We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Protect, N-able Cove Data Protection, and NetApp SnapCenter based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Veeam Software, Zerto, Commvault and others in Backup and Recovery."Traditional storage works perfectly with it."
"It scales from very small to very large. It is easily the most scalable product out there."
"Every time we go and try to get a file, we can get it. Restores are quick and the data is always there."
"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."
"It is good in terms of functionality. My clients are very satisfied with this solution."
"It is very stable. A plus is to use POWERAge for the SNR copy of the Spectrum Protect, then it is more reliable."
"It saves you a lot of storage."
"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 monitoring makes it very easy to check whether a backup has gone bad."
"I know I won't have an issue if the data is there. The reliability and the confidence that we have is amazing. It doesn't matter. We've had customers have ransomware. We've had customers that have had corruption. We've had customers that have had employees destroy their data. As long as it's been backed up, I know that I can get it back and I know I have nothing to worry about. Our confidence level is very high."
"The product is simple to use and manage. The customers have access to verify the backups."
"One of the bigger features and advantages of the solution is that it is easy to integrate with my RMM which is also N-able."
"The most valuable feature by far is the Virtual Disaster Recovery. On top of that is the bare-metal recovery. The recovery options that we have are great. We have tested the Virtual Disaster Recovery and the bare-metal recovery in just about any scenario you can think of. We have even restored bare metal, a full server, to a laptop, and had full functionality. It's just insane how well it works and how simple it is. It does most of the work for you."
"The most valuable feature is that it's hands-off. I log in every morning and there are pre-canned filters that I've created to make my life easier. I have something called server status color bars, and that gives me all the servers and, in a nutshell, I can see: if any errors are being reported; when the last backup was; if one is not working, should there be one, and it literally jumps off the page."
"The user interface is the most valuable. It gives us the ability to check everything. With more than 100 endpoints running that software, I like the ability to quickly check that everything is working correctly. That's one of the biggest selling points."
"For starters, this is one of few databases that allow us to backup MySQL databases, most others only support Microsoft SQL. This solution also has a very user-friendly interface accessed through a web browser. Additionally, backups can be easily configured through N-able Backup."
"It allows us to easily take a Snapshot and use it with any backup tools. We can also take Snapshots on the application side. We can also take Snapshots on the application side. If we want to restore an SAP or an Oracle machine, a normal Snapshot won't do it, but we can do so with SnapCenter."
"It's integrated with VMware vCenter. You can also see the backups there and you can do a restore completely out of vCenter."
"What is very handy for our clients is the consolidated view. They have a dashboard with everything, through a single pane of glass. This is what they really need because, within seconds, they can have a good overview and see if there are any errors or any issues."
"Being able to add everything in as resource groups is a valuable feature... Having all the SQL servers put into specific buckets, based on their year of release - 2008, 2012, 2014 - allows us to get almost immediate backups that are easily seen and reported on."
"The most valuable feature is the RBAC, the Role-Based Access Control. In our managed service, we can have different layers of security."
"It has greatly improved our DR activity."
"We have been very satisfied with the technical support's help. Their knowledge level is great. For a noncritical question, they will get back to us within a day."
"The Exchange plugin is the most valuable because we have a lot of customers that use SnapManager Exchange and have to migrate to SnapCenter."
"It needs some software upgrades to fix some of its current bugs."
"They need to do a better job on Windows, because if you are running Windows, the scalability is more limited than AIX and Linux."
"I would like to advance reporting and analytics for the platform to see how much data is coming into the platform. how much data is expiring everyday, and what tape savings we are getting through reclamation."
"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."
"The features should be a little bit closer together."
"The GUI has long been a problem for TSM/Spectrum Protect."
"The solution should have better integration with VMware and with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus."
"Probably educating the virtual group who are not as used to the product. Most of our expertise is with AIX servers and virtual server backups."
"We would like to have better reporting."
"Integration with a hybrid cloud is something that I found complicated."
"The one thing they don't are Linux servers, it's Windows only. I understand that directive. I have another product that I use for our Linux servers and stuff, but it would be nice if they had that flexibility on the Linux side. I understand the development and the world is geared towards Windows in 365, I know that's where the clienteles are and the business and the money is."
"The only area that needs improvement is that it is a little bit difficult when you get into virtual machines. The initial deployment of Cove is a little tedious, not for standard machines, but when you get into specialty stuff, like Hyper-V."
"A disaster recovery console would be an improvement for the product."
"N-able Cove Data Protection for Microsoft 365 is an area with shortcomings that need improvement."
"This solution is not very good for image restores, mainly just files. The solution also does not allow you to enable or disable backups. Sometimes, our users will connect via mobile device and it will use their data to perform the backup. If they were able to enable and disable the backup, they would not have this issue."
"One area I don't like has to do with the agent that goes on the system... if a system stays offline for some length of time, say for a week or so, I may have to go back in and reinstall the agent to get it back in business. I don't know what's causing that."
"I'm waiting for SnapCenter for hybrid solutions. Right now, we only have SnapManager for hybrid. I need agents for that. People are looking to install SnapCenter in a SQL environment, but where they're running SQL on Hyper-V and using virtual files. Currently, we don't have support for hybrid."
"I want to see a few more features add that will help our team in managing solution better."
"We have experience some difficulties with our current support. We are engaging in engineering level support because some of our problems are more technical."
"The documentation could be a little bit better so that we could handle more of the troubleshooting ourselves, rather than having to go through support."
"The UI, the User Interface, needs to be improved. It's not as clean or modern as it could be."
"I feel a little bit that during the whole process of putting this software into production we were like a beta program. It was full of bugs... For example, we had a problem with truncating our Exchange log files... It has improved over time."
"Since the solution's initial setup is complex, it should make training documents available in the public space."
"There is one area that needs improvement and that's in the alerting. When you set up your SMTP alerts, it only has - and I don't understand why - the ability to send an anonymous SMTP. It doesn't do basic authentication, which frustrated me for a while until I figured out that I'm not missing something. It's just not there."
