The storage admins: If we are standardizing on a Blueprint spec, and it has been blessed by IBM, it helps the supportability of everything. We are not "cowboying" things. It is, "This is the spec, it will perform to this standard,” and we know what our expectations are going into it.

We have been fortunate to roll out a few of the Blueprints, and they have been successful, so supportability is one of the benefits.

As a highly regulated institution, like any bank in the European Union East, we have mandatory requirements for data protection in case of data loss, cyberattacks, or some kind of catastrophic event. We test it regularly, daily. 

These are the main benefits, but there's also a practical one for forensics, which we don't use as often, but it does happen from time to time. 

Spectrum Protect allows us to retrieve a point-in-time view of our data, like the balance sheet or any other information at that specific point. So, the benefits are for security, regulatory compliance, and even for forensic or business needs.

Integration with IBM products is out of the box, and fully supported across everything from mainframes and Unix platforms to the latest container platforms. It supports all major operating systems, application stacks, databases, and file systems out of the box, providing essential features like security, compression, and encryption for enterprise-class protection in financial institutions like banks.

Moreover, the incremental forever strategy in our backup processes has been in place for more than a decade. At this point, it's not so much a choice as it is a standard we've adopted. 

Since the technology is reliable, it simplifies the backup process significantly. Now, our focus can primarily be on managing full backups and creating some offline copies. The incremental forever approach is widely accepted and has been for over ten years.

With data deduplication and compression, we are reducing our overall storage footprint for our disk histories. Therefore, we are reducing the actual cost of the disk for our data protection and data backups.

The product has helped our organization recover and restore data faster.

The addition of the retention set feature provides a reduction in storage costs. It also reduces RTO and RPO so that you can respond quickly to your clients and services in case of data loss. 

One of the benefits for the company is that if a major error has been made we're able to restore to a backup prior to when the error occurred.

It simplifies our backup environment to one product. Cost is also much, much cheaper because you not only save space, because you're deduplicating and then compressing on the storage end. You are also saving on the licensing, because the license is after deduplication and compression.

It helps insomuch as that it is a run solution. The issues that I've had with IBM are few and far between. Every time it restores, even though it may use tapes, there are no issues.

We do not lose data. That is why we are using this product and have a backup in place.

We currently use Tivoli Data Protection to back up our databases. Spectrum Protect is actually the application which backs up the file system data, then anytime you want to back up the databases you use an agent with Tivoli Data Protection (TDP) to be able to back up your Oracle databases or your SQL databases. 

Right now, we are getting  good results when we back up Oracle with TDP, but we back it up directly to the VTO. So, the goal is to get rid of the VTO and utilize the native features within Spectrum Protect to be able to do deduplication and no replication as we would do it on the VTO, because all that functionality is on the VTO. However, Spectrum Protect does not know about the VTO. So, it would be nice to be able to move that within the functionality Spectrum Protect. However, in order to do, we have to make sure we are sizing the servers correctly. This is why we are also considering using the PowerNAS, and maybe putting Spectrum Scale ESS behind it as well. 

We currently are working with our sales rep and some of the IBM techs to see how this solution would play out if we wanted to bring it in-house.

It provides upper management peace of mind that we can recover, if needed. We have never had a problem (knock on wood) of recovering anything via Spectrum Protect. Whatever we backup has always been there. It is a good product.

It has expanded its capabilities and is now part of the Storage Defender suite. This suite is designed to enhance cybersecurity, particularly in safeguarding against ransomware attacks. In addition to disaster recovery, the Storage Defender suite aims to protect against cyber threats by providing measures to recover data in the event of encryption by malicious actors.

I'm new to the company, so I don't know if I can answer how the solution has improved the organization.

The business value comes from the capability to overcome data losses.

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.

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. 

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.

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 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.

The solution significantly improves a client's restoration times. They also do complete backups now. Some of the things clients used before couldn't really provide complete backups. In that sense, it's been great for organizations.

It is just a backup. It has not changed anything.

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.

Besides the compression, the new feature of data replication has helped us. Based on the feature, we were able to decommission our tape media infrastructure.

With Spectrum Protect, we were able to lower the TCO thanks to it always being incremental by design (progressive incremental forever).

Why back up data again if the data has not been changed? It has faster backups, as only changed content is sent and has less storage use.

Why restore the same content many times if you can just restore one backup?

• Faster restores as only one full backup is needed to restore. With other competitors, you have to restore fully with all their incrementals.
• We successfully lowered data storage due to its progressive incremental-forever by design (always incremental), plus its advanced data reduction techniques using deduplication with compression.
• Backups are much faster, as only changed content is sent, especially if the journaling is added.
• Restores are much faster too, as it only restore the objects needed. Other competitors restore objects from full backup, later restoring a more recent version of the object.
  

It protects our data. That is what it is there for.

We cannot live without it, since it gives us the confidence to move forward knowing our data is safe.

It allows us to backup and have the DBAs manage their own backups and our retention period. It reduces the work on our part while we get the backups completed.

