IBM Spectrum Protect Room for Improvement

it_user865533 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Right now, I can't say exactly what the feature would be, but it would be cloud-based. 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 (public cloud). I imagine that this is a pretty common piece of feedback for this question.

We're just not sure what the real world results will be when we get there. That is the big question mark. Ideally, I would want to spin up a host on-premise with Spectrum Protect on it and have no storage. I would have my database running locally on flash, and all the pools would be remote. However, I don't think this is realistic from a performance perspective, dumping all my data in the data center over a 40-millisecond hop to the next nearest region of whatever public cloud is available.

There are definitely some things in that area that we can address and work toward, but I don't know if they are achievable.

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Robert Hedblom - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud and Solution Principal Architect at sumNERV Provider AB

If IBM could provide a partial module, that would be great.

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Rainer Kummerfeldt - PeerSpot reviewer
IT-Teamleader at Bechtle

Customers need a clearer understanding of how to implement IBM Spectrum. However, issues revolve around financial constraints. If you lack the correct service contract, resolving problems can be time-consuming, requiring escalation and waiting. Sometimes, the solutions provided are standard and could be more helpful. The initial advice is often to update to a newer version, which may not address the specific issue. In our experience, newer versions sometimes resolve different errors. Overall, there is room for improvement in the service aspect.

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Buyer's Guide
IBM Spectrum Protect
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about IBM Spectrum Protect. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Atif Najam - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Information Officer and Program Lead at Gatron Industries Ltd

The product’s recovery process in terms of agent installation needs improvement. There could be an agent-less backup and recovery mechanism.

In the next release, I would recommend the inclusion of a feature that integrates an immutable cloud storage option to the data store. It could enable users to create policies for moving critical data to immutable storage. In the event of a ransomware attack or a disaster, this would serve as an additional layer of protection, allowing for data recovery. Additionally, users should have the flexibility to seamlessly take backups both on-premises and in the cloud, based on defined policies.

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MP
Information Technology Infrastructure Manager at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

From what I've seen in evaluations of various products, most have similar features. Some are quite modern, opting not to support legacy systems, which can offer a more streamlined, better user experience. 

Yet, for more traditional organizations like ours, support for legacy systems is seen as an advantage, not a drawback. It really depends on the users. 

IBM Spectrum Protect, along with a few other vendors who support legacy systems, fits us well. I imagine newer, smaller organizations might find greater benefits in vendors that are cloud-native or don't support legacy systems in the same way. So, it all comes down to the specific needs and usage scenarios.

The latest enhancement, such as out-of-the-box cloud support, meets our expectations. It's particularly competent in areas we prioritize, like compliance with regulations, GDPR, data protection, and encryption. So, there isn't anything specific we find lacking at the moment.

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it_user868266 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at a government

It seems like they are a little behind on the integration to Azure Cloud as well as Amazon. Some products are there, but not everything is there, and these seems to be with all products. Even Azure themselves as we are looking to migrate, they do not have the functionality we need. Then all of a sudden, it is there with the next order.

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AS
Senior Manager at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

There are new products in the market that might be more useful for various cyber threats like ransomware. IBM is not doing its best for such threats. The solution must protect against ransomware attacks better. It must let us know if something has gone wrong with the server. Cyber Recovery must be improved.

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Van Duivenvoorde Winston - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees

Software-wise, IBM Spectrum Protect didn't handle virtual machines that well, but I heard that the issue had been resolved on IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, though I didn't get a chance to test that feature.

The license cost is mainly the area for improvement in IBM Spectrum Protect.

Another con in the solution is the Microsoft Office 365 backup, which needed to be handled better by IBM Spectrum Protect, and could have some improvements.

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JY
System, Storage and Data Administrator at ORNESS

The Operations Center requires improvement. We are still using TSM Manager for many of our projects to administer our platform because the gap was not resolved with the new Operations Center.

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JD
Spectrum Protect/TSM Specialist at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

They are behind on many things, especially security. They are catching up a little bit now, but the competitors are doing better security-wise. There should be malware detection and prevention and higher security.

The ease of use also needs improvement. There are many products that are easier to use than Spectrum Protect. It is quite complex to manage, and you need an experienced administrator to manage it, whereas other products are easier to get into. You can have somebody with less experience managing them.

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UT
Service Delivery Manager at Xoriant

The solution should improve the ability to monitor backup failure. There should be proactive monitoring to provide early warning. The solution should also improve its dashboard.

The next release should include automated DR.

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MB
CEO at Fischerei Leipold

Enhancements are required for backing up our virtual environment.

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AT
Sr. Consultant, pSeries & Open Systems at Glasshouse Systems

The solution could be more user-friendly and provide better monitoring. The monitoring should be improved first since it is a higher priority.

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HM
Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

The usability of IBM Spectrum Protect could be improved, specifically additional features to the product in the operations center. Additional reporting facilities and stronger reporting tools such as build dashboards would be beneficial. The tool should allow you to write SQL queries to get the information as it is not easy for entry users to retrieve some reports.

I would also value a comprehensive mass deployment solution for clients that would provide an automated method for deploying agents across a large environment, not only for Windows, but also for AIX and Linux. This would reduce the time required to deploy the tool.

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PK
Storage Administrator at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Their plans need to be upgraded. It's a 1.0 and needs to be taken to a 1.4. Other solutions have more; Veeam for example, has 2.0, as well as Cohesity, and CommonVault.

When it comes to virtualization in IBM, it's not perfect.

