IBM Storage Protect vs. LiveVault

IBM Storage Protect is well-suited for large heterogenous environments, with skilled IT staff on-hand. You need a person (or group of people) to monitor day-to-day operations, tweak schedules where needed and be mindful of things that might go wrong. It is also well-suited if you have other IBM products that integrate well with Storage Protect, like Storage Protect Plus or IBM Defender. It is less suited for small companies, with only one person responsible for IT. Employing Storage Protect would be overkill and use too much time of the administrator.

Incentivized

Our company was originally with VaultLogix which was taken over by LiveVault. The transition to the new product was not as smooth as expected and presented us with issues especially with a restore. Restore and what files needed to be included in the backup policy were not communicated to us correctly and it was not until a customer's server failed that we found out we couldn't do a restore because we were missing files that were needed for a complete restore.

I don't believe it works very well for backups of virtual servers. Installation of the product is user-friendly.

Incentivized

• Tight integration with Db2. As an IBM product, it works seamlessly with Db2. You can query what is stored in TSM via Db2 itself. You can also use DB scripts to maintain the items being stored there.
• Like most of its competitors, Tivoli handles deduplication well.
• Provides a GUI for browsing and maintaining items stored there. I rarely use this feature, due to the next item I will post:
• Command-line interface directly from my Db2 database servers.
• Both client and server-side deduplication, compression and encryption are available.
• If the requirements are zLinux and DB2 support then it's the most solid solution.
• Can be complex to implement, but once up and running, it is rock-solid and immensely scalable.
• Scalability is huge. Can be added onto easily.

Incentivized

• Easy to install the client piece.
• Easy to setup the backup policies.
• Data encryption and security.

Incentivized

• Deployment and configuration is not easy for an unexperienced IBM Spectrum Protect administrator
• Operations center uses a lot of data and needs a lot of storage for larger environments
• Have not seen a redbook about it in the past 10 years

• It does not play very well with virtual servers.
• Support is not always responsive.
• Issues with failed backups have cost our company time and money.

Incentivized

Not required, company closed. TSM is not used in my current role at my current job.

Incentivized

In the present, a backup solution is a must-have, but then companies start using a solution for virtual machines, another solution for bare-metal servers, and another solution for their ERP. By using Spectrum Protect you can have all of that in a single pane of glass. This way you can have a simple recovery plan for all your information assets.

Incentivized

The few times we've called for support we eventually got an answer, but it's IBM and a very big company and getting to a support agent is hard.

Incentivized

IBM Spectrum Protect is related to the other IBM Spectrum products listed because it is part of the suite and is also the main backup product for backup and restoration of information. With Veeam it is related as they present competence in different lines of technology, often the integration of both tools can be the best solution for clients looking for a successful backup strategy.

Incentivized

LiveVault is the only product we have used. The reason is that we chose it initially was the fact you can restore individual files. Also that the data is transferred offsite to a secure data center and data is backed up again, providing a second offsite copy.

Incentivized

Not at the moment, but it can leverage the billing outcomes as per the scales.

Incentivized

• Tivoli does well running file-level backups, but Exchange is clunky and restores are really hard. With no SharePoint agent, if you use SharePoint you will need another product like AvePoint DocAve. The web-based GUI console is MUCH improved over earlier versions, but you will still need to be a command-line guru to make Tivoli do everything, and local (node) config files still rule. This product was originally ported from Unix and retains may of its 'nix roots.

Incentivized

• LiveVault has initially cost us more labor time than we anticipated for our IT staff.
• Installing cloud backup has given us a piece of mind that our data and our customer's data is safe.

Incentivized