Carbonite Server vs. IBM Storage Protect

A key question is, "how much critical data needs to be backed up?". A follow-up question might be, "what impact would it have on your business and reputation if you were to lose this data or take more than a few days to recover?" If a company's data is not critical or valuable to the success of their business, then this is not a good solution.

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

• Their web portal is easy to use to monitor server, check logs, restore or run an ad-hoc backup job.
• Minimal problems, but when there is a problem, customer support is friendly and flexible in finding a solution. Contacting through their customer portal is convenient.
• Competitive pricing for level of service provided.

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

• The granular restore tool for exchange, which is needed to restore a specific email rather than an entire mailbox, is a bit combersome. I wish the tool was incorporated into the 'normal' restore features.
• The inline replication process is very sensitive to available bandwidth. And if bandwidth between source and replication site becomes overused, inline replication fails and 'regular' replication takes its place. I wish inline replication was a bit less 'touchy' and would have a built in 'pause' to allow for the clearing of bandwidth before it fails over to 'regular' replication.

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

Carbonite Server Backup does not integrate or support any reporting; it is not good at it. We required monthly and quarterly reports for audit. If we fail in that we get fined or we have to pay a certain amount of money to customer. It does not support cloud instances and we are using N2WS for the cloud instances. This is an additional burden for customers.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Product needs a lot of improvements in some features like Cloud and Reporting.

Incentivized

It is suitable for a huge part of our organisation, supports many operating systems (including Windows, Linux and IBM AIX), supports many databases - also for online backups (like Oracle, Db2 and SAP HANA), has an Operational Center for control, command-line and GUI for backup/restore. It just works well, once setup correctly.

Incentivized

Some of the requests we could not get resolved on time. They took a long time to provide the reason for the issue we had raised.

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

We had appliance and we just needed to setup the Director Console which was straight forward and easy.

Incentivized

Carbonite Server's direction wasn't really for cloud companies as they are more specialized in robust local backup services. I'm a novice when it comes to server backups and replication, but have learned and picked up a lot from talking to the customer center compared to Veeam where it's mostly just self-learning reading lots of documentation which could be overwhelming at times. We started using Veeam as most of our on-prem servers are ceasing operations as we slowly transition to the cloud. I would still use Carbonite as a fall-back option just in case the cloud fails us. Our company cannot afford to have downtimes as we work closely with a lot of contractors and every minute counts.

Incentivized

We have been using TSM (former ADSM), rebranded Spectrum Protect and now rebranded Storage Protect a long time already. The product served us well. Last time we compared it to competitors we found they all had something lacking. And switching backup suites is no small task if there is data you need to keep 5, 7 or 10 years anyway. Commvault gets close, but doesn't match all features.

Incentivized

• While EVault can become expensive if you have a lot of data to store, but you have to keep in mind that it does not cost you anything more to restore your data in the event of an emergency. Some systems give you a great upfront cost, until you actually need to retrieve your data.

Incentivized

• It can be used as a disaster recovery solution when you have the right configuration (either replication or tape copies in a safe location). This way it can be a lifesaver for any company.
• It can bring back the information you need if you are hit by ransomeware.
• It is also needed if you are accounting for user error, sometimes people delete the files they need by accident and without a backup solution they are out of luck

Incentivized