We are going to switch from IBM to Veeam because Veeam is more accommodating to virtual environments. You can restore your Active Directory or your object to your group policy with Veeam.

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HS
Presales Solutions Architect at SAS

The solution's ability to integrate with a cloud solution is one area that needs improvement.

In the next release of the solution, I would like to see the solution being able to integrate with EFS storage.

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PC
IT Analyst at a educational organization with 5,001-10,000 employees

We've noticed that restoring massive number of files is a time-consuming process and should be improved. We found a way to deal with it by using the 'no query restore' where the restore operation is done on more than one thread and is restartable as opposed to the 'query restore' which is a single thread process. The 'no query restore' needs setting a few parameters for the node in order increase the number of resources that will be used by the restore process.
In addition, we've found that this is not the best solution for backup and restore of virtual machines. Even with Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environment which could be improved a lot. I believe they're working on that with the new product Spectrum Protect Plus.

Finally, the licensing is complicated and could be simplified.

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TJ
Network Systems Analyst III at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Their support is lacking. I've talked to their developers and stuff in the last couple of weeks and they reassure me that some people have retired, and they're working on getting that bumped back up. But the support lacks a lot to be desired at this point.

Their backups are once a day, they're not doing asynchronous replication. They're doing a one time a night backup. So whereas products like Zerto, every time there's a change in a block, it's immediately written across. They're not doing replication instantaneous, they're doing it once a day. There is a lot to be desired there.

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GB
Manager - Storage & Backup at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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AL
IT Infrastructure and Architecture Manager at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

They can include more cloud-enriching features. I would like IBM Spectrum Protect to have the functionality for backing up a VM directly in Azure. I would like to back up a VM directly in Azure without spinning up a Hyper-V cluster and backing up the virtual server. 

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Mark Torpy - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Protection Specialist at Tech Mahindra Limited

It is not easy to manage like other products in the market. It is okay only if you are command-line driven. Even though the operation center is there, it doesn't provide a single view of everything. You have to, for example, use TSMManager on top of it, which gives you a far better management capability, but it is a third-party product. Its management needs to be improved. There should be an HTML or graphical interface. 

It is a very difficult product. For example, you have a backup policy where you want a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly policy standard. It is an old kind of system where you have to keep retention for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups, which is very difficult in IBM Spectrum Protect. In other products, in a matter of five minutes, you can configure such a policy. In TSM, it takes you one, two, or three days because you need to configure a node for each of them. If you have 250 nodes, you have to configure each node for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly retention. If you have 1,000 nodes, it is going to take you ages just to configure and register the nodes. You need to configure the schedule and the CAD daemons or services, depending on whether it is a Unix or Windows OS. Unfortunately, it is a very long and drawn-out process. You have to stop and start the services for changes to take effect. This is a very difficult part of TSM in IBM Spectrum Protect.

To configure a backup policy, I should be able to select the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly options in one screen and finish it. After that, everything should happen in the background. All the backup products in the market already do that, and they are very simple to manage. This particular part of this solution has really been a major pain area for us, and unfortunately, we could not find a workaround. There is nobody at IBM who can give us a way to configure all this easily through a GUI or even scripts.

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it_user671421 - PeerSpot reviewer
Analyst IT at Bayer

Right now, we are in it for container pools and such. The ability to have an active-active, where you no longer have to go in and do modifications if your primary site goes down and your offsite needs to do the primary backups.

It takes a lot of manual work to go in and update all the records and run a bunch of scripts. I would like to see that becoming more automated and with more intelligence in Spectrum, so it can then detect what is down.

When my client comes to you to back it up, he not only comes to you for restores, but it should be able to do a backup without having to modify the state of the node registration.

There are features that it came out with, such as the directory container pools, which brought it back up to where other products we were using are currently at. Namely we were using EMC Avamar in our remote sites, because they were much more RAM friendly. Now, in the past year and a half with the directory container pools, version 7.1.3, brought TSM up to that level. I'd like to see that performance increased.

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KashifAdeel - PeerSpot reviewer
Pre-Sales Consultant - Infrastructure at InfoTech Group

IBM Spectrum Protect is not a very user-friendly tool. IBM Spectrum Protect should be made a user-friendly tool. Though I feel that there are attempts from IBM Spectrum Protect to improve, it's still a very tricky or complex tool.

Three or four years ago, IBM introduced IBM Spectrum Protect for VM-level backup, which was just like how Veeam functions.

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AM
Consultant at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

The user interface needs to be improved. It is mostly a command line and you're stuck in a terminal most of the time. They have been moving over to a graphical interface, in part, but it still has a way to go in terms of ease-of-use. The commands are awesome but you can't really remember all of them. If the whole thing goes graphical then you don't have to remember obscure commands to run stuff, or set stuff up.

The configuration section needs some work done, especially with the day-to-day usage of setting up schedules and policy domains, etc.

The licensing needs to be simplified, changing it from "per core" to "per socket". This would make it much better.

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it_user865548 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head Of Storage at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees

The features should be a little bit closer together. 

If you take Spectrum Protect into account, and you have it along with restrictions to Spectrum Archive by means of LTFS, this is also something which should be made better within the overall product's program.

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it_user623352 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would love to see something which allows us to do an auto restart of backup jobs. Right now, we have it where we have health checks, and if anything that missed or failed, we monitor those. However, we have to manually go onto the servers to execute a manual backup. It would be nice if there was something that ran behind the scenes on the Spectrum Protect server saying, "If our file spaces have not been backed up in eight hours or 12 hours (depending on the attribute status set by the customer), then an auto backup restart occurs automatically." This would be instead of having to do it manually. 

