IBM Storage Protect vs. Oracle GoldenGate

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

I think it's a great product. We apply Oracle GoldenGate to several use cases in our organization. 1. Business Continuity Planning, 2. Query Offloading through data replication to a reporting instance of our data, 3. looking into data transformations to help support various queries for different teams within the business.

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

• As the product under the Oracle umbrella, it perfectly and natively supports the Oracle database very well.
• For the standard scenario and use cases, the configuration is straight-forward (in our case uni-direction copy from source to target).
• It is robust and the performance meets our SLA, even for a large amount of data volume.
• The error report is not only detailed but hits the right points, so trouble shooting is easy.

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

• The earlier versions of Golden Gate were complex to use as there was no front end. All that works was the command line.
• The cost of the product can be a detriment to most companies.
• The product has been augmented over the years and has so many features that it can be overwhelming.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Oracle GoldenGate is a core part of our business.

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

Once set up, it's very easy to use and keep running, it's getting to that point that can make it cumbersome to some. Also, depending on the data that you want to replicate, the configuration files can become quite cumbersome to maintain. Learning curve can be high for some who are not as experienced with databases and transactions.

Incentivized

Oracle GoldenGate has only gone down for us when the data being sent was bad.

Incentivized

Oracle GoldenGate's performance is great for our use cases. Your mileage may vary.

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

Oracle Support for Oracle GoldenGate has been quite responsive and quite helpful in the few situations where we've needed it. Furthermore, the documentation on Oracle GoldenGate is so good that we often do not need to contact support with issues as the fix is already documented and able to be run by us without needing to open a ticket.

Incentivized

We've had Oracle consultants come as well for training days to talk about new features, parts of Oracle GoldenGate we may not be using and things of that nature. The consultants they send are great as they're very knowledgeable about all things Oracle GoldenGate and great resources for any questions or concerns you may have with the product.

Incentivized

We used Oracle University for our Oracle Golden Gate Training and it was top notch. We were able to turn our whole DBA team to Oracle GoldenGate newbies to Oracle GoldenGate troubleshooting experts in a matter of a few days, while this obviously did not come cheap, the company felt that it was worth the investment.

Incentivized

If Oracle GoldenGate is new to your organization, expose as many DBAs as possible to it. Having your whole team fluent in it will overcome early operational hurdles and allow it to more quickly become an accepted and supported part of your supported platform for your team that will enable the business to use it to its fullest.

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

We use Oracle Data Guard as a backup tool, but not for data replication. Data Guard is not suited for real-time data replication in our non-normalized reporting database nor for the database we are using for our upgrade project, as Data Guard is not able to transform data and is not able to synchronize data into different schemas, which is necessary for our project. Additionally, our project database is on Oracle 12g not 11i: I am not 100% sure Data Guard is able to replicate from 11i to 12g

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Have never had any issues with scaling Oracle GoldenGate itself, however Oracle GoldenGate Monitor does have scaling issues, but with Oracle GoldenGate now able to be monitored by Oracle Enterprise Manager, this is no longer an issue, in my opinion.

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

• In earlier versions, DDL support was limited as well as the need of primary key constraints in the source tables. This made me create partitions, sub-partitions, truncatations and perform other operations upon they are performed in source systems and I need to discuss with source system administrators and need to convince them to let them create primary keys for replicated tables.
• But both issues are solved now.
• Installation is straightforward, easy.
• Deployed everything within Oracle Data Integrator.
• Developing 1000 of ODI interfaces for loading into Operational Data Store took not more than 100 man/days. But, adding them to Golden Gate is taking not more than 5 man/days.
• Management Pack and VeriData are additional packs for your management and data verification needs.

Incentivized