IBM Spectrum Protect Reviews

We are using it for backing up corporate data.

It helps you protect your data with various retention policies, as required by the business. It would help the company maintain a disaster recovery plan and be able to recover from a failure.

Its incremental forever approach is valuable, so we don't have to load tapes to do a restore.

It does what we need it to do, but it could be better with VM backups. It could be better integrated with virtual machines or VM backups, but that's why they have their Plus out now. Plus version is more geared toward VM backups. The regular version is more for endpoint clients. 

Its licensing and pricing could be improved. Its licensing is complicated, and it is an expensive solution.

I have been using this solution for over 20 years.

Its stability is pretty good.

It is very scalable.

They're decent. They're fine. I would rate them an eight out of 10.

Positive

I have only been with IBM. I'm a consultant, so that's basically what I've worked on.

Its initial setup can be complicated. You would need a certified deployment expert to configure it and install it properly upfront. It isn't for a novice to be able to set up.

The deployment duration depends on the environment, but it typically takes about a week or two. Its maintenance also depends on the size of the company. If it is a small-sized or a medium-sized company, you could get away with one admin, but if it is larger, you might have more than one Spectrum Protect server, so you'd have multiple admins.

I am a consultant, so I would be the one who does the implementation.

Its licensing is complicated. It goes by CPUs, and it is pretty expensive as well.

I would advise others to do proper planning beforehand. You should know the retention policies that you want. You should know what policies you want to set before you go into it, and you should know how much data you're going to be backing up and then make sure it is sized properly.

I'll give it a nine out of 10. It is a good product.

We are using Spectrum as a backup solution. We use it to backup all of our data, which is different kinds of databases and software, with a virtualization environment. Also, we have more than a hundred remote sites. We are taking backups through Spectrum for all of those. 

The most valuable aspect is the fact that it combines all types of data. 

It's compatible with many other products, including Oracle, VMware, and Hyper V products.

The replication is great. 

The solution is robust and problem-free. We have not had any issues with Spectrum since we implemented it around 2012. 

The solution is very stable.

You can scale the product.

The management is pretty good and it covers all of our technical requirements. 

Technical support has been excellent. 

It's difficult in terms of the configuration at set up. In our case, it required another admin, one person dedicated to the backup.

Compared with others, the pricing is high.

There needs to be some sort of personalization within the environment. We cannot back up a shared storage desk through Spectrum.

I've used the solution since 2012 or 2014. I've used it for more than seven years at this point. It's been a while.

The solution is very stable and very reliable. We've had no issues with it. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. Over the years we have not had any issues. 

The solution can scale, however, it's a matter of the license you have. That said, if you need to expand, you can.

We've had a very positive experience with technical support. We are satisfied with their level of service. 

I also have experience with Dell EMC. I use them both.

The initial setup can be a bit complex, specifically in terms of configuring everything. We had to bring on an extra admin to assist us.

The solution is a bit expensive, especially if you look at other competitors. They cost less. The licensing could be more competitive. 

We are partners with IBM.

I would rate the solution at a ten out of ten. We've been very happy with its capabilities. 

We use it for our enterprise backups. By enterprise, I mean Oracle, SAP, and all other business-critical applications.

Initially, we started using Spectrum for backing up our business-critical applications, such as SAP running on AIX, and then we had Oracle RAC clusters. We also had Veeam for VMware, but then IBM Spectrum came up with their version of the virtual environment. IBM was initially not into the virtual environment, but over a period of time, they got into this.

IBM is providing us a good and cost-effective solution. We also get more robustness for daily backup where we can restore a virtual machine, just like Commvault and Veeam. 

We have been using it for several years, and it is quite reliable and predictable. We are quite comfortable with this solution. They're coming up with new features as well. 

It has good scalability, and it provides good integrations with business-critical applications or databases, such as SAP HANA. It works as expected, and we don't see any issues.

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.

I have been using this solution for more than ten years.

We have been using it for several years now, and it is very good in terms of stability and reliability.

It is scalable.

We don't have any issues with technical support. They're okay, and we're fine with their support.

We also use Veeam, which is mainly for the virtual environment. IBM Spectrum covers everything. It covers virtual and physical environments and heavy databases and applications such as SAP HANA. We are using Veeam only for a subset of our environment. 

Its initial setup is complex and not very easy. The deployment duration depends on a lot of factors, but generally, one week should be enough.

It is not very intuitive, and you can't do it all by yourself. You need someone for initial deployment. We have a seller who helps us out. This solution has been here with us for years, so our team is now comfortable implementing it, but it is still not that intuitive that you can do it all by yourself.

