Reliability: Our tape library has aged. It is an old 3584. We have had it for many years, probably 10-plus years. It is problematic at times. We have a single robot, so it gives us the ability to get away from that mechanical robot and just do disk-based replication and backup.

Performance and recoveries are better. Our clients and customers are happier with the performance of it. They can just spin something up, take off, and they don't have to say, “Hey, this tape is busted or this tape is marked write-protected.” Operators kick tapes across the floor in the data center every now and then. Now, I don't have to worry about that.

The deduplication and compression features are the most valuable features. For example, one of our clients has a quarter of a terabyte that we are protecting and the deduplication and compression of that data is in the back end around 75%, which means that it's just magic.

The platform’s most valuable feature is its ability to verify the recoverability of backups. It helps us take data backup at different levels to be used during structural disasters. 

It's proven, enterprise-class, reliable, and fast. Spectrum Protect works with a multitude of platforms and databases, not limited to Windows or Linux, making it a leading enterprise-class backup and restore solution.

Another good thing about IBM Spectrum Protect is its flexibility, offering both a graphical interface for younger or less technical users and command-line integration for existing automation tools or scripts. 

This versatility is a continuation of its legacy from Tivoli Storage Manager, enabling full command-line operation for automated processes. 

Additionally, its graphical user interface (GUI) is particularly user-friendly for tasks that don't require programming. So, it covers all user requirements, whether they prefer manual or automated operations.

Data deduplication's effectiveness varies by case. But it comes with some penalties, using deduplication might impact encryption performance, but it's still viable depending on regulatory compliance and stringent security requirements. 

Despite potential trade-offs, deduplication can lead to significant cost savings in environments with high data redundancy or uniformity by reducing storage needs. Although the decreasing cost of cloud storage and microtape has lessened its impact on decision-making, deduplication can still offer a lot of savings.

The most valuable features of the new version are directory container pools with inline data deduplication and compression.

The solution can back up every kind of workload in the environment. It is a very old and robust solution. The product evolves with technology. I have been working on it since it was just a physical server. If we are using tapes, we can ship them offsite. We can build our new server and recover the data. If we use the online application, we can start recovering from the disaster location.

The VM backups are very useful. Most companies use VMs. The solution also provides agents for databases like Oracle, SQL, and SAP HANA. It is also a useful feature. The deduplication and compression feature eliminates almost 80% of the data. We have been using the tool until now. It's working fine. We do not have any complaints. The technology is always evolving. I rate the product’s performance an eight out of ten.

What I found most valuable in IBM Spectrum Protect is that it allows you to back up physical machines, and its proxy feature lets you back up virtual machines.

The most valuable feature for data recovery in IBM Spectrum Protect is its database protection capabilities. It ensures the integrity and availability of databases through online communication and robust backup drivers.

The file-restoring feature is the most valuable.

Its flexibility is valuable. It is a very flexible solution. There are always more ways than one to do something. It is a software solution, which means you can buy your own hardware and expand it whenever you want. You are not boxed in or locked into something you've bought and outgrown. You can always expand it.

The most valuable features of the product are data deduplication and disaster recovery.

Incremental backup is highly valuable as it allows for significant time and cost savings. By only backing up changed or new data, there is a reduced need for extensive storage space on the backup server. This efficiency contributes to both time and cost-effectiveness in data protection practices.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the centralized enterprise backup.

Spectrum Protect is a robust solution. A valuable feature of this solution is the retention sets, which is a fairly new addition to the feature portfolio. This allows you to back up information to leverage all their copies of backup and not do new backups of the same information over and over again. 

It is easy to implement and restores very quickly.

It's very simple.

With the SPVE you can migrate from IBM to a different storage box. For example from IBM, you are going to Dell or NetApp. If you want to carry it over, you can.

You can do restores very quickly. You can mount a drive and restore it right from the drive.

The most interesting feature is without a doubt the 'management classes'. A management class allows us to configure the number of previous versions of each file that we want to keep as well as the number of days that we want to keep them. Thanks to the way in which the management classes can be assigned to file, the possibilities are endless.
To my knowledge only SP offers this flexibility.

In the past, we've always been uploading our stuff to tape. We now have disc-based solutions, and those disc-based solutions, one of the neat features of them is when you use what they call TSM for VE, Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environment, you're able to crack those snapshots open and are able to do file-level recoveries out of them. It gives you the ability to get rid of some file-level backups that you're using and gives you the ability to get rid of some SQL data protection backups. 