This would help us out, and also the operational teams as it would allow them to focus more on maintaining the Spectrum Protect server versus restarting backup jobs.

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AS
IT Specialist at Saudi Business Machines - SBM

The administration tools for GI need improvement, as the current assessment suggests shortcomings in the back-end system. Dealing with administrative tasks from my perspective has not been straightforward. The user interface for administration lacks the ease that is found in other tools, especially when dealing with storage.

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MO
Senior Storage Architect at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

The solution has a Spectrum Protect Plus product, which is more for Windows-only VM. However, it doesn't really do tape. It requires IBM to do things to the Cloud, which adds costs. They're starting to integrate the products together. That said, right now, it's like two implementations, it's not one product.

We've tried to sell Protect Plus from time to time, however, then you need Protect if you want to do tape. It's kind of clunky. Once they integrate the products, it will be pretty powerful.

Spectrum Protect is still an industry-leading product across multiple operating systems. It still runs best on an AIX server and does remember Windows or Linux. The install base is more AIX as far as hosts because the AIX server is more powerful.

They should be able to integrate the products so that you don't have to do two system installs.

The solution should have a better way to deal with the system state files in Windows. They should do that better where it doesn't try to walk the file system and you have to use in image mode.

The experienced people still use the CLI. You shouldn't have to use a CLI to use this product.

They took some of the funding off of it for a while. Therefore, instead of being a market leader, they took their position for granted. Then some competitors developed new bells and whistles that they advertise, and due to that lag a few years ago, there are not the resources to explain the differences.

They're outsold. IBM is outsold because people do not understand the product and it had a reputation of being complex.  That said, with the new GUIs and other improvements, it's really pretty easy. The problem is they've got to deal with their old reputation of being difficult and complex. Still the GUI could still be more robust.

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RN
Director of Storage Services at a legal firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Although I am not a technical user, I would say the cloud integration features could be improved.

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TE
CEO at a educational organization with 5,001-10,000 employees

The software is complex.

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AA
Co-Founder -Technical Director at Dot Future

The solution is overly complicated in terms of architecture, especially compared to other tools in the market. So, IBM Spectrum Protect should try to declutter. Also, there are even some conflicts in the functionalities between IBM Spectrum and Spectrum Protect. That's my take on it compared to the competitors like Veeam.

In future product releases, the solution should be less complicated regarding architecture.

Also, they have to stop being dependent on anything, which is CLI. I am saying this even though I like CLI. So, they have to change. The problem is that the solution originates from IBM TSM, especially because they have not even updated it in the terminology. So, when I see the terminology, it does not communicate what has happened in the solution, especially in terms of if everything has developed or if they have to update and try to find a way of transitioning from the old terminology to the new terminology.

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SL
AIX System Administration at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We need better protection from ransomware or the ability to identify ways we can protect ourselves from ransomware. Having backups is one thing, but specifically, we need methods to recover if we have a ransomware attack. If we could find a way to detect and alert us if specific data has been encrypted (except the ones we choose), that would be a good selling point.

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HD
Director at Q Pro Solutions

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.

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MY
Sr. Pre-Sales Engineer at Advanced Technology Company

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.

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RP
Regional Platform Services Manager at GBM
  • 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.
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BR
Technical Specialist at CMA Technology Solutions

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.

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PP
Data Backup and Recovery Admin at Albert Einstein Healthcare Network

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.


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AO
Sr. Production Analyst at Santos Brasil Participacoes SA

There is room for improvement in IBM Spectrum Protect, especially regarding its support for virtual environment backups. IBM hasn't progressed much in enhancing its products, leaving users seeking alternative solutions for virtual backups, like Spectrum Protect Plus.

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SA
Unix and Storage Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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AH
Senior System Engineer at Generali

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

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MA
manager technique at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees

In terms of what could be improved, the integration with Cloud and a simplified, unified GUI. They do not have a unified GUI, they only work on CLI and operations center, which is really complicated for the installation and configuration.

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HS
Manager at a university with 10,001+ employees

The high availability of the backup servers can be improved because we can replicate nodes, but the software is very complicated. It's very complicated to do backups in several clusters.

You have to do a lot of configurations to build a server, and you would need to backup and restore.

To go to new hardware, it's a project because you would need to do tests of the backup and restoration of the  DB2 database. A lot of time would need to be spent.

There are lots of configuration issues.

I think it would be good if they could improve the self service of the users.

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it_user866817 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Administrator at Comerica Incorporated

We would like to see bare-metal restorers.

There are some things that it is not doing too well for us. It does not do too well in our virtual environment. We have had to move away from it because of this.

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it_user866142 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Storage Administrator at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees

I would like to see the operations center be a lot more functional. It was nowhere near as functional as the admin center, and I'm doing a lot of command line with it. I grew up doing command line, so it is fine for me. For people that are younger, they want to do everything on their smart phone, and running hundreds of commands is not the answer. Therefore, more functionality for things like creating tape drives and tape libraries, as the functionality is not at the operations center yet. If the operations center had been fully functional, I would have probably given it a rating of a 10.

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TE
CEO at a educational organization with 5,001-10,000 employees

There could be various client systems and process integration included in the product.

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RL
Architecte Technique at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Better integration with other tools and databases is needed. Some examples of this are Oracle RMAN and Veeam.

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it_user672387 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

I am looking forward to new features in the next release.

One of the main features is the cloud storage integration, which was one of my main required features. I've had more difficult experiences with other platforms than with this one.

