IBM Storage Protect vs. Qumulo Core

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

Qumulo is great for media and entertainment companies, that need simple and easy management of a NAS. The product can also scale and be sized to larger shops too. The support that comes with it also can act as an extension of internal IT. Their support is always watching the box when it phones home with hardware errors or if it would go offline. Qumulo is not initially set up well-running virtual workloads, while Vmware supports NFS, some settings need to be adjusted on Qumulo to allow for upgrades to happen while virtual machines are running

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

• Support, they offer a slack based support which is fast and incredibly helpful.
• Fast releases, they release new features every 2 weeks and actively seek out improvement ideas from end-users.
• NFS and SMB co-existent support through mapping permissions allows mixed end users to connect through there native protocol.

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

• Admin users are not able to be tied to SSO or LDAP accounts.
• At the start there was no RBAC but this has since been addressed.
• While there is incredible analytics, there is no native way to get historical trends by volume or user.

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

Their Slack-based support is like nothing I have experienced. They are fast, helpful, and willing to go the extra mile, even when an issue is not clearly their's to solve. They are committed to your success. The engineers on the Slack channel are oftentimes the engineers that programmed the very same feature you are asking questions about or having issues with.

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

Qumulo was not the least expensive but we were blown away by support offered and pre-sales support to ensure questions were answered. Our main challenges were mixed end-user platforms and a diverse set of use cases on those end-user computers. Having the dual access to volumes, over NFS and SMB, helps us greatly in this area.

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

• Reduced cost in support and upgrade times compared to old fiber San.
• Allows the Service Desk to focus on other things since permissions and access are simplified.
• Very easy and bandwidth efficient replication allows us to comply with DR.

Incentivized