Instead of taking three different backups of your systems, you're taking only one. You're able to crack that open and get what you need. The incident recovery, where it creates the VM and then you're running it, technically you're running it on Spectrum Protect. But then in the background, it's doing the storage motion and moving it off the Spectrum Protect back to your VMware environment. The users don't know the difference. 

Those are nice really features that we really use. And it's really been helpful since we've gone to an all disc-based solution.

The feature that I have found the most valuable is that IBM Spectrum Protect is highly integrated with IBM ESS. In addition, it allows us to back up our virtual servers directly to take VM snapshots. It runs on Linux as well.

The backup of Sybase databases is the most valuable feature in the existing environment.

They have got the most documentation out there on the internet for its software protection. The documentation is excellent, and there are a lot of blogs, websites. Because it's still one of the oldest products out there for data protection, there are also lots of people who have a lot of experience in using this solution.

For me, the fact that we can do inline deduplication and compression with Spectrum Protect itself, where before we had to use other products.

The most valuable feature of the solution is application-aware backups.

We really like that it just works and haven't had any problem with it, whatsoever.

It is very flexible in terms of schedules for different types of retentions. We have different policies for images, for audio files, and for user files. We have policies set up for something lasts for 15 years, or five years, or some for only two years. It can put up many, many schedules for different types of retentions. It's awesome.

• We can scale. Today, we have an average backup volume of 100TB a day. 
• It is reliable; it works. 
• We have a good cooperation with IBM. 

From a tech perspective:

• Utilizing deduplication
• No replication
• Getting the virtual environment backed up using Spectrum Protect Plus on all of the databases.

I like the new GUI. It makes things really nice. The previous GUI that they had was slow, and it did not have enough information on it. Therefore, they have truly improved in what they are offering. It is moving into the main stream, like all the other backup solutions are. 

I also like what I am seeing with some of the new features which are coming out.

The most valuable is its versatility, allowing users to efficiently manage IBM V and Hyper-V in diverse environments. The flexibility extends to cloud transitions, enabling easy movement from one vendor to another. The tool proves invaluable in scenarios where systems need recovery, such as restoring damaged data. Users can leverage it to migrate data between different environments, making tasks like moving from on-premise to the cloud straightforward.

The two features in the solution that I have found valuable are its functionalities related to UFS and KMS.

The archiving feature is the most valuable aspect of the solution.

There's no single feature. It's the overall product, the reliability, and the ability to work at the scale we are working at. It's that incremental forever approach, which we definitely need for the amount of data we are handling. It's more a philosophy of product, but a certain feature.

To be honest, there aren't many features in the solution. However, it is a very robust solution.

We like IBM Spectrum's versioning capabilities. It lets us specify how many versions of a file we want to keep and for how long. Also, the archive component of the software helps us a lot. Let's say we have a department that needs 10 versions of one file that need to be kept for at least six months. So with IBM Spectrum, we can set rules that will respect what has been asked of us. For example, we can set it to save 15 versions, and if the file is deleted, we need to keep the last version for at least six months. 

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

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

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

The replication is great. 

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

The solution is very stable.

You can scale the product.

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

Technical support has been excellent. 

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

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

The backup on real-time, especially for the virtual machine, archiving, and retrieving the reader from the backup repository and getting it online, getting it validated, then performing the data consistency check over the backup.

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

The deduplication and compression are the most valuable features.

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

All of these features are very important.

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

The feature we have found most valuable is when you want to integrate it with a Tape Library and then do the DRM life cycle. That is when it works the best.

We have found the building, compression, backup, and the tool to save point-in-time backups to be valuable features.

The backup is very good. In other backup systems, you need a lot of storage to gain the same backup policy.

There aren't too many bugs, and it is good for storage and backup.

The solution actually does a lot. It's really powerful. The value of Spectrum Protect is it does everything. It does tape and it does disk. It's easy to migrate. You don't need any other software. It's basically an all-in-one solution, which is its most valuable aspect.

Their GUI has improved quite a bit. It's made the solution a lot simpler and less complex.

It allows us to have one interface. Our database administrators can schedule backups themselves. We can freeze and start databases for consistent backups. Also, we can have different schedules for whatever they need, whenever they want.

I have not implemented the most important feature yet: node replication. I can have a hot Spectrum Protect server under the DR site instead of having to build one up like I would have had to before.

The platform has valuable stability.

The interface is easy to use.

The most valuable features of Spectrum Protect would be the compression and the deduplication.

