Data Protection Software

Hello Community
I have some customers who are very concerned about the future for their investment in Spectrum Protect Plus which they use to back up VMware virtual machines. 
There is no clarity on how their investment is protected with the new products.
I have no clarity from a technical point of view what to give to the customer.
Is there any reference that is clear to the customer.

Thanks for sharing.

Hi Diego, 

As it stands today SP Plus is still supported and updates/fixes applied to the product as we know it. It is still a part of the Storage Protect portfolio. 

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/spp/10.1.16?topic=whats-new

As you may know IBM has put very much focus on data resilience from a storage perspective and the mission to increase data resilience across all the storage in the infrastructure. For this we have introduced IBM Storage Defender and IBM Storage Data Protect. These components together with Storage Protect and other capabilities are a big part of this mission. IBM Storage Data Protect have more features than SP Plus but as long as SP Plus does the job I do not see why that needs to be changed. However a change in strategic requirements to increased data resilience may require the customer to think differently about backup/restore especially when focusing on protection against cyber attacks. 

From that aspect I would look into:

1. Is there a change in business requirements for faster recovery; recovery objective, resilience with immutable copies, cyber recovery automation, validation of backup data before recovering it back to production storage. Regulative requirements also drive this. 
2. Time frame for the hardware that SP Plus is running on. If physical servers, then the capacity may need extension or maintence costs may increase over time might.
3. Licensing perspective. We have added a new license model with Storage Defender and the customer may benefit and added value depending on the usage today.

More info here: https://www.ibm.com/blog/maximize-the-power-of-your-lines-of-defense-against-cyber-attacks-with-ibm-storage-flashsystem-and-ibm-storage-defender/

/Pia

Hello Community
I have some customers who are very concerned about the future for their investment in Spectrum Protect Plus which they use to back up VMware virtual machines. 
There is no clarity on how their investment is protected with the new products.
I have no clarity from a technical point of view what to give to the customer.
Is there any reference that is clear to the customer.

Thanks for sharing.