IBM Storage Protect vs. SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM)

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

SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) is pretty good at forecasting capacity consumption, which was a must for us. If you have LUNs that have high latency in a normal environment (user shares, for instance), you'll need to customize the alerts to tune out the noise. As with all SW modules and most other products, there is a time lag between what is in the console and what's happening now. Data in the console and alerts are typically 5 to 15 minutes old.

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

• Unmasks storage performance metrics and gives a common dashboard for monitoring.
• A simple, intuitive interface for adding supported storage frames.
• Lineage -- "The guest OS is connected to the virtual host and the virtual host is connected to the ... wait, what LUN is that?!?" #SOLVED.

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

• Issues getting SMI working correctly to monitor Compellents through SRM.
• The ability to break down alerts to a more granular level.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It has helped me prove that we need more storage as well as faster storage to management

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

Easy to set up and start. Out of the box alerts which you can tweak to your needs. Easy to use interfaces as well

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

Do not have to contact support for issues often and when i do it is fast to get response and resolve my issues

Incentivized

Easy to use set up wizard went off without a hitch.

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 have a full suite of SolarWinds products and did not evaluate other options for a full package. For selective monitoring we log into the devices, but this has made that much easier as we have a dashboard rather than logging into devices one at a time.

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

• Real-time monitoring and alerting to surpass those of native vSphere and in some occasions, better than manufacturer written software.
• Historical monitoring of environment with charts and graphs to assist with ever changing environment loads.

Incentivized