I find the whole product useful. The backup archive client, snapshot, spectrum for virtual environments are beneficial features.

The MN backup for a cluster is most valuable because it has made backing up the GSF as a zero-file system easier.

I like its stability a lot. Over the years, I very rarely had a problem with it.

Progressive incremental-forever (always incremental):

SPFS is a file system for Spectrum Protect. A way to mount a Spectrum Protect storage pool as a mount point on your server for easier usage. With this one can protect any data using the Spectrum Protect storage.
Eg
# mount -t spfs /backup
# mysqldump > /backup/mysqldump.bkp

SPIR is Instant Recovery for Spectrum Protect. Take application consistent snapshots locally using, and sends snapshots data using space efficiently and blocking backups to the Spectrum Protect server. It provisions the snapshot from the backup server to the same or new server near instantly, so that applications can be started before all data has been copied back to original place.

The most valuable features are reliability, capacity, and performance.

It has to ability to backup DV2, Oracle, and Informix.

One of the main things that I like about IBM is the versioning of the data - meaning that we can have multiple versions of a file or directory of a server. I could have 10 versions of one file and that file I could keep for as long as I want.

There is the archive for a version of the solution which gave us the opportunity to have, let's say, one full backup every month for a long period of time. Its archiving offers us good flexibility.

The solution is very stable.

We've found the scalability to be very good.

The initial implementation is straightforward for the most part.

The biggest thing is its enterprise-wide type of architecture. It supports a lot of different platforms. This is useful for us.

Once it is completed properly, it is low maintenance. Most of the functions do not require much deliberation. It is all the blueprints and technologies laid out, and it is straight forward.

There is a laundry list of valuable features: scalability, performance, mass platform coverage, etc. It is one of the few backup products on the market right now which an organization can bring in and it will serve all of their backup needs. It is a completely centralized solution and one of the three largest, market share wise, in the world (I believe).

It is a strong, mature product, which a lot of people are using, and there is a ton of support for it.

You can protect your data and keep it for long durations, without it spending too much time on the local disk. You can send the data to an outside location. I think the main feature is that you can protect your data from disasters.

I found the restore operations feature the most valuable.

• Deduplication
• Data compression
• There are a lot more features that we can use versus the previous product.

Product features were previously not great, but they eventually evolved. There have been a lot of good improvement, so now the features are quite impressive.

• The product is very stable.
• Performance is mostly perfect.
• We have been very satisfied with the product.

All the useful features are valuable actually. You can't ignore any one of them. We also use Spectrum Protect Plus actually, the other product, where you can integrate the VMware Hyper-V or any other solution for the backup, data protection, and using that one, you can protect all the databases also.

Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus still have separate use cases. From the IBM side, these two products are running in parallel. But in the near future, they are combining the Spectrum Protect Plus. There will be no Spectrum Protect itself in the near future. But as both are currently separate, Spectrum Protect Plus is mostly for the virtualized workloads, whereas Spectrum Protect is for the bare metal and databases kind of thing.

The solution has excellent performance overall. 

The product's initial setup is pretty straightforward. They offer good documentation that helps with the process.

The stability of the solution is very good.

In general, the solution is quite user-friendly. The GUI is very nice.

The most valuable feature is the backup speed.

The backup feature. Everyone wants a full backup. It gives them safety and peace of mind, like an insurance policy for that rainy day when they may need to restore a system. It is not necessarily as good for migrating to a new release, then putting back a D-drive. However, for daily operations and disaster recovery, it is a big use case.

Scalability: Our customers are able to grow the product without having to buy additional hardware, so it is very scalable.

The most valuable feature is the breadth of what it can do in an environment for backup protection of data. It's very scalable. Customers can adopt a Spectrum Protect solution at an entry level.

As their environment grows, the solution will grow with it. They don't have to worry about purchasing additional vendor solutions to meet their backup and storage needs.

Client scheduling, deduplication, parallel processing of restores, disaster recovery manager.

The feature I have found the most valuable is load replication.

The most valuable features are compression and deduplication.

High availability (HA): It is one of the best features that we have.

All features help me meet my requirements, but I love the TDP for VMware because of the web interface and the possibilities provided by this tool. It's amazing.

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

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

• The server application - the features in it.
• The replication part of it.
• The dedupe piece of it, which is a huge help, especially in our environment.
  

Integration with Spectrum Scale is a large part of it. 

We sometimes use different pools of storage (policy engine in it) in terms of retention. 

I have found that the most valuable feature is useful documentation and troubleshooting.

