IBM Spectrum Protect vs Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Protect and Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

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Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"With the new features that we have added, it has made a difference as far as faster recovery and speed.""Our performance is better.""The ability to migrate between media over a long period of time. My customers are long-time users, and they have benefited from being able to move between tiers. They have been able to do this within the product.""The backup on real-time, especially for the virtual machine, archiving, and retrieving the reader from the backup repository and getting it online, getting it validated, then performing the data consistency check over the backup.""Spectrum Protect's best feature is that I can use it practically anywhere, on any platform, and for any servers or clients.""Support of the IBM X platform and the backup data replication to DR are the most valuable features.""Once setup, you do not need to touch it again. You just need to do a formal check on possibly batch updates.""The product is very stable."

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"The most valuable feature is disaster recovery, where we have the ability to boot up VMs quickly in a disaster.""The overall ease of use and management of the solution using the Infrascale Dashboard is very good. We haven't had any issues. It is easy to learn. Most of our techs who deal with backups are usually up and running with the dashboard within a day or so. They don't have a lot of buried features where you have to dig through things to get to the resolution. It is pretty self-explanatory.""The recovery of data is the most valuable feature. The software backup, which is just a program that gets installed on a server, can back up to the cloud. You can install that on a server or PC, and that will simply back up a user's files and folders. If it is installed on the server, we just back up the relevant data. Recovering that, if there has been a malicious attack on a business or anything like that, has been invaluable in the past. The good features about that are obviously, if the physical hardware has a problem, then we can utilize the appliance, turn on the virtual machine, and carry on running the business while we put the hardware back and correct the issue.""The Infrascale Dashboard is very easy to understand, has a good overview, and gives me access to all my appliances without having to have a local VPN connection to the individual clients. It makes it very easy to find my way around.""Its Critical Server Insurance feature for protecting physical and virtual servers, including Windows, Linux, VMware, and Hyper-V is mandatory for me and it makes me happy. If I had a backup solution that didn't do that, it would not be a backup solution and would not be any good.""Given that we are in the hurricane belt, the spin-up of replicated servers in the cloud is among the most valuable features. If our site goes down we can just connect to the cloud appliance, spin up the servers, and we are good to go.""The most valuable feature is the ability to boot locally, as well as in Infrascale's cloud. This means that we can either do on-site failover or failover to their cloud.""For this particular client, the solution’s Critical Server Insurance feature that protects physical and virtual servers including Windows, Linux, VMware, and Hyper-V, was a very big factor as well. They have a bunch of physical servers, as well as virtual. The mix is predominantly virtual. They also have some NAS boxes that we back up using Infrascale."

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Cons
"I want to see better compression than what it currently does.""I would like a little more ease with the virtual platforms, because it is a huge thing that is coming up.""Easier configuration of some of the products, e.g., VE comes to mind.""Needs more support for non-mainstream databases, in particular PostgreSQL, SQL, and MySQL.""An area for improvement would be the ease of use - the GUI is not up to the mark compared to other products in the market.""Getting technical support all the necessary diagnostic information is still very painful.""We need better protection from ransomware or the ability to identify ways we can protect ourselves from ransomware. Having backups is one thing, but specifically, we need methods to recover if we have a ransomware attack.""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."

