We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Protect and NetApp SnapCenter based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Backup and Recovery solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The backup is very good. In other backup systems, you need a lot of storage to gain the same backup policy."
"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."
"Enterprise-wide type of architecture supports a lot of different platforms."
"Support of the IBM X platform and the backup data replication to DR are the most valuable features."
"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."
"Some of the people in our group, like our DBAs and non-technical people, can restore some stuff themselves via Spectrum Protect. That is how simple it is."
"We optimize our costs of media and storage use, thanks to the Incremental Forever backup. The TDP software provides us many ways to protect our data, so we don't need to use monstrous scripts for doing backups now."
"It is good in terms of functionality. My clients are very satisfied with this solution."
"It has greatly improved our DR activity."
"The backup process finishes very quickly."
"What is very handy for our clients is the consolidated view. They have a dashboard with everything, through a single pane of glass. This is what they really need because, within seconds, they can have a good overview and see if there are any errors or any issues."
"We have been very satisfied with the technical support's help. Their knowledge level is great. For a noncritical question, they will get back to us within a day."
"The centralized GUI is the best feature, that there is only one webpage where we can see the states of all the backup jobs. We can see all the tasks that are running and we can quickly see if one fails; if they are running or have any issues. We have all that in one place."
"The Exchange plugin is the most valuable because we have a lot of customers that use SnapManager Exchange and have to migrate to SnapCenter."
"The central pane view is the most valuable feature. You have one console where you can monitor all your jobs, as opposed to going to different vCenters."
"A feature that stands out is cloning databases. If you have a SQL database and it's huge, like one terabyte, the classical SQL way would be to do a backup-restore to create a clone of your database for test purposes. With SnapCenter now, we can clone a database but through the Snapshot technology, which means if you right-click and you click Clone, the one terabyte database is there instantly."
"It's difficult in terms of the configuration at set up. In our case, it required another admin, one person dedicated to the backup."
"This solution does not have good support for virtualization and a hyper-converged environment."
"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."
"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."
"It does not do too well in our virtual environment."
"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."
"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."
"The product’s recovery process in terms of agent installation needs improvement"
"If it was possible to create backups on non-NetApp storage, that would be helpful."
"We have experience some difficulties with our current support. We are engaging in engineering level support because some of our problems are more technical."
"We tend to have a lot of Hyper-V... so now we have two management consoles and we would ideally like to leverage SnapCenter to include Hyper-V."
"I feel a little bit that during the whole process of putting this software into production we were like a beta program. It was full of bugs... For example, we had a problem with truncating our Exchange log files... It has improved over time."
"The DBAs are comparing it to SMO but it doesn't have a lot of the functionalities that SMO has."
"The GUI is still so-so. I' don't use the GUI that often anymore because it's really slow, refreshing disks, refreshing hosts, and you have to click a lot."
"I'm waiting for SnapCenter for hybrid solutions. Right now, we only have SnapManager for hybrid. I need agents for that. People are looking to install SnapCenter in a SQL environment, but where they're running SQL on Hyper-V and using virtual files. Currently, we don't have support for hybrid."
"When you have role-based access, for example, it's a bit of a problem that the person who creates the backup job is the owner of it. We are struggling a bit with this, that everyone has the same view and the same permissions in there."
IBM Spectrum Protect is ranked 17th in Backup and Recovery with 146 reviews while NetApp SnapCenter is ranked 42nd in Backup and Recovery with 24 reviews. IBM Spectrum Protect is rated 8.0, while NetApp SnapCenter is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Protect writes "Performance and recoveries are better, and customers are happier with performance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp SnapCenter writes "A stable solution that is mostly used by banks and financial institutions". IBM Spectrum Protect is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, Commvault Cloud, Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) and Rubrik, whereas NetApp SnapCenter is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Cohesity DataProtect, Commvault Cloud, NetApp Cloud Backup and Delphix. See our IBM Spectrum Protect vs. NetApp SnapCenter report.
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