Spectrum Protect Plus Announced

This week IBM made the public pre-announcement that they have a new data protection offering in Spectrum Protect Plus which will be released in Q4.

What is Spectrum Protect Plus? 

IBM are calling it the future of data protection, recovery and data reuse. 
It's a new data protection platform packaged as an OVA that simplifies VM backups for VMware vSphere and Hyper-V that can be implemented as a standalone solution or integrated with IBM Spectrum Protect for longer-term retention of data. Below is an architectural overview of how the product works.

If you want to see the product in the flesh go and have a look at the IBM product demo available on YouTube here which includes an end to end product preview of the beta.

Ok, looks good but why should I care? There are 6 key business benefits of Spectrum Protect Plus that jump out.

1. Providing you with Greater Confidence In Protection - SLA driven protection management and monitoring to instantly identify backup compliance which will become key especially for organisations needing to comply with GDPR.
2. Simplicity - A standalone, agentless data protection solution for virtual environments that is easy to implement and use.
3. Improved RPOs and RTOs - Via Instant search and recovery of VMs, databases and files to any recovery point from a single global catalogue.
4. Unlocking the Value of Backup Data - The self-service access feature means application teams can access backup data to enable use cases such as DevOps and Analytics on the often wasted resource that is your backup data.
5. Faster Time To Value - Deployments are quickly completed via an OVA meaning you can be backing up data in under 15 minutes following the deployment.
6. Enterprise Integration - Provides the optional ability to integrate with IBM Spectrum Protect for advanced longer term retention.

These benefits solve many of the common business problems seen when attempting to protect data within virtual environments. 

But wait IBM already have a data protection offering for virtual environments in Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments what is going to happen to that?
Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments still offers an enterprise class solution for protecting virtual environments for customers with Spectrum Protect. Support for Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments will continue for the foreseeable future and if you have implemented this don't worry it's not going to vanish! But IBM have stated that their overall strategic direction with data protection offerings for virtual environments is going to be focused on Spectrum Protect Plus. The roadmap looks exciting with support for hardware snapshots, enhanced application integration for Exchange, DB2, Oracle , SharePoint and MySQL, AWS, Azure and restoration to public cloud all in the 17/18 plans.

From my perspective it's great to see IBM attacking an area of the market they see the competition thriving in and removing the shackles of being branded too complex via organisations who prefer products such as Veeam, vSphere Data Protection and Actifio. Licensing is on a per protect virtual machine basis. With full details on pricing to be announced shortly.

If you want to chat in more detail around data protection in your virtual environment before the release of Spectrum Protect Plus please feel free to get in contact with me via william.bush@tectrade.com