IBM allows for the versioning of the data, allowing us to have multiple versions of a file or directory of a server. 

As managed solutions provider, it has been really useful because it scales bigger than a lot of other products. It allows us to consolidate costs on the back-end, making it somewhat more cost effective for us, while still being able to scale bigger for our larger customers that buy solutions from us.

One of the recovery methods used to help troubleshoot all of our operations for contractors or the lower tiers, it meets that. Therefore, we are able to run it in an enterprise quite easily with one or two resources. All of the automatic tape deck functions are done well, too. We are able to connect two separate sites relatively easily without any problems. 

Historically, we have a very good team of administrators who know the product perfectly and are able to manage it on a day-to-day basis.

It is something like: How does insurance make people happier? An insurance policy of sorts. You have to spend money to protect your assets. That is what this is. It does that job. That is why people like it. However, much like insurance, I am sure people dislike it for a lot of the same reasons.

The main benefit is the protection.

• It saves you a lot of storage.
• Our performance is better. 
• Our product is running better than it was previously, which is huge.

My organization loves it, because they say it is one of the best product they have ever used.

The product helps us do data protection and restoration for disaster recovery (DR).

We have a long history using Spectrum Protect. We are working close together with IBM development to make solutions happen that we need and solve issues very fast.

Recovering files which have been lost. You can't place a value on it. If someone loses a day's work, or they had this file that they had been keeping for years on end and now all of a sudden the data is gone, they can recover it with Spectrum Protect.

It provides our customers with the comfort of having reliable enterprise data protection. 

Some of the new advanced features are definitely more into cost savings, e.g., dedupe compression, so doing more with less.

With a single solution, a customer can manage all their data from a backup protection perspective. I think, single-handedly, the way that it does their backup is quite unique. It incorporates data reduction during all stages of the backup process. Customers can manage more data without incurring additional licensing costs.

Very reliable backup and recovery system. If you have SAN on the back-end housing TSM’s storage pools, you can achieve blazing fast restore times.

This solution helps us to meet all of our data protection needs.

The capacity of the storage is huge. It can be affected with all of our requirements. We also have two copies for each volumes. This makes life easier and safer for us, in cases of disasters happening and for any volume or data corruption as well.

It has increased our security, scalability, and high availability.

With IBM Spectrum Protect, we optimize our costs of media and storage use, thanks to the Incremental Forever backup. The TDP software provides us many ways to protect our data, so we don't need to use monstrous scripts for doing backups now. My life is easier and the environment administration is simple.

We see that solution is now getting a new breath. The solution is helping new customers with sending workloads to the cloud, which helps us a lot, because they are uploading their internal and on-premise systems.

About 20 to 30% of my clients are now using cloud to upload their backups. This is very important to us, because Spectrum Protect now helps them to achieve this result.

With the new features that we have added, it has made a difference as far as faster recovery and speed.

It is hard to say because we tend to go in with a specific project and deploy that project. Therefore, we do not always have visibility on what the impact is. Just that it is a positive experience and it integrates well with the solution that we have provided. However, we do not tend to get to see the before and after of the impact for our specific client.

IBM Spectrum Protect provides us with the scalability and growth that we need. It is suitable for very large environments. It's very robust and has been on the market for a long time.

Here's an example of how this solution has improved our client's organization: There is a customer in the banking sector here in Colombia — the private banking sector. They had two terabytes of information backed up daily, in incremental backups from a different number of file servers. Those file servers were being backed up daily. At the end of the month, the customer backed up the data completely. In short, they made a full backup of all the data  on a monthly basis. It was roughly 20 terabytes of data. To cope with this situation we implemented retention sets. Thanks to these retention sets, the customer doesn't need to back up that 20 terabytes of information monthly. They can just resort to the incremental backups that they made before, daily, to have a snapshot and an accurate picture of the end of the month. They only have to do another incremental backup for the last day of the month, and that's it; they have a complete, very robust picture for the monthly data. 

This has reduced our customers' backup time by a considerable amount. They have also reduced the amount of storage space needed as they are not repeating backups every month. The data is 90% the same, month to month, which has optimized both speed and storage capacity.

It is reliable. The backup solution is our fail safe. When we are required to recover data, it is there.

We have better, faster backup times, and it has improved efficiency in the backups.

IBM Spectrum Protect is a robust tool which allows us to backup pretty much any environment, virtual or physical, and create offsite copies of all our data for security and recovery purposes.

Well, apart from restoring data which has been inadvertently deleted or corrupted, we also use Spectrum Protect in conjunction with Spectrum Scale.

As the tape storage pool for HSM (inactive) data, this leaves a stub file in Spectrum Scale's GPFS file system and moves the file data to the LTO6 tape based storage pools -- so it vastly reduces the cost of the overall services, whilst maintaining Nearline access to the files.

I guess it keeps everything under one umbrella. So there are fewer products to deal with.

Using LTO6 technology you can store up to 10TB of compressed data.

