We evaluated Veritas and Dell's EMC with the main appliance and network. One reason for going with IBM was the integration with IBM systems which make up our major landscape. Another reason has to do with the time it takes to restore the system. IBM won the POC for restoring and backing up as quickly as possible.

We have evaluated other backup solutions from three or four vendors. Two that I can recall are Veeam and Veritas. Veritas Backup and Replication is a very popular one.

We also evaluated the Data Domain Appliance and NetWorker from Dell EMC.

The whole idea of buying from IBM was integration with the landscape. Also, the time used to restore a system from backup is very quick. During our POC, IBM won in this aspect.

The price that we paid for IBM was much cheaper than it would have been for the EMC or Veritas products.

Our customers do evaluate other vendors, especially Commvault. We also cannot ignore Veritas and EMC NetWorker Solutions. These solutions sometimes evaluate our base on pricing or function. It depends on the customer situation. It is different from customer to customer, as it is a bit difficult to change the backup software on the customer side. This is because it requires a lot of migration.

Some of our customers are planning to replace Veeam with the Spectrum Plus software. Veeam is a powerful tool and good for virtualization, but the price is lower for the IBM product.

We did evaluate other products before choosing this solution. We had a look at Veritas and another solution that works with VMware. We chose this solution because the price is lower than that of the other two. Also, we already had their hardware, including the server and tape libraries.

I have evaluated Rubrik and Veeam.