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AS
Unique Storage and Backup Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

I find the solution somewhat difficult to use with virtual environments or VMware. 

The ability to schedule myVM on operation center should be addressed. 

Setting up the server is not easy; really difficult, in fact. It requires some skill sets. 

Automation should be added in the next release.

It is difficult for the Windows team, as it cannot make use of the solution. 

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AA
Co-Founder -Technical Director at Dot Future

IBM could improve by decluttering its product lines. There are too many clients, too many names, and overall too many products. They have to decide for the virtual environments, are they going to stick with Spectrum Virtual Environment or Spectrum Protect Plus? They have to decide on this, a final decision. IMB is trying to catch up with Veeam but they have to declutter a lot of products or sub-products that they have.

In a future release, it would be a benefit to have the ability to add an application as a storage target, as a storage pool. Additionally, they should add more functionality to the administration for the Operation Center.

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MA
Storage administrator at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

It can be improved for large file systems with many files. Spectrum Protect can restore large files very well, but if you're restoring millions of little files, it is not as great.

At one point, we tried to implement the VMware module with it, and it was awful and terrible. I don't know if that has improved. If it hasn't, this would be one big improvement.

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HM
Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

The reporting could be better. There's not a complete solution for reporting; however, there is a solution that allows you to write SQL queries. This way, you can explore the databases with metadata and get the reports that you want. Still, that's not an out-of-the-box solution, it's just a tool that allows you to write queries as you need. There is a steep learning curve for that.

I would also love to see more agents and solutions devoted to backing up other workloads, especially in regard to non-traditional databases.

The licensing can be a pain to manage. There is a tool that can provide you with automated reports regarding how much licensing you're using, but sometimes it's not accurate. You need to contact an IBM representative in order to get the correct information. 

Traditionally, there has been a Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments module that allows you to protect virtualized environments; however, it's not easy to use. It's very complex. In this case, my advice is to leverage Spectrum Protect Plus, which is the newest addition to the portfolio to back up both virtualized and modern workloads and works very well.


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TD
IT Architect at CGI

Replication services would be nice. If these could be enhanced to be always on so multiple storage backup services could be added as a cluster pool. This would provide a better availability service.

It would be great if the API could add functions to check storage pool details using the client-side API.

It would be great if there would be an API to add new licenses using the client-side API so the licenses can be reviewed using QUERY LICENSE. Then, new licenses could be added using the REGISTER LICENSE command.

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it_user672336 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Systems and Database Administration at Austin Community College

I'm sure there are some areas of improvement, because no product is perfect- but I can't think of any right now.

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it_user672351 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at a wellness & fitness company with 10,001+ employees

I'd like to see some benefits to help manage it. With a big installation, we don't have the performance characteristics that we maybe should have. We've come up with a cookie cutter approach, where you would just spit out the same thing time after time.

I would like to see something that maybe a beginner, or intermediate professional could do, in order to give me a set of tools to answer questions and spit out what I should have.

It doesn't integrate with storage pools, with a normal pool. I'd like to see that.

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SL
AIX System Administration at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The pricing is a bit high. It would be ideal if it was more affordable.

Generally, everything is changing so fast within the product, it's hard to pinpoint what needs to be changed or what is missing. The solution is constantly evolving.

It would be helpful if the solution included some sort of ransomware protection.

The only thing that I haven't tried yet is using it with VMware. I haven't done any tests on it. Let's say that I want to restore a VM, virtual machine, and I would like to access it in a short period of time. This is something that Veeam, for example, is doing. Veeam will permit you to start a VM and start working with it and restore only what is needed to do a prompt work. If it's possible to have the same functionality on this product, that would be ideal.

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it_user586107 - PeerSpot reviewer
TSM SME and Storage software Solutions Architect at Software Information Systems, LLC

There is not much that they do not have already. 

Integration with some applications in the healthcare field could be added, as that is a big part of our business. I just recently learned that Spectrum Protect Plus has integration with Epic. They are planning on implementing it. It is on their road map, and that seems to be the right direction. 

IBM has a good direction, making sure they address the things that they discuss with us as a service provider, and looking to provide better products to our customers.

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it_user866124 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Backup Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I need to have more than two instances working together. I need a worldwide grid able to have replication between three, four, or five instances.

The problem with Spectrum Protect is you can do anything with it, so you can also do bad things. While it is a very good solution, you have to provide a good quality of care to your administrators. One other challenge of the bank is examination, meaning that most of our administrators now are not located in France, but in India or Bangalore. This causes a lot training time, but it is not useless time.

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it_user865542 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

This is more something that I would have to go over with the IBM guys. There is probably a small laundry list. 

Ease of use. This has got to be the one thing that I routinely hear from clients and customers. It is a bit more difficult than it should be. What I find is that IBM has heard this issue, and they are responding with updated interfaces.

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it_user671424 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Engineer at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

We should be talking about the capacity of the tape drives. That's the only problem. We have a system that is in petabytes. We have five frames of the tape drives and we have more than 2,000 slots. If we could compress that space in the data center, that would be good.

I was looking for what is already in the market. Everyone is getting a cloud. The product has already given us some solutions which we can use in the cloud. I think that's fine for the moment.

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MG
Consultant at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • A legacy backup (daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly) would be good, this means a backup plan (native in TSM Server) that would include the following points:

One incremental daily backup with a retention of 15 days, one full weekly backup (Sunday?) with a 5 week retention, one monthly backup (the last day of each month?) with a 13-month retention), one annual backup with a 10 year retention (every January 1st? or last day of each year?).