Very good performance with Virtual Tape Library technology

This solution has improved our organization through better file and database recovery.

For most of our customers, it is more efficient than most traditional backup solutions. It can also scale from a very small environment to a very large, multiple-tenant environment.

Most of the customers that I work with today tend to use more disk-based solutions. Therefore, we apply the new dedupe and compression technology, using maintenance and time to give more time for the backup window and less time for the overhead related to the daily housekeeping.

The product has been there ever since I have been there; the enterprise system along with the hierarchical system. It is pretty easy to use and maintain. I do not run it all the time, but I can get in and do what needs to be done. When I have to do disaster recoveries, I can do it with this tool.

The benefits are that it's an efficient, scalable, and reliable product that provides what it is supposed to provide.

Spectrum Protect provided a steady state in my backup operations and confidence in restores procedures with 99% assurance.

Generally, the happiest users are Oracle users. What they like about the platform is that they have received organic benefits in performance from the backup system and also as their platforms have upgraded over the time. Therefore, 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.

We use it for our backups. That is our main use for it. So far, it has been quick to restore, and we have never had any issues. Every time we go and try to get a file, we can get it. Restores are quick and the data is always there.

IBM Spectrum Protect has improved my organization with its total support of IBM products.

• Less backup/archive media
• RPO/RTO

The incremental forever, TSM for Virtual Environments, deduplication and node replication, has opened up further advantages and solutions for users and customers.

We did have a challenge with one of IBM Spectrum Protect's systems. For some funny reason, it was not coming up because of the stability. We were able to restore, but it started us thinking about improved backup services. 

Two weeks ago, we were able to restore services as quickly as possible in a production environment. We were able to kickstart and provide services on that particular server to customers, which saved us a lot of embarrassment.

Otherwise, we would have been down due to power supply issues we had in our production environment. Some of the services were misbehaving. We had to do a majority stop and IBM Spectrum Protect was a big plus for us.

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. 

It is keeping the banking license alive, thus it is perfect for the business.

The scheduled backups ensure we meet the requirements for our business, and we keep backups of certain environments.

With Spectrum Protect, you can use any type of disk to back-end the repositories. It gave us the flexibility to use whatever storage we wanted at our secondary site. On our first site, we have really high performing variable disks, and at our secondary site, we have a lower performing tier. On the cloud, we have an even slower tier.

Data reduction definitely reduces costs, not only software costs, but from the infrastructure needed. Then, the ability to replicate second copy to cloud helps reduce their infrastructure and management costs (for that infrastructure) by being able to send encrypted, secure information over the internet.

Due to the rapidly provision new server in my organization, the backup resource needs to add more also. But IBM Spectrum Protect can help me to optimize the backup resource. 

We've used it for a very long time and this is impossible to describe. 

It works well with AIX. 

We can gain benefit from any advance features (incremental forever, deduplication, compression, etc.).

Most of my clients have been running Spectrum Protect for a long time, so they have been running it for years. If they have migrated off of it, they migrated off of it because of its lack of virtual environment functions.

I’m a consultant. I provide installation and technical support and help to customers. TSM provides ease of use for customers to recover from any type of data disaster.

The D2D2T archive of my PACS data improved after I put Spectrum Protect 8.1.4 into production.

• It helps our customers protect their data, especially with stuff like ransomware, compliance, and regulatory requirements. 
• It helps them protect their data, keep it long-term, and feel pretty secure about it, basically sleeping well at night.

It builds confidence to recover from a variety of disasters. It really keeps our data safe and lets us manage what is important to us and our customers.

It scales.

It is a single point of control and administration for backup and recovery. My team and I are more comfortable with this solution. With this product, we are able to save a lot in costs and on expensive storage. It has reduced backup infrastructure costs for us.

The archiving ability of Spectrum Protect is second to none. Our company archives millions of files and Spectrum Protect has been the only product we found that can handle the workload, let alone handle it in the time frame that we require.

I have a lot of examples of how it has improved different clients' organizations, but the greatest value is with a dual-site infrastructure and container storage pools.

Maintaining recovered data.

Significantly reduced recovery time.

This is a very mature product. It has been around in the large data set. People widely use this product and it helps our organization for backing up the petabytes of data.

Being able to migrate off and release storage without impacting the client at all.

Easy, relieable, Scalable Backup Solutions to save data and recovery.

Spectrum Protect does not just improve our work, it saves the infrastructure of more than one enterprise in the event of hacker attacks, administrative errors, and a variety of other failures.

IBM is a partner-friendly company which has open API that one can use. In our case, we have built solutions which have helped many customers who use API to protect databases and applications with Spectrum Protect that IBM doesn't protect today. For example, MongoDB , MariaDB , MySQL , PostgreSQL, Firebird, Progress OpenEdge , SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise , and SAP IQ Server. See www.ligtas.org.

For our company, disaster recovery is, of course, the biggest benefit.

With this product we are able to save a lot on costs and on expensive storage.