IBM Spectrum Protect Pros and Cons

Performance and recoveries are better. Our clients and customers are happier with the performance of it.

From a tech perspective, utilizing deduplication is one of the most valuable features.

For initial setup, we started with the blueprints, which were great. The blueprints allowed us to be able to decide if we needed to use small, medium,k or large. Because we are a large environment, we used a large blueprint. Once we followed everything in the blueprint, it was a smooth transition from there.

Every time customers make a change or we have made a change, then they use the product to do a cloning and refreshing. They are happy that they get good performance something changes.

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.

One of the features which is most interesting in Spectrum Protect is the ability to scale out to great environments. This is something that not many vendors have on the market.

It is also a product that has been maturing for a long time. This is good because customers need reliability in their enterprise initiatives.

The solution is very stable. It is one of the most important features that we look for in a product before putting it into the market and when establishing a strategy with our customers.

The technical support for Spectrum Protect is very mature. It is very committed to giving a top-notch support experience.

Traditional storage works perfectly with it.

Our customers have come to trust IBM.

The best part of this solution is that it just works.

The fact that we can take the backup straight onto tape is the most valuable feature.

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.

Once setup, you do not need to touch it again. You just need to do a formal check on possibly batch updates.

They have recently added support tickets specifically engineered around performance. This has been very useful for us when we run into issues where customers are looking to try to squeeze a lot more horsepower out of older system.

Enterprise-wide type of architecture supports a lot of different platforms.

It integrates well with Spectrum Scale.

Our new leadership has pushed us to go more toward the cloud, so we are definitely going to leverage anything we can in that direction.

I would love to see something which allows us to do an auto restart of backup jobs.

Needs more support for non-mainstream databases, in particular PostgreSQL, SQL, and MySQL.

I would like to see monitoring within the platform: monitoring for storage pools and monitoring for the server's health (e.g., CPU and memory).

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.

No one can fix every solution for backup and restore.

The user interface needs to be improved.

We cannot take VMware backups for our banking data center environment.

They should have a proper technical support team serving the customers and get issues resolved earlier.

It needs better connectivity with other non-IBM application hardware and non-IBM platforms.

Integration with some applications in the healthcare field could be added, as that is a big part of our business.

High availability (HA) is a scalability challenge.