Its licensing is complex, and its price is not really reasonable. It is on the expensive side. IBM, in general, is slightly expensive, but with IBM Spectrum for the virtual environment, they are looking into the aspect of helping customers with the cost and providing a cost-effective solution.

It is a reliable tool. It has been there for so many years. It is a good solution that provides many options. I would recommend this solution for large-scale environments with mission-critical applications running on complex hardware, such as AIX.

I would rate IBM Spectrum Protect an eight out of ten.

It is performing very well. However, our customer feedback is the product is very complex, and mainly built for the enterprise customer. They will need to do some developments on the Spectrum Protect, especially on the Plus series. Maybe on Spectrum Protect, they can simplify it, so the admin can get more easily access the console, and generate jobs and alerts.

As a product, it is very nice. People love it, but the only issue is it requires a very unique/rare skill set. 

80% of the core business is running on-prem, and some of the applications which are add-on, go on the cloud. This is a mixture: 80% is on-premise, which is non-critical.

The problem with moving to the cloud is the government compliance agreements. The government says the data should not leave the country, or if the data is leaving Iran, it should be encrypted and no one else can read it. This is why Amazon is coming with their data center. Once it is live, all the Ministry's data should be part of Amazon and it should not go out. Those are the compliance issues with the Ministry.

We manage approximately 20 customers, except Saudi Arabia.

Especially for the banking and ministry sectors, they have core businesses running and they can't have a single bit of data corruption or data loss. This is a very important product for them, because it gives ease of access and the type of data consistency where they can rely on it and its safe on-hand. When there is a need or a disaster, they can get the information back from the archive. So, it is very much required.

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.

• I would like the users to have a better experience with the product.
• Easier recovery
• It needs better connectivity with other non-IBM application hardware and non-IBM platforms. If it can get connected with other applications, the customer would be happier because they would not need to stick to a single vendor, so they could have a backup on multiple environments.

It is very stable. It is meant for the enterprise customer's core business. I have never seen any customer talk about a system crash and not being able to retrieve their backup. 

It takes a lot of time to configure on the first setup. Once setup, you do not need to touch it again. You just need to do a formal check on possibly batch updates.

If you are attaching with IBM products, it is all compatible and very easy. Issues arise when you are working with non-IBM products. Then, you need to find all the APIs with the Spectrum Product. There are some issues with HPE and Dell, because these two do not support Spectrum Protect. You have to be on certain versions before they will support integrations.

Spectrum Protect will meet our customers needs as they grow, because as the data is growing they need to have a backup. We are talking about on-premise backup, we are not talking about cloud backup. We are discussing out of the country backup. There are tapes which are getting shipped out of the country with an encryption key. Spectrum Protect is playing a vital role, because they do the encryption. It is a very reliable, consistent, unhackable product. 

Technical support is okay, but their skills are limited.

Example: Our customer was not able to do certain activities. So it went from Level 1 to Level 2, then Level 3. Level 3 takes a longer time to bring up the batch or find a resolution. I think that is a part IBM could fix something. They should have a proper technical support team serving the customers and get issues resolved earlier.

The initial setup starts straightforward, but as soon as a customer opens the requirements for the backup because they are happy it, they will want to export their system, virtualized platform, or some applications on the databases. This is when it starts getting complex. Then you need to run multiple jobs, multiple consoles, and bring it all together. Of course, customers want to have a single console to connect all their different environments.

I would recommend IBM, but I am a business partner.

Other market competitors include EMC NetWorker, Veritas (Plus Edition), and Veeam (for virtualization).

Customers main criteria when selecting a vendor: presence in the market, and onsite and offsite support.

I have seen my clients use it historically for AIX systems and for applications which are pretty robust, like Domino. I use it there, or for customers who have a lot of systems and are trying to backup everything in a certain time frame. They get this benefit and the benefits of its space efficiency. It keeps the footprint down (the space), so they will not need to continue buying more disk. 

Mostly, it is a flash database for Spectrum Protect, then as far as the user space for everything else, they are using mostly using NL drives. I do not know of anybody using flash all the way. Our customers are also using tape, too.

The great thing about Spectrum Protect is I do not have to be concerned with the latest, greatest technologies. I can still use what has been out there for some time. Traditional storage works perfectly with it.

We do have customers with cloud strategies, who are looking to put their backup in the cloud. A lot of customers talk about moving to cloud, but do not do it because of their size (too large). We are in the works with one customer looking to do this, but their legal people stopped pretty much anybody putting their data in the cloud, so that is on the customer side.

