We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Protect, IBM Tivoli CDP for Files, and Veritas Backup Exec 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 has a lot more capabilities and functions than a lot of other products. Even though it is more complex, the reason is because it gives you a lot more features. This is what I prefer, especially for a long retention."
"We are able to run it in an enterprise quite easily with one or two resources."
"The customization and the ability to backup across all platforms are the most valuable features."
"The licensing isn't very clear. They should work to simply or clarify the cost structure."
"The platform’s most valuable feature is its ability to verify the recoverability of backups."
"It covers all the different operating systems. If you need backup, it can pretty much do everything."
"Technical support is okay. We have not had many issues with them."
"The D2D2T archive of my PACS data improved after I put Spectrum Protect 8.1.4 into production."
"The restoration and infrastructure is extremely reliable."
"The flexibility is very good."
"It is a good backup tool."
"It's quite stable, and so far, we have had no technical issues with Veritas Backup Exec."
"I have found the overall features of the solution very good and there is the option to backup to the cloud."
"The solution is good for small and medium-sized businesses."
"The product is good in a small environment when looking to a backup on a tape."
"We are satisfied with the stability of the product."
"Once the solution is integrated with the Exchange, you just click Exchange to back up that file."
"The solution is evolving, so it has to be evolved to fit all new types of software requirements too."
"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."
"I am not really impressed with the Level 1 support, but once I get past that and go to Level 2, then we will usually get some type of resolution."
"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."
"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."
"I find the solution somewhat difficult to use with virtual environments or VMware."
"Integration with some applications in the healthcare field could be added, as that is a big part of our business."
"We would like to have the opportunity to omit data from being backed up. For example, we have three virtual machines, each with three disks. When running the backup, it will automatically take each disk rather than allowing us to select what data we want backed."
"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."
"Something within the software itself isn't quite right. There may be a bug or glitch. It will work fine for weeks and then all of a sudden it just tanks."
"The deduplication feature can be improved."
"Veritas Backup Exec should improve by having a user portal that customers can use."
"The licensing packet is confusing. If Veritas could do a better job of clarifying it, that would be helpful."
"The one thing which could be improved, which we have informed Veritas about, is the ability to plug in to the cloud. Meaning, instead of using local storage if we're backing up a small user or end user, we want to be able to make it so they can direct the backups directly to the cloud. It can't be done at the moment. We can only back up to the storage then replicate to the cloud, but we cannot use the cloud as a source of storage."
"There still a lot of room for improvement in synthetic technologies, especially when targeted to deduplication media."
"The EDR should be looked at, as the operating system is too weak."
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