This backup plan would be integrated into TSM Server, and it would then suffice to associate the nodes with the start times.

  • A Hardware Security Module (HSM) --

Have multiple predefined queries for HSM activity, such as migrate, recall, pre-migrate activity, and performances of these activities.


View full review »
AG
Chief Manager HSSE at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

An area for improvement would be the ease of use - the GUI is not up to the mark compared to other products in the market. IBM should also move on from the mainframe mindset and evolve so that configuration does not need to be done via the command line.

View full review »
SS
Lead Engineer Storage at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Generally, the implementation of virtualization could be improved. The workflow service and so on are not working properly. They have another solution, Spectrum Protect Plus, however, for me, that is a new product. They invented a new product for virtual environments as they didn't succeed in integrating it into the former solution. For me, Spectrum Protect Plus, and Spectrum Protect are not the same product. It's not a new feature for Spectrum Protect, it is just a new thing. Therefore, we assessed IBM was not able to provide a good solution for virtual environments. Therefore, we decided to use Veeam for that.

The initial setup is quite complex.

View full review »
PP
Sr. Solution Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

I want to see better compression than what it currently does. I heard that 8.1.5 has better compression. 

There are more features, but I want test earlier, therefore we can do more bugging for the compression feature.

View full review »
it_user865527 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We would like to see cloud integration.

The solution is evolving, so it has to be evolved to fit all new types of software requirements too.

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it_user866115 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Storage Services at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

We need everything cloud. Strong support for cloud services. S3 connectivity, which is mandatory for us in the future along with this integration of Spectrum Copy Data Management or Spectrum Protect services together with these Spectrum Protect Plus functionalities, e.g., hardware, snapshots, and Copy Data Management. They should come together in one solution.

Coming from the last issue we had, the requirement was to have snapshots in place for our fast recovery of our SharePoint environment. With the original Spectrum Protect, this was not possible. After IBM provided the product, Copy Data Management and now spectrum protect provide a solution resolving this issue to have a fast recovery in place. That was the main issue with Spectrum Protect.

We have been waiting for solutions for approximately one year.

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MA
Manager - IT Infrastructure at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

This solution itself protects the data, but the solution itself should be recoverable quickly in case of disaster on the production side or something. So this solution is not mature in terms of disaster recovery and could be improved. The architecture of the solution needs more flexibility.

View full review »
HB
Backup Administrator at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The solution requires organizations to purchase an extra license to go to the cloud. I've got a limitation of going to the cloud. I don't want to pay more. It gets expensive.

There needs to be a bit more automation.

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VN
Network Administrator at a government with 51-200 employees

The interface could be more user-friendly.

In the future, I would like to see more features regarding file backup, as well as multiple cloud integration.

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it_user866148 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Manager with 1,001-5,000 employees

Probably educating the virtual group who are not as used to the product. Most of our expertise is with AIX servers and virtual server backups. I am doing more work these days with Identity and Oracle, why would I use the pump and dump on Oracle or would it be better if I am able to send it off-site using something like Spectrum?

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it_user865551 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

For Spectrum Protect Plus, I would like to see more enhanced reporting features and integration with Spectrum Protect. 

In terms of Spectrum Protect, usually the IBM features are ahead of where the customers' demand is, so I generally do not even install the latest version for at least a year. Therefore, I think they are doing good with this product.

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it_user672348 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Information Officer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see IBM take the solution more into enabling customers to work with cloud solutions. While they are making great strides to do that today, I think there are some areas for growth required in that area.

In addition to the hypervisors, whether it's VMware or Hyper-V, there are still some areas that I would like to see continued. So to sum up: Handling with the cloud and the hypervisor.

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it_user170520 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Engineer at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

DB2 at the back-end database has some bugs in version 6; however, I have not yet worked with version 7 of TSM, so perhaps IBM has improved this, but don’t know for sure.

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AM
Service Delivery Manager at Thakral

We did not see any drawbacks to IBM Spectrum Protect before assisting a customer using Windows that wanted to migrate to using UNIX. IBM Spectrum Protect does not offer an option to migrate from other operating systems.

There are some drawbacks to load replication as well. On their site, you only have the option to restore a backup. You cannot download it. That is a limitation.

View full review »
TM
Sr. Infrastructure Engineer at Unum Group

In the next version of the solution, I would like to see cloud support.  Specifically, I'd like to see this product leverage the native data protection services in the major cloud providers (AWS, Azure) and not require an agent to be installed.  Since access to the hypervisor is not available in an IaaS environment the native services must be leveraged.  Many competing solutions already do this.

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it_user865521 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems And Storage Administrator at Zain Mobile
  • It needs some software upgrades to fix some of its current bugs. 
  • In SVC, we need a masking view that combines with a storage group. This is collected all in terms of hosts, storage, and volume, both on the storage side and the host side. We need to combine them in one storage group in the SVC.
View full review »
SS
Lead Engineer Storage at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

I need two separate solutions for virtual and physical systems. I need IBM Spectrum Protect Plus for virtual systems and Spectrum Protect for physical systems and that's a pain. It would be an improvement if they were combined.

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PD
IT Infrastructure Analyst at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

In my opinion, the Hyper-V and SQL Server backup could be improved. In the 2016 version there was a significant improvement, but I think IBM has a big challenge with these technologies.

View full review »
HM
Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

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). This has been somewhat lost from previous releases because we had IBM Tivoli Monitoring for these purposes, but now we do not have anything, and it is important to cover this. 

