IBM Storage Protect vs. VMware Site Recovery Manager

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Storage Protect
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
IBM Storage Protect (formerly IBM Spectrum Protect, or Tivoli Storage Manager) provides data resilience for physical file servers, virtual environments, and applications. Organizations can scale up to manage billions of objects per backup server.N/A
VMware SRM
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
VMware's Site Recovery Manager (VMware SRM) is a disaster recovery option, used to automate orchestration of failover and failback to minimize downtime and improve availability with VMware Site Recovery Manager.N/A
Pricing
IBM Storage ProtectVMware Site Recovery Manager
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Storage ProtectVMware SRM
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM Storage ProtectVMware Site Recovery Manager
Features
IBM Storage ProtectVMware Site Recovery Manager
Data Center Backup
Comparison of Data Center Backup features of Product A and Product B
IBM Storage Protect
8.1
6 Ratings
4% below category average
VMware Site Recovery Manager
-
Ratings
Universal recovery8.04 Ratings00 Ratings
Instant recovery7.46 Ratings00 Ratings
Recovery verification8.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Business application protection8.64 Ratings00 Ratings
Multiple backup destinations8.65 Ratings00 Ratings
Incremental backup identification8.65 Ratings00 Ratings
Backup to the cloud8.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Deduplication and file compression8.65 Ratings00 Ratings
Snapshots8.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Flexible deployment7.42 Ratings00 Ratings
Management dashboard7.65 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform support8.16 Ratings00 Ratings
Retention options7.06 Ratings00 Ratings
Encryption9.05 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM Storage ProtectVMware Site Recovery Manager
Small Businesses
Cove Data Protection
Cove Data Protection
Score 9.7 out of 10
Cove Data Protection
Cove Data Protection
Score 9.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise
Score 9.6 out of 10
Cove Data Protection
Cove Data Protection
Score 9.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise
Score 9.6 out of 10
Keepit
Keepit
Score 9.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM Storage ProtectVMware Site Recovery Manager
Likelihood to Recommend
7.4
(11 ratings)
7.3
(7 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
1.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
7.6
(5 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
7.2
(5 ratings)
7.0
(2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM Storage ProtectVMware Site Recovery Manager
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
It's quite well suited for a medium to large size VMWare virtualization infrastructure where your production infrastructure can be failed over to a disaster recovery site. There are other cheaper options for a smaller budget business. Also, for a non mission critical virtual infrastructure, you can simply use VM backups such as Veeam backups for restoring failed VMs
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Pros
IBM
  • 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.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • Easy configuration and setup.
  • Testing of a particular VM or datastore with several VMs is easy.
  • Auto configuration of IPs makes the process even easier.
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Cons
IBM
  • 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
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VMware by Broadcom
  • It’s unfortunate, but more and more, the quality of VMware’s products and the technical support teams behind them has degraded significantly. We have opened several support requests within the last few months and ended up resolving a large majority ourselves due to the poor performance of their remote teams.
  • VMware is suffering from the same illness that’s affecting multiple U.S. technology firms, in that their focus has shifted completely away from their customers and moved to pleasing investors. In doing so, clients suffer because they do not get properly tested products and the support teams behind them are very weak and overwhelmed.
  • We worked close to a month trying to get SRM V6.5 to work. We have worked with many previous versions of SRM in the past while using HP EVAs, NetApps and Hitachi arrays, and we can honestly say that we are greatly disappointed with this release and the company.
  • We escalated right up to engineering, but their response times were brutally slow; the technicians were juniors at best.
  • As a technology leader, the last thing you want during a DR is to be dealing with a company that just can't deliver. SRM is not cheap, and you would expect much better products and support from VMware.
  • If you are comparing products, try other companies like Veeam... We ended up using them instead, the setup and execution was easy and seamless, and they answered all our questions quickly and efficiently. They actually do care about their clients.
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Likelihood to Renew
IBM
Not required, company closed. TSM is not used in my current role at my current job.
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VMware by Broadcom
- easy to set up - easy to protect critical servers in case of disaster
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Usability
IBM
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
VMWare SRM is very easy to use and configure. You don't have to be a virtualization expert to learn SRM configuration and execution.
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Support Rating
IBM
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
Sometimes we have to struggle explaining the problem and getting it resolved on priority. The overall quality of support team is not as good as it used to be in past.
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Alternatives Considered
IBM
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
Entertained Veeam, however with SRM's tight integration and "brand" it was an easy decision. The cost for a 25 server license also weighed in the decision for using a VMware product. Plus I am a VMware fan and feel this option to go with SRM will transcend jobs.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
IBM
Not at the moment, but it can leverage the billing outcomes as per the scales.
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VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
IBM
  • 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.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • The biggest positive is that we have a data recovery solution that we can test and verify in a live condition. Prior to this we were only hoping we could recover from a disaster.
  • We've been only running for 4 months and haven't had to use SRM.
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ScreenShots