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.
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Unitrends
Score 8.1 out of 10
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The Unitrends Recovery Series Backup Appliances are hardware developed for data backup and management. They cover enterprise backup, ransomware detection, recovery assurance, proactive monitoring, and cloud continuity into a single platform for organizations of all sizes.
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.
We have a traditional stack and pretty typical needs as a manufacturer. I have used and evaluated everything out there, but the Unitrends solution fits very well and was competitively priced. I would think if it fits us, it could fit anyone like us with a similar stack.
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.
Errors on backup jobs could be more clearly explained. As the administrator of the device for my company, I often don't know what caused an error, and can't tell from the error information what happened or caused the error.
Updates of the devices should have an automatic option. It takes to much time to do an update to the devices if updates haven't been maintained.
Shutdown and restarting the device should be available from the main UI screen to eliminate some time when doing updates or if you're doing some maintenance on the device.
We have grown very attached to the Unitrends appliances and their use for recovery and other file restoration needs as well as data archival, data replication to other appliance and data migration to other servers or long term storage requirements. The appliances work well and the support for them is very good as well.
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.
I have never used such an easy product that is stable and scalable like Unitrends. I have been running backups for MANY years. On premise, tape, disk, cloud, you name it. Unitrends is very flexible, stable and has incredible reporting features. It's nice when management requests a report and it takes you 5 minutes to run it and dump it to PDF. How can you beat that?
They're incredible, attentive, thorough. They make sure my issue is resolved and follow up. I'm usually behind on giving them a reply or an update. They have always gone above and beyond for me, and I'll continue to do the same for them.
The Unitrends employees involved in the installation were very friendly and knowledgeable. A certain degree of hiccups can be expected during any installation but never shook my confidence because of the friendly and knowledgeable team that was assigned to my project.
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.
Symantec Backup Exec was the primary tool used for backups for years. We also used Veeam for some Office 365/Exchange backups. Unitrends once configured and set up works very well against the competition. Backup Exec interface was more user friendly. The search tool for exploring backups was much better than Unitrends as well. Unitrends is much faster if you need to restore an entire VM or large file folders. Also once you have Unitrends all set up, it is very low maintenance, it just works. If something fails 9/10 it will correct itself on the next backup that is scheduled to run
It has saved some deleted file server data for our business department.
We have lost some reports for the business department due to an overlooked setting that make the backup reports look great, but the server was not being backed up in reality.
Less anxiety for the IT department, we have backup plan and that is worth a lot to us.