Also, 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. These are important things to know, as we are lacking a bit in this area.

We have a very long road to walk. We can make a lot of improvements taking into account all the participants in the ecosystem: The developers with the business partners and the clients who help us to improve the product.

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it_user866130 - PeerSpot reviewer
Global Backup Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

I would like a little more ease with the virtual platforms, because it is a huge thing that is coming up. We have a huge virtual environment, but it seems like it is convoluted as far as the process of planning it, then integrating Spectrum Protect. There are a lot of moving pieces, so I am looking forward to Spectrum Protect Plus. There seems to be less moving parts to it, so hopefully it will be quicker.

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it_user865545 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

There is always a balance between the power of the product and the usability of it. There is learning curve to learn how to use it, but it is a very powerful product.

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MD.Faisal Alam - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy Manager, Technical Services at Thakral

I want a better user interface, support, and integrations.

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it_user866139 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at Grenfell Campus

The only thing that I would like to have a little more of is insight in reporting. I find that Spectrum Protect needs a lot of monitoring, and I have to actually log into the servers. I would rather be more proactive and send the information when things do not work the way we want.

I am hoping that the Spectrum Protect Plus supports Exchange. That is my primary wish, since Spectrum Protect Plus should be a single pane of glass where I will be able to monitor all my instances from.

I would like to see more technical training online. Sometimes, it is a little bit difficult to find, or that I do not really know what I am looking for as somebody who is starting off finding their learning curve. The first part of it was very long, but once I found the terms and where to look, it became a lot easier. Then. I found another gap when troubleshooting information that I needed to have. I needed to contact support to actually find that information.

View full review »
PH
Sr Sys Analyst with 1,001-5,000 employees

Easier configuration of some of the products, e.g., VE comes to mind. 

Perhaps some better documentation, which I believe was better in the past.

View full review »
JA
Systems Architect at The University of Auckland
  • Reporting
  • Ease of use
View full review »
it_user671436 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer II at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I would like to see it simplified. Depending on what client you're talking about, there are lots of different features. There's instant recovery that it doesn't have. For the database side, it does not have object level recovery. There are just a slew of things that are lacking feature-wise. But the biggest problem is the complexity.

View full review »
LP
System Engineer with 10,001+ employees

Reporting via Operation Center.

View full review »
DJ
Director at Magnamious Systems Pvt. Ltd.

It has a lot of areas for improvement. Its reporting for job completion or incompletion can be improved. It should also provide a granular recovery, ease of operation, data life cycle management, and media management. 

It should support a backup in such a format that in case of a disaster, one can start the virtual machine out of the backup itself. Its reliability can also be better. It is also expensive, and their support is also poor. 

View full review »
SR
Sys Admin 4 at UC Davis Health System

The deduplication must be perfect, and thus should be improved. It costs us too much when we hit corruption in a backup and cannot recover.  

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it_user866823 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at Etechservices

Continue the incremental improvements that they have been doing all along. There is not any one big thing right now that my customers can think to do. 

The Spectral Protect Plus addresses the VM inside of things and is a huge improvement. This is the main thing everyone has been seeing.

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it_user866133 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Most customers still struggle with the reporting piece, especially trending and generating reports. I think it needs some improvements in this area.

It is famous for its complexity, which is a big challenge for the customers to accept. Customers are still scared about some of the history related to Command One. These are some of the challenges that customer usually complain about.

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it_user865539 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Analyst at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I should be able to backup Linux. I would like SUSE for Linux on POWER. Right now, we have to use Storex, which is a pain to use.

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it_user672378 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Storage Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I would like to see better cloud integration. The big thing is the ability to better integrate with the cloud.

The current cloud integration is good and improving. The conference provided insight to some interesting and useful cloud directions that I was not aware of when we spoke. But in response to your question, I would like to see more (is better - right?) functionality. One notion is to provide self describing backup data which can be picked up by a second Spectrum Protect server in an ad-hoc manner. This could provide a simple means of DR recovery without requiring a DB Restore or existing replication configuration.

Another, similar notion would be an ability to create cloud based backup sets or client images which could be retrieved directly to a client without a Spectrum Protect server. There would be some serious security considerations for both of these ideas and their use case may be too small to realistically consider. I would like to say that I did meet some sharp folks who work in Spectrum Protect Development and they do like to think outside the box and they seriously consider input from their user community.

View full review »
KV
IT Infrastructure Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Its price can be better. It is very expensive. 

Its interface is very old and not user friendly. They can improve its interface.

Their support can also be better. My clients are not very satisfied with the support because they are not really quick. 

View full review »
BH
Head of Cloud & Systems at Abraxas Informatik AG

This is quite an expensive solution so I'd like to see the cost reduced. Technical support could be improved. 

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it_user156498 - PeerSpot reviewer
Line Of Business Manager for Storage and Backup at Compta IS

This product should be more user-friendly for newcomers.

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it_user799533 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical manager of the storage area with 501-1,000 employees

Integration with Windows environments needs improvement. It should be more "assisted", both at the application and database level. It remains a product that fits better in Unix/Linux environments than in Windows environments, given its configuration procedures. It needs BMR (bare machine recovery) solutions for both Windows and Linux systems.

View full review »
DE
IT Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

More support for non-mainstream databases, in particular PostgreSQL, SQL, and MySQL. I would also like support for snapshots of non-IBM hardware. I have read some future statements, and it seems that this is coming, though.

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it_user866118 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator Manager at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We would like to see capabilities of long-term archiving and more support for hardware platforms.