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"They set me up as a vendor, not as a client. So sometimes I end up in the wrong portal and I'm doing vendor things instead of client things, and I didn't realize that right away. Once I figured it out I just changed my favorites on my desktop to go to the client-side.""I would like to see more features for the section on the viruses and maybe another in reference to two-factor authentication.""The only thing I would suggest, and I have talked to my manager about it already, is that they should have a direct backup-to-cloud solution. It should be something that does not require me to do an image backup, and then individual file and folder backups, to be able to restore individual files.""Having options to replicate between their data centers, once the data is offsite, would be an improvement that they could make.""There could be some room for improvement in the on-premises hardware selection. It is hard for them to deploy a lot of different hardware options. Depending on footprint size and overall capabilities, that is where there could be some flexibility in some cases. However, it is not a deal-breaker.""One of the significant drawbacks of it is due to the fact that we're using two devices to manage the same vCenter, or virtualization environment, and they don't talk to each other. That means I can't easily see what VMs are already being protected. If I'm on Infrascale device "A" and I have protected these VMs, when I go over to device "B," I can't see that those VMs are already covered.""There is room for improvement by making the interface a little more intuitive when navigating to recover flat files or an old server.""When you are ordering hardware appliances, they have to be delivered from America. In the past, hard drives on the appliance have been simple SSD drives that are installed. However, they don't have a local supply for the SSD drives in the UK. They have to be exported from the US, arrive, and then I have to go and install them. Then, they will rebuild it from their side of things. However, I could order that same SSD drive online and get it the next day. So, I have to wait days for things to come when I could get the exact same drive the next day in the UK, if I wanted to. That causes a bit of a problem. I don't know how many businesses they have in the UK, but I do think that having to import stuff from the US is a time-consuming problem. If there was a holding in the UK, then we wouldn't have that delay in time."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Technical support is pretty good. It is doing fine, but you pay for it."
  • "Licensing can be either complicated or simple depending on what type of licensing you wish to use and what works best for your environment."
  • "At scale, the consumption license (per TB) is very expensive."
  • "Use capacity licensing. It's easier and cheaper."
  • "We worked our licensing into a capacity model, which is nice. Now, everything is much simpler to manage from a licensing perspective.​"
  • "We chose IBM Spectrum Protect, because they actually have something called MSP pricing, which means managed services provider pricing. The pricing was attractive, and it seems to be a platform that IBM is totally investing on in terms of new functions and new capabilities."
  • "Spectrum Protect is not expensive, and it is simple to use."
  • "It is very scalable, but the downside is that it costs money."
  • More IBM Spectrum Protect Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Our licensing fees are billed every four months."
  • "You get unlimited clients and buy a bucket of space. In addition to the standard fees there were setup fees."
  • "The licensing is based on how much data you have plus what appliances you need."
  • "The pricing is fair, and they are interested in working with MSPs as part of their market."
  • "The appliances have different prices because of storage, size, and memory. For example, the older machines support more virtual machines, whereas the new one only supports one virtual machine. As we have purchased the later appliances, they have probably been a little bit more expensive because they have to be good enough to keep the business running if the physical server goes down. We learned our lesson from the one that went down when we tried to run products and it wasn't quick enough."
  • "It is super competitive. It is worth taking a look at it from a licensing and pricing perspective."
  • "Pricing of the product could be improved. It definitely makes it a harder sell. They will usually end up getting close to the price we need, but I have to go through everybody to get the price reduced. Their list pricing is significantly higher than that of other solutions."
  • "Infrascale's pricing, to me, was outstanding and was one of the major factors in my decision to go with Infrascale... My customer had a different solution before and his monthly payment was three times as much as the payment he now has with Infrascale."
  • More Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Customers need a clearer understanding of how to implement IBM Spectrum. However, issues revolve around financial constraints. If you lack the correct service contract, resolving problems can be… more »
    Top Answer:The initial setup was straightforward and we received support from the manufacturer.
    Top Answer:The licensing for Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery is monthly.
    Top Answer:I think they could increase security. I would like to see more features for the section on the viruses and maybe another in reference to two-factor authentication.
    Ranking
    17th
    out of 133 in Backup and Recovery
    Views
    7,375
    Comparisons
    5,217
    Reviews
    16
    Average Words per Review
    601
    Rating
    7.3
    38th
    out of 133 in Backup and Recovery
    Views
    517
    Comparisons
    347
    Reviews
    1
    Average Words per Review
    167
    Rating
    9.0
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
    Infrascale Platform
    Learn More
    Overview
    IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) is a data protection platform that gives enterprises a single point of control and administration for backup and recovery. It is the flagship product in the IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) family. It enables reliable, cost effective backups and fast recovery for virtual, physical and cloud environments of all sizes.

    Infrascale overcomes the complexity of creating backup and disaster recovery solutions without sacrificing performance and reliability. We provide fast, secure recovery that enables customers to feel confident that their data is fully protected from any type of disaster, whether it be operational, environmental, or malicious. Infrascale provides data protection for SaaS applications, endpoints, and servers.

    SaaS BACKUP

    Protect Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Box, Dropbox, and Salesforce data from accidental deletion and malicious attacks. Infrascale Cloud Application Backup (ICAB) provides customers with essential data protection that isn’t included in their SaaS provider’s limited retention policies. It also protects the broadest set of SaaS applications and delivers ease of use and ease of deployment.

    ENDPOINT BACKUP

    Direct-to-cloud backup and recovery solution for endpoints. Infrascale Cloud Backup (ICB) provides unlimited retention and version history, MSI installer and single pane of glass management, and ransomware anomaly detection. This delivers ease of use, ease of management, and protection from cybersecurity threats.

    SERVER BACKUP AND DISASTER RECOVERY

    Boot ready in minutes to run your systems when they go down due to any reason including server crashes, ransomware attacks, or natural disasters. Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery (IBDR) provides boot-ready time for failover that averages 2 minutes as well as unlimited disaster recovery and failover testing. In order to eliminate downtime and data loss, IBDR also provides a centrally managed Infrascale Management Dashboard.

    Sample Customers
    CERN, Einstein Healthcare, Nyherji, Allianz Australia, TZM, ABT Online, NCT, Kindred Healthcare Inc., Cobalt Iron, TransGrid, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Cash America, Piedmont Healthcare, RWGV, Arkansas Tech University, British Columbia Institute of Technology
    MSPs servicing small and mid-size companies VARs servicing mid-sized companies Direct SMB or mid-sized companies
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Healthcare Company13%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Insurance Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Retailer8%
    Government8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Real Estate/Law Firm8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business31%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise55%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise65%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business100%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business36%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise51%
    Buyer's Guide
    Backup and Recovery
    April 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Veeam Software, Zerto, Commvault and others in Backup and Recovery. Updated: April 2024.
    768,578 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    IBM Spectrum Protect is ranked 17th in Backup and Recovery with 146 reviews while Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery is ranked 38th in Backup and Recovery with 11 reviews. IBM Spectrum Protect is rated 8.0, while Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery is rated 9.2. 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 Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery writes "If the physical hardware has a problem, then we can utilize this appliance, turn on the virtual machine, and carry on running the business while correcting the issue". IBM Spectrum Protect is most compared with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, Veeam Backup & Replication, Commvault Cloud, Cohesity DataProtect and Rubrik, whereas Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Commvault Cloud, Acronis Cyber Protect and Datto Cloud Continuity.

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    We monitor all Backup and Recovery reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.