IBM Storage Protect Plus vs. IDERA SQL Safe Backup

Good for daily operational backups and their replications and areas like VM backup, when it comes to resting the backups in a cloud environment especially features like BYOL is an edge to IBM over its near competitors. On the other hand, a lot of scopes to improve to have native/application-aware backups for modern applications like AI and microservices.

Incentivized

SQL Safe is appropriate and well-suited for any backup scenario. Having used SQL Safe, I probably wouldn't want to manage a set of servers in the future without it. If you only have a couple of SQL servers, it might not be worth the spend as there are well-maintained free options that are very functional (though they do require more technical knowledge). But I can't think of a scenario where SQL Safe wouldn't be appropriate.

Incentivized

• recovery
• replication
• retention

Incentivized

• History visibility
• Very intuitive
• Easy to set up

Incentivized

• Incorporation of more touchless agents for physical servers.
• Direct offload to tape - instead of requiring Spectrum Protect.

Incentivized

• When you're adding a new SQL server, sometimes the install from the management server to the SQL server will fail. I'm guessing this happens because of some version difference in Windows components or similar. Not a huge deal because you can just copy the agent to the SQL server and install it there, but considering how easy everything else is, I would expect this to be a little more fluid.
• I ran into a situation where part of our business decided to move their servers to a third-party data center. When they took away a SQL server that I was managing with SQL Safe, anything having to do with that policy took forever. Click. Wait 10 minutes. Window reacts. I'm guessing this is because the Management Console is trying super hard to contact the server in question, but I wish it handled losing a server better than it does.

Incentivized

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus doesn't allow taking backup of the Meditech HIMS application, due to the unique nature of the database and its functionality. As it's a special case, the vendor supports only a few fully integrated backup solutions which resulted in using Bridgehead as a trustable backup option specific to the application.

Incentivized

IDERA SQL Safe Backup winning thanks to the pricing, nothing more.

Incentivized

• Cloud backup can be expensive and slow

Incentivized

• SQL Safe allows me to spend less time managing my DR plan and still maintain confidence that my backups and restores are solid. Saving my time means saving money.
• SQL Safe does an amazing job at backup compression over and above SQL's native compression. SQL backups are probably our single largest consumer of network drive space. Any product that helps reduce my network footprint, saves money.

Incentivized