One of the more recent features that we value the most, being an influencer myself, there is feature we call retention sets. These retention sets are snapshots of previously backed-up data. This data no longer needs to be backed up again so there's no need to re-back up that information, to reinject that data. It allows us to offer, improve, and optimize the use of storage resources for our customers. We implemented this solution for a number of clients here in Colombia and throughout Latin America.

Also, Spectrum Protect has what is one of the greatest ecosystems of experts, users, forums and in general learning resources in the data protection realm.

Reliability: It has never had a problem with backups or restores. If you store something, it is there.

• The ease of use
• Being able to set it up and configure it.

• Incrementals forever
• SnapDiff functionality
• VE

The ability to do dedupe in the product is nice to have. We currently have a VTL appliance with dedupe functionality. We will be exploring the SP features in this area shortly.

a. Incremental forever
b. We have approximately 4.5PB’s of front end data and a 12 hour backup window.

However, by backing up only the changed data, we average around 75TB per night. If we had to do full backups, even occasionally, we would not be able to complete the backup within 12 hours, or we would have to make a large investment to fit a full backup within the 12 hour window.

It covers all the different operating systems. If you need backup, it can pretty much do everything.

1. Disaster Recovery module
2. Incremental backup
3. Flahcopy manager
4. VTL support
5. IBM Spectrum Protect Operation Center
6. Deduplication
7. Node replication

The Oracle database backup is the solution's most valuable aspect.

The solution is scalable.

We've found the product to be quite stable and the performance is very good.

Technical support has been helpful overall.

Support of the IBM X platform and the backup data replication to DR are the most valuable features.

The most valuable features are scripting to control daily processing, scripting to integrate special client backups, and scripting to develop enhanced reporting (primarily using SQL).

The incremental forever backup, which makes it more efficient than any other solution that does not use this scheme.

• Performance
• Scalability
• Backing up virtual environments
  

That it backs up everything, except Linux.

Incremental forever philosophy.

It is good in terms of functionality. My clients are very satisfied with this solution.

I believe the user interface is a good feature. The personnel who work with the product on a daily basis seem to be satisfied with what's possible.

It is the only backup software which gives retro-compatibility, resilience, and enterprise agents.

Yields are a key feature. There are also very few incidents related to restores that cannot be performed. The level of product support is very high.

The ability to migrate between media over a long period of time. My customers are long-time users, and they have benefited from being able to move between tiers, e.g., L Tier 5 from L Tier 6 and/or L Tier 7. They have been able to do this within the product.

• It is very robust. 
• It has been in the market for many years. 
• We can use it with any storage for the back-end to save data. 
• It supports tape, which is something that we like as a hospital.

It is an IBM product. With SAP, you are using IBM software to protect it. DB2 and AIX servers are both IBM. Therefore, it is a total IBM solution, which helps.

• Incremental-forever backup: one-time full backup; then, incremental forever.
• Data replication: removes the need for tape off-siting by replicating data from one management server to another (off-site). No need for storage replication as the replication is application-based.
• Deduplication
• Disaster recovery management: can provide assistance in managing DR media (tapes); also provides a DR plan based on current configuration.
• Macros: can automate actions using scripts, native or via OS. Spectrum Protect can be configured/managed via the command line.
• Library management: works very well with tape libraries.
• Tape management: Tape management is excellent as well. It can create multiple copies in a single process (e.g., one primary tape, one copy tape at local site, one copy for vaulting). It can also recover damaged tapes.

Incremental Forever backups, Enterprise management, Journal Based backups, policy based, copy storage pools, deduplication and node replication. Also the extreme flexibility and scalability the product offers – most of it done without interrupting production at all. The smallest entry level sized installation can easily grow to large enterprise usages and be migrated across platforms.The product is very client-oriented which supports a lot of different platforms and products, and only have to be upgraded approx. every five years to maintain support.

Spectrum Protect's best feature is that I can use it practically anywhere, on any platform, and for any servers or clients.

In the past, one of the most valuable features, and the biggest advantage, was the incremental forever feature. Not many other backup vendors provided that. In the pre-virtualization environment, it was very robust and simple technology, especially writing to tape. 

It is a very good and mature enterprise product. Once it is set up and everything is put in, you don't have to manage it. It actually runs automatically by itself.

The IBM Spectrum Protect feature I find the most valuable is how fast it is. 

The fact that we can take the backup straight onto tape is the most valuable feature. IBM Spectrum Protect is very valuable for me because you don't necessarily need storage on-prem or on a production system. 