The average Spectrum Protect customer is going to be somewhere around 150 servers, and about 2,000 user company organizations or larger. They have usually dozens of terabytes to protect. Some companies have five Spectrum instances, and some have 30 or 40.

Its capability of just being able to handle legacy servers, and new and old platforms. That is one of the things about IBM, they made sure the product will continue to keep customers loyal.

The Spectrum Protect people know that they have to have the Spectrum Protect Plus product pick up and move faster, meaning getting to those features that Spectrum Protect can't do. 

I think IBM is great with software, and it will always improve. It is just the speed of getting it out there. Faster development and deployment speed would help us as partners go out there with confidence and sell more product right now.

Though, no one can fix every solution for backup and restore.

Stability is excellent. This is one of IBM's strength.

Scalability is excellent. This is one of IBM's strength.

The technical support is general. If you need more than that, you need to know someone within IBM on the technical in-depth side. We will be the transparency to do that for our customers. That is why we are there to help manage their Spectrum Protect environments.

However, if something changes at the customer's company, the environment can go into what we call debt. If you don't watch it, it can get out of hand. That is also where we come in to help our customers if they cannot find the time. A good Spectrum Protect administrator should be spending approximately an hour to an hour and a half a day just to the administration of it. If you are spending more time than that, then it is possible that you need more training on it.

I work on the initial setup with my teammates and technical team to verify the setup will work. I work with the IBM blueprints that they have online as a basis. I try to follow them as closely as possible, but they do not always fit all customers, because there are just three broad versions: small, medium, and large footprints. 

If you follow the blueprints, it is pretty straightforward, because it is all scripted out for you. We do run into something complex with each customer setup, but we have the experience to handle it.

You need to put it in a PoC and test it out if you can. A lot of companies have time and resources to do this for every product that they are looking at. They need to scrutinize every one of the competitors. 

After, you can basically configure it and script it the way you want it to work.

Spectrum Protect is often compared with Commvault and EMC for overall backup solutions, then against Veeam, and Rubrik for virtualization platforms.

Our customers have come to trust IBM. If there is ever an issue that has to be solved, IBM will throw the bench at it and make it work. If you know how to design it right the first time and you show proof that you have done it before with the customer, it will make it easier for the next customer when you go out there and try to sell them on the solution.

Backup is typically last of the things that customers want to tackle, but they have to do it sooner or later, or they will get burnt by it.

Most important criteria when customers select a solution:

• Skill and experience in the product
• Relationships
• Confidence in product.

The deduplication and compression are the most valuable features.

We can get lots of storage space. Storage is a big problem. Deduplication gives me a lot more flexibility so I can do more backup in the same storage space.

I would like to see:

• More flexibility
• More features
• More scalability. I would like it to work with different storage solutions.
• There's a limitation with the cloud container. That is a limitation in terms of what it can do with the cloud.
• I would like them to increase functionality in cloud containers.
• Easier to learn: It's too complex. It takes long time to learn.

I would like more feature on Inline dedupelication.

1. Move data from one container pool to another container pool
2. Move cloud storage container to another cloud storage container
3. Currently, Inline deduplication you can copy to tape but cannot restore any data. I know it is in road map to restore from tape
4. If the Inline deduplication has a issue, You need to restore whole container pool before repair command is issue.
5. If your container pool is very large means few 30 to 40 TB. It can days to restore container pool. If you like to restore to another location, You need lots of space. That can be issue.

Stability is 50/50. They come out with fixes, but then they break some other stuff. I am constantly fighting with them to fix some new stuff. As they put out the new patches, they break something else. It's very complicated product, so they can't cover every possible scenario.

The scalability is extremely good.

I use technical support all the time. I would evaluate them depending upon who is helping me and what kind of problem is being dealt with. Sometimes it's frustrating, because I want to go to Level-2 support. Sometimes they take too long to go to Level-2. It then took them too long before they called me back. They have to improve the process to call back right away.

We knew it was time for a new solution because we were using Backup Exec before and it was not meant to be an enterprise backup solution. We were looking for some kind of enterprise backup system, and we had too many backup solutions.

We had one for ERX, one for Linux, and one for NetWare. We used NetWare and Windows, so we had to consolidate all the backup solutions into one backup solution.

We found that TSM was the best, as we can back up any OS.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward.

NetBackup was on my shortlist. Back then, they were not running on Windows and they ran on Unix. I was not a Unix guy for too long, and I wanted to feel comfortable with the OS. I came from a mainframe background. It's more flexible, and it can back up a cross-platform backup to any platform. That's a good feature, and they have it. You don't need a different backup solution and a different OS for each platform.

