We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Protect and N-able Cove Data Protection 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."With Spectrum Protect, you can use any type of disk to back-end the repositories. It gave us flexibility to use whatever storage we wanted at our secondary site."
"Good deduplication and compression features."
"Some of the people in our group, like our DBAs and non-technical people, can restore some stuff themselves via Spectrum Protect. That is how simple it is."
"The main thing is to keep the data safe and in files, keep it on tape ready for a request from a bank, and it is working perfectly with all our hardware."
"With the new features that we have added, it has made a difference as far as faster recovery and speed."
"The licensing isn't very clear. They should work to simply or clarify the cost structure."
"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 work very closely together with IBM using their Support Center, but we have a strong contact in their development teams, and we have dedicated people from IBM working with us."
"What I like the most about it's the ease of use and the reliability that it has when copying information to the cloud."
"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."
"It provides a single dashboard for all types of data protection, we monitor everything through a single dashboard. It simplifies everything overall. It allows us to see everything, whether passing or failing any issues, any problems through a single pane of glass that we don't have to click through or adjust as we go forward."
"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 solution has reduced backup times by an immeasurable amount. Its backups are incremental, so you are only backing up data changes based on the last 24 hours or so. If you are also maintaining the stored images, the restores are also only incremental, happening in minutes. Whereas, with a lot of the other solutions that we have looked at, each time it goes to refresh the restore, then it has to build a completely new image. That takes forever. This solution also improves recovery time."
"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."
"We use a neat feature called VDR status, Virtual Disaster Recovery status. It only works on servers... It's automated. Once or twice a month it will virtually mount the backup and provide a screenshot and advise whether or not there have been any errors."
"The product is simple to use and manage. The customers have access to verify the backups."
"The solution needs to work on disaster recovery integration. Basically, VMware applications to the cloud, for example. There needs to be integration with the storage, and integration with VMware."
"No one can fix every solution for backup and restore."
"The reporting could be better."
"It would be helpful if the solution included some sort of ransomware protection."
"IBM Spectrum Protect does have a lot of the features that we need, but I think they need to improve their backup virtualization and backup for container."
"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."
"This solution does not have good support for virtualization and a hyper-converged environment."
"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."
"The reporting feature and functionality need improvement. We would like to see a little bit more detailed reporting that offers more CEO or C-level focused reporting options."
"An area for improvement that would really work out well would be if there were a little bit more of an elegant handshake relationship between SolarWinds RMM and the PCs that are being backed up, to advise regarding "up" status... Since RMM is an agent that feeds back that a machine is alive and on, I don't see any reason why they can't either tap into that one feature or build the same exact polling within the backup agent, to update right away and say the system is online or offline."
"A feature I'd like to see would be a more customizable admin console."
"For small amounts of data, recovery is easy, but when it's large amounts of data, it takes forever. So, if they can have a service where they put our data on a hard drive and ship it to us as fast as possible, it would be great. Even if there's a fee associated with it, it's fine."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The recovery side, the restore side, could be a little more optimized."
IBM Spectrum Protect is ranked 17th in Backup and Recovery with 146 reviews while N-able Cove Data Protection is ranked 7th in Backup and Recovery with 20 reviews. IBM Spectrum Protect is rated 8.0, while N-able Cove Data Protection 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 N-able Cove Data Protection writes "Provides feature flexibility and modularity for our customers". IBM Spectrum Protect is most compared with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, Veeam Backup & Replication, Commvault Cloud, Rubrik and Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain), whereas N-able Cove Data Protection is most compared with Acronis Cyber Protect, Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, Azure Backup and MSP360 Backup. See our IBM Spectrum Protect vs. N-able Cove Data Protection report.
See our list of best Backup and Recovery vendors.
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.
