection needs."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is the deduplication functionality. The clients moved to this solution originally because of this feature."
"If the system were to go down, we needed to make sure that the system could be recovered and available as soon as possible. Spectrum Protect provides you access to directly bind the backup volume to the server and make the system available instead of restoring it and copying the system."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use."
"The most valuable features of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus are you have many possibilities on how to use it. We use it for backups and to create secondary and third copies. It is possible to pick up Kubernetes containers and use a different cloud provider if you need to start backups on the cloud."
"The feature I find most valuable is the offload to Spectrum Protect for long-term retention. I think the deduplication and replication are quite nice on Plus."
"This solution is very stable and has good support available online."
"This is a multi-platform backup solution where you can take a backup from AIX, Windows, or Linux servers and restore from CD, disk, or tape."
"The solution offers a very straightforward deployment. You click, click, click and it's done. There's not much configuration to do."
"We would like to see bare-metal restorers."
"We have run into some periods where we have found some tape issues which were causing us problems, but we resolved them. For some reason, we had a bunch of drives go offline on our disk storage (our virtual library)."
"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."
"The features should be a little bit closer together."
"This solution is not mature in terms of disaster recovery and could be improved."
"We are having a balance issue between the reclamation and the backup function. It has to take the space back from the tapes before it can record to those tapes, but sometimes those two processes are overlapping."
"My customers are not always happy with the Level 1 support. Sometimes, it just takes too long for the response to come, which is probably something that needs to be addressed."
"It might be seen as leaning towards the legacy side, missing some features of newer solutions. The main drawbacks would be its complexity and high pricing."
"I think the graphical reports are a shortcoming of the tool since it fails to provide my company with what we want in terms of reporting. Due to the product's inability to take care of its reporting part, we have to use third-party software."
"The solution should allow for backup of iOS snapshots."
"Rooms for improvement in IBM Spectrum Protect Plus are installation and configuration because those were difficult. They should try their best to improve those areas. In the next release of the product, better implementation and administration are what we're expecting."
"The tool needs to increase the number of threats."
"An area that needs improvement is data validation. We currently use another product that gives us immediate validation, information about when the last backup was, and no risk of corruption happening. TSM in IBM Spectrum is not mature so that you can validate on the spot."
"Instead of using the command prompt for troubleshooting and administering the backup, there should be an easy-to-use graphical user interface."
"The one issue we are facing is related to file restores."
"The replication feature is not available."
IBM Spectrum Protect is ranked 17th in Backup and Recovery with 146 reviews while IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is ranked 19th in Backup and Recovery with 28 reviews. IBM Spectrum Protect is rated 8.0, while IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is rated 8.0. 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 IBM Spectrum Protect Plus writes "Has very good integration features and can quickly backup data and optimize storage". IBM Spectrum Protect is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Commvault Cloud, Rubrik, Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) and Cohesity DataProtect, whereas IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Cohesity DataProtect, Nutanix Mine Integrated Backup, Veritas NetBackup and Rubrik. See our IBM Spectrum Protect vs. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus report.
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