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it_user865524 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Production Specialist at a tech vendor with 1-10 employees

At the moment, it meets DB2's needs sufficiently.

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AG
Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The GUI needs improvement; it is not the best in the market.

The default GUI, Operations Center, does not provide much information to a
Spectrum Protect Administrator.

Such as:

  • Volume (tape) errors
  • Volume content
  • DR Media Status
  • Volume operations - check-in, checkout, label

To name a few.

But all this information can be attained using SP's command line interface, query or select statements.

And hey, I didn't acquire this product to watch it all day. Configured properly, it can remove backup/archive operations from the admin's daily tasks. Not a big deal for me.

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it_user165195 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO with 51-200 employees

There is always room for improvement. In the fast paced time we live in, unfortunately many products are released before they are complete and mature in every corner.

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KB
Systems Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

IBM Spectrum Protect could be improved by making the installation easier. Once it's implemented, it's okay. 

IBM started lagging behind when things started moving to storage and cloud-based solutions. Even though they've recently released updates that give cloud-based protection, personally, I still believe they are not up to par with the likes of Rubrik

The entire product is a little bit clumsy because they have co-joined two different products, so it's complex. Even from a sales/explaining to people what it does point of view, it's complex. Whereas, if you take more current products, it's a single box solution. You reel it in, you fire it up, you do a couple of points and clicks, and off you go, whereas the IBM system is seriously complex. There's a lot of training involved and it's a massively difficult product to sell at this point in time. 

View full review »
DH
Senior Systems Engineer at a marketing services firm with 1-10 employees

In terms of features, they've got it all covered. The features they have are quite good. The only downside to it is that it is for an enterprise or big organization. In my opinion, it is not for a small business. 

View full review »
AH
Sr Systems engineer at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

They should introduce more features for virtualization platforms and backing up IBMs. Backup speeds should also be improved. 

View full review »
RH
Database Specialist at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Technically, I've not used the latest version. What can be improved is the graphical interface and user-friendliness of the products. Secondly, they can make it also more available for other sub-regions so that we can pick up some courses on it. We need to improve our knowledge base on their products.

IBM Spectrum Protect needs improvement, but I'm sure they looked at some of these issues in the latest version. There are continuous improvements in the application.

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it_user866127 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Leader For Back Up at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Sometimes they have already erased information in our operational center and we need some of it for reporting to our subsidiaries if the backup was successful within the last months and which amount of data was backed up, archived, and stored. This is what the customer has interest in and we have to deliver. If the operational center could assist us, that would be fine. 

Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus, if they move together, that would be good. I heard already that we can get rid of data removal from virtual environments in the next version. The idea that Spectrum Protect Plus was dealing with appliances on ESX or Hyper-V seems good to me.

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it_user865554 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I would like to see integration with Copy Data Management, which is an IBM product. That would be really nice. Right now, these two products are siloed, so if these two become integrated, the product would become a bit of a powerhouse.

View full review »
NR
Technology Analyst at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Their support is not as strong as most of the products.

It should have the ability to break down the data that's being backed up. It should have better reporting.

View full review »
JD
Spectrum Protect Specialist at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

The solution is used to support newer client types for backup for cloud-based software as a service, mail as a service, things like that, and hyper-converged systems. That's what they intended Spectrum Protect Plus for. They need to make sure it continues to cater to these clients.

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. 

View full review »
DH
Solutions Architect at Key Information Systems

Single store: The ability to mark an archive from my backup for long-term retention.

A lot of my customers always ask for legal holds, especially on email.

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WC
Service Director at scsi co.,ltd

You need to use command line rather than the console. It would be better if users didn't have to use command line in order to use the solution.

Technical isn't so great. It's a bit slow in terms of response. They need to get back to their users a lot faster.

The licensing isn't very clear. They should work to simply or clarify the cost structure.

View full review »
ZC
Technical Specialist IT at HCL Technologies
  • A new adjustment to Azure cloud
  • Possibility to split big file spaces CIFS and NFS into smaller parts (together with storage split) in order to avoid retaking backup from scratch.
  • Possibility to move file-spaces between nodes: These are very needed in very big environments.
View full review »
JP
System engineer at Colourtex Ind Ltd

Sometimes we experience trouble with the backup transfer of the control files. 

View full review »
WC
Service Director at scsi co.,ltd

The user interface (UI) for the admin is still not good. It is way too complicated to manage the product, as we still need to use command line. IBM launched the Operations Center (OC), but there are still functions lacking, especially since we cannot manage all our scheduled tasks by using the GUI. 

View full review »
it_user171978 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consulting Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Once the product is installed and configured correctly, it’s easy to use. But for the average user, the product is extremely difficult when compared to other products.

View full review »
KC
Individual Contributor at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I think Spectrum Protect's interface is not so user-friendly, but the interface is not so friendly. Some of the functions are too complicated. I prefer a simpler solution.

View full review »
TS
Solutions Architect at Net Place

The installation process could be simplified. However, the tool is comprehensive and if the installation is too easy, then the tool itself will be too simple as well. I do not see any pain points. The only issue I see is the pricing, it is expensive.

View full review »
it_user3396 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead at Tata Consultancy Services

They need to reduce the complexity and make the learning curve easier.

View full review »
it_user741711 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technical Officer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Our customers would like to see metadata replication, tearing to tape, and more cloud capabilities.