IBM Spectrum Protect has its system for taking a backup. It has a backup option on the outside also that makes it easy for you to do a restore.

The wide variety that we have for using the software with each database and your own adapter. You can configure it, and it is quite good. Other backup software, you can be stuck to one environment and have to keep that environment.

We have scheduled backups whenever we want.

Most valuable features are:

• Good tape integration
• The node replication to a secondary site.
• The ability to use S3 Data Store as a repository.

The customization and the ability to backup across all platforms are the most valuable features.

The solution offers very good flexibility. 

It's huge. You can do almost everything with it. It's very programmable, customizable, and automatable. It supports a lot of operating systems and a lot of applications. It's very versatile. It's maybe the most versatile on the market.

The software-defined ability to do data reduction through deduplication and compression, as well as being able to replicate data to a cloud container.

The backup aspect of the solution is very good. The solution allows for incremental backups forever. It saves your backup files while also saving space.

The product is quite stable.

The API is simple to integrate into a custom application.

• Enterprise solution
• Easy to build and add new instances: physical and virtual 
• Easy deployment in the cloud
• Scripting-automation possibilities necessary to have in a big environment above 5 PB a month
• Very good monitoring tool 
• "Operations center" very useful in order to check how instances feel and backup results.
• We also use it to create tickets in SNOW in order to address issues and assign to the right team.  

• Incremental forever: This feature helps us reduce backup time and backup storage space.
• Deduplication and compression: This feature helps us move away from physical tape by using disk.
• Replication: This feature help us to offsite backup data without tape. Data replication is incremental and will send only non-duplicate data.

• The speed of backup
• The amount of data that it protects with very little storage by doing incremental forever.

The valuable features for me are Disaster Recovery Manager, Replication and and File Device Class for ease of recovery.

Overall the solution is fairly complete.

Disk-based implementation of a data protection solution for multiple sites, which is a better fit for my complex data protection needs.

It is a proven product. It has a lot of features and capabilities. That is its pro and its con. It makes it a very capable product, but somewhat difficult to use.

Flexibility and Scalability. Sturdy software for potentially large environments. Because of the flexible parameters, everything can be fine-tuned to the customers’ needs in their environment.

The diversity and flexibility of the application. No matter what the problem is, I can solve the problem any number of ways based on the customers’ requirements.

It's very hard to say which feature is most valuable. It's a complex product. It's not possible to say what is most valuable.

The solution is mostly stable.

The product scales well.

The solution offers good cloud extensions.

The technical support on offer is pretty good.

It is a very stable product. The cost is similar to that of other enterprise solutions.

IBM Spectrum Protect offers stable software and products. It has much third party integration, such as that involving databases, email and virtual machines. 

The data archiving functionality. It is easier and less time-consuming.

Traditional archiving. One of our revenue streams involves maintaining archives of our customers' data for very long periods of time. Spectrum Protect has proven to be the most effective solution given our requirements.

The most valuable features are the stability and also how it's seamlessly integrated with other IBM offerings.

• Forever incremental - allows TSM to optimize storage needs.
• The way it covers backup and archive needs. The flexibility of backup copy group always allows me to cover the customer's requests.
• Replication processes with container storage pools allow reduction of storage space and network bandwidth, using deduplication and compression.

• Mainly backups
• Replication
• Exporting the data from another data center.

Scalability, it lets your company grow without losing confidence.

• Deduplication
• Compression

But really, today, all features are available from all vendors. We can ensure incremental backups, full backups, differential backups. These are not specific to IBM. All other products contain the same features. But when I'm backing up a Power server, I feel more comfortable with IBM Spectrum Protect because it's the same vendor.

The solution is not complex, it's very easy to configure agents or VM backup and restore. Upgrades from one version to another are very fast and the product is very stable.

The ability to seamlessly migrate storage sub-systems underneath IBM Spectrum Virtualize.

Disaster Recovery Manager, TDP Backup Vmware, TDP Oracle, TDP Exchange. Flash Copy Manager.

The main feature of this product is a flexible architecture and functionality that allows you to solve problems of any complexity and scale. Most importantly, it is not just a product that simply makes a backup, but it restores and saves a large number of services in critical situations. By the way, it works fine with different types of clouds, supports S3.

Space efficient data reduction, using progressive incremental forever in combination with deduplication and compression. IBM philosophy is to not backup data that has not been changed

• Performs backups on multiple platforms
• Reliability
• Speed

The archiving functionality of data.