It depends upon the company and what they're looking for. It's an expensive product, but it works really well. You can install it on any platform. It's not a perfect product. There's always bug and there's always something going on.

When selecting a vendor, we look for support, how long they have been in business, and how often they do product upgrades.

Our primary use cases for IBM Spectrum Protect are for data backup and archive and high performance solutions.

I would not say that IBM Spectrum Protect is a product like any other product. We have selected this product because we want to standardize. One way they have improved our organization is through the stability of the solution and the availability of the product.

There are a lot of features within these products. One of them is for data backup and protection and the other one, the Spectrum Scale, is for parallel storage as a data storage solution.

All of these features are very important.

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. But overall, they meet the requirements and they're okay.

In terms of what I would like to see in the next release, I think better reporting. Today the reporting lacks some of the features, interface, et cetera. If they increased that reporting and made it user friendly, it will be good.

I have been using IBM Spectrum Protect for over 10 years.

We have different versions. For the file system, the Spectrum Scale, we are using version 5 and for the Spectrum Protect we are using version 8.

IBM Spectrum Protect is stable.

IBM Spectrum Protect is scalable.

There are about two to three direct users for the backup who are the admins.

For the Spectrum Scale file system, we have more than 500 users who use the file system with two admins for staff to deploy and maintain. Of course with backend for both from IBM.

This solution is being used heavily because we are a 24/seven shop, so it's heavily used and we always go and refresh the technology.

Technical support in the region is average. But overall, when we talk about IBM, when they get the right resource for you, they bring the best resources.

We have been with this product for a long time. I know initially it was difficult, but after the team built the experience, things started to be straightforward. So initial setup is complex, but maintenance is average, it is not that complicated.

It was complex because of the learning curve, for people to know more about the product, how to handle the product and the features. That's where the complexity comes from. But once people get the knowledge of how to handle the solution, it can be very straightforward.

Because we have done multiple installations, the initial took a couple of months if I recall correctly. The last installation for the backup was done four years ago and I remember it took two weeks to configure and have everything up and ready. For the Spectrum Scale, it took less than two days because we're getting the appliance model that comes as a total solution - hardware and software preconfigured.

We deployed it by ourself.

When it comes to data protection and data retrieval, most of the time, the projects that you protect cost money. So just retrieving and protecting these projects are a key value. It's like the insurance in my opinion.

We have a yearly maintenance license.

We always look at alternatives, but there are certain things you do as a strategy because you want a certain standardization and there are things you do as a temporary setup for a project or two projects. So we have both actually. We have a lot of products and there is always an alternative to them.

Before choosing IBM Spectrum Protect we evaluated solutions from EMC, from Commvault, and from Veeam. We selected IBM because it meets all our requirements and we have been using it for a long time. Shifting to a new technology comes with the price which includes support, training, development, et cetera. So that's why we continue to use IBM.

My advice to anyone considering IBM Spectrum Protect is that they need to do a thorough study of the market. They need to look at the company's resources to determine if they have the capacity. If they are new to Spectrum Scale, there is a learning curve that they need to go through, and from my experience, it is more than if you go with Veeam or to Commvault. But if you're already established and you have that and you pass that stage, then it's worth continuing with IBM. But you need to negotiate the license pricing. It takes time to negotiate pricing with IBM.

The main lesson that I learned from dealing with IBM is that you always need to have alternatives. There is a reason for it. You have to have an exit strategy. Because IBM, once they see you are hooked up to their solution, they will go and unfortunately, they do this, they will try to raise their pricing. So if you are not ready for that with good negotiation skills, you will be paying more.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give IBM Spectrum Protect an eight.

The reason for the high score is the availability of the solution. If you have mission critical functions, IBM is one of the companies that you trust. They do not release a product unless it goes through a lot of testing. And when it comes to data protection, you can count on them. If there is a bug, if there is any issue with the product, they always maintain it, which is very important when it comes to critical data backup.

Our primary use case is for Windows machines and SQL servers. I'm a senior systems engineer and we are customers of IBM.

In general, this is a good product. Specifically, I like the deduplication and compression features.

Replication of data could be improved and made a little easier to use. 

I've been using this solution for 20 years. 

Stability is good. 

Scalability is good. 

Customer support is quite good. 

The initial setup is quite complex, but I'm familiar with the solution so it's not a problem for me. 

Licensing costs are a little high but it's not too expensive.

I recommend this solution for backup servers. We have around 700 nodes and servers. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10.