View full review »
it_user676356 - PeerSpot reviewer
IBM Tivoli Certified Instructor, Certified Exam Reviewer & Consultant at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

If customers have problems or requests and they file a PMR/ESF (Problem Management Record/Electronic Service Request) to IBM, they can present a weblist of when this problem/feature will be solved/released depending on the amount of other customers having the same request. (People can vote on how useful/problematic new features/items listed by other customers are and thus create a higher priority.)

A recent failure with the Spectrum Protect v8.1 client on windows 2016:
2017-05-25 23:28:30 ANS6718E: The path contains too many nested subdirectories. The maximum number of nested directories is 1400.
(This was never a problem on other windows versions and seems to be introduced in the client version on Win2k16) Will be fixed in the next client version v8.1.2.) (Will be released in a few weeks.)
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1IT18901

View full review »
it_user671442 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage and Backup Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

In terms of room for improvement, I would like to see better interfaces.

I'm not allowed to talk about features I want to see in the future. I have an NDA with them. The things that I've asked for are already on record.

View full review »
MS
Business consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The user interface could be better. It could be more intuitive or more user-friendly.

The initial setup is complex.

It's not a good option for smaller companies. It can be a bit expensive.

View full review »
WC
Service Director at scsi co.,ltd

The main admin console from the UI cannot do anything in the product. It just allows us to maintain, maybe, 30% to 40%. For the rest, we have to use the command line. I think the management console could be improved.

The initial setup is very complex.

View full review »
YD
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The solution is quite outdated compared with others and I feel IBM to be lagging a step or two behind other vendors. 

We have received user complaints about the user interface. There is a need to manage a monitor and it can sometimes be exceedingly difficult to manage the internal TSM Spectrum Protect database. 

As a general rule, things should be updated. I do not manage too many customers who still utilize IBM, perhaps only one or two. 

While the installation is, overall, pretty straightforward, we must make certain that the requirements are met before we begin the process. 

In respect of stability, while IBM is very good because of the maturity of its products, which function well for the current environment, there are certain features I find lacking. It is stable, but old. 

When it comes to technical support, we must occasionally collect the log and we find the process to be layered. This makes it problematic to get the support we need from level two, since level one support basically consists of a call center, something which is more useful for end users than integrators and which is time consuming, as well. 

The solution tends to be hard to monitor and control and the user interface should be addressed. So too, the environment and the queries are not user-friendly. 

The most important feature which I wish to be added involves the GUI, the user interface. The solution should have more features and a more powerful GUI, equal to the command-line, as we occasionally are unable to configure it through the GUI and must resort to command-line prompting. 

The solution is not geared toward one who lacks a dedicated manager of his backup infrastructure, usually involving the command-line interface. This can make it quite challenging. We occasionally have to configure our minutes or make a mass configuration using the command-line, as opposed to the GUI. 

IBM is pretty challenging when it comes to scalability, since the bigger the environment, the greater the TSM database, especially in respect of long term retention. Sometimes our customers require permanent backup retention and this increasingly enlarges the size of the solution's database, making things hard to manage. 

View full review »
it_user301308 - PeerSpot reviewer
SSE at Value Point Systems

It lacks reporting and an efficient alert mechanism. The GUI could also be improved.

View full review »
it_user601302 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Data Protection Analyst at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The GUI has long been a problem for TSM/Spectrum Protect. IBM has improved it a great deal, but until you can do any administrative task necessary, it will always be its weakest point.

View full review »
NB
IBM Product & Technical Sales Specialist at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Their marketing needs improvement. I don't think it's market correct.

This product comes up against other products available that are marketed better but the other products that it's in competition with are a single product and this is one of IBM products. If it could be marketed as more for competitors I think that's where it comes short. 

There are massive choices when it comes to data backup, in terms of products. VMware is known on the market, for example. But VMware only can market that. IBM on the other hand has 20,000 products and the Spectrum Protect does not get the same presence in the market, because of the vastness of the organization. But a competitor, VMware, only has to market that product offering that they have because that's all they have. IBM has to market their solution better.

View full review »
it_user807867 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a legal firm

The administration interface:

  • should implement more functionalities that exist only in the command line
  • needs improvement in how some reports are created.

Also, it needs agents that take into account more databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.).

View full review »
it_user866832 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Advisor at GBM (an IBM alliance Company)

Any feature that is compliant with virtualizing the application should be improved. Also, the product should be improved to save more space.

View full review »
MC
Business and marketing manager at MML Systems

All departments.

View full review »
MN
Research Data Architect Lead at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

This solution does not have good support for virtualization and a hyper-converged environment.

View full review »
it_user879321 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect with 51-200 employees

I really haven't noticed that something is missing. There is a central console for all backups and restores. Perhaps if they could add replication to a second site or third site from the same console, that would be helpful. Currently, we have to connect to another console.

View full review »
it_user671427 - PeerSpot reviewer
SAN Administrator at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The ability to migrate seamlessly between clusters, such as between Spectrum Virtualize clusters.

View full review »
it_user164163 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Systems and Storage Consultant at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

Tape management.

View full review »
it_user677721 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Technician at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

I would like to see a way to have "always on" implemented. In this way, if an error happened on the primary backup server, there would be a way to continue to protect the data without any disturbance. This is partly implemented today, but only in the purpose of restore.

View full review »
it_user671415 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I would like to see more GUI. The command line is fine, but if I had more GUI, that would be good. Also, I would like to see better reporting.

View full review »
it_user166608 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Reporting, alerts when things go wrong.

View full review »
it_user165318 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

GUI could be improved.

View full review »
AH
System engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The solution should have better integration with VMware and with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. 

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
IBM Spectrum Protect
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about IBM Spectrum Protect. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.