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Carbonite Migrate vs Densify comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Migration
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
Carbonite Migrate
Ranking in Cloud Migration
11th
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Migration Tools (5th)
Densify
Ranking in Cloud Migration
16th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (33rd), Virtualization Management Tools (9th), Cloud Analytics (2nd), Cloud Cost Management (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Migration category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 4.0%, down from 5.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Carbonite Migrate is 4.9%, up from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Densify is 2.2%, down from 2.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Migration
 

Featured Reviews

Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves time and costs while reducing performance degradation
It's been a very good solution. The reporting has been very, very valuable as, with a very large environment, it's very hard to get your hands on the environment. Turbonomic does that work for you and really shows you where some of the cost savings can be done. It also helps you with the reporting side. Me being able to see that this machine hasn't been used for a very long time, or seeing that a machine is overused and that it might need more RAM or CPU, et cetera, helps me understand my infrastructure. The cost savings are drastic in the cloud feature in Azure and in AWS. In some of those other areas, I'm able to see what we're using, what we're not using, and how we can change to better fit what we have. It gives us the ability for applications and teams to see the hardware and how it's being used versus how they've been told it's being used. The reporting really helps with that. It shows which application is really using how many resources or the least amount of resources. Some of the gaps between an infrastructure person like myself and an application are filled. It allows us to come to terms by seeing the raw data. This aspect is very important. In the past, it was me saying "I don't think that this application is using that many resources" or "I think this needs more resources." I now have concrete evidence as well as reporting and some different analytics that I can show. It gives me the evidence that I would need to show my application owners proof of what I'm talking about. In terms of the downtime, meantime, and resolution that Turbonomic has been able to show in reports, it has given me an idea of things before things happen. That is important as I would really like to see a machine that needs resources, and get resources to it before we have a problem where we have contention and aspects of that nature. It's been helpful in that regard. Turbonomic has helped us understand where performance risks exist. Turbonomic looks at my environment and at the servers and even at the different hosts and how they're handling traffic and the number of machines that are on them. I can analyze it and it can show me which server or which host needs resources, CPU, or RAM. Even in Azure, in the cloud, I'm able to see which resources are not being used to full capacity and understand where I could scale down some in order to save cost. It is very, very helpful in assessing performance risk by navigating underlying causes and actions. The reason why it's helpful is because if there's a machine that's overrunning the CPU, I can run reports every week to get an idea of machines that would need CPU, RAM, or additional resources. Those resources could be added by Turbonomic - not so much by me - on a scheduled basis. I personally don't have to do it. It actually gives me a little bit of my life back. It helps me to get resources added without me physically having to touch each and every resource myself. Turbonomic has helped to reduce performance degradation in the same way as it's able to see the resources and see what it needs and add them before a problem occurs. It follows the trends. It sees the trends of what's happening and it's able to add or take away those resources. For example, we discuss when we need to do certain disaster recovery tests. Over the years, Turbo will be able to see, for example, around this time of year that certain people ramp up certain resources in an environment, and then it will add the resources as required. Another time of year, it will realize these resources are not being used as much, and it takes those resources away. In this way, it saves money and time while letting us know where we are. We've saved a great deal of time using this product when I consider how I'd have to multiply myself and people like me who would have to add resources to devices or take resources away. We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time. Those saved hours are across months, not years. I would consider the number of resources that Turbonomic is adding and taking away and the placement (if I had to do it all myself) would end up being hundreds of hours monthly that would be added without the help of Turbonomic. It helps us to meet SLAs mainly due to the fact that we're able to keep the servers going and to keep the servers in an environment, to keep them to where (if we need to add resources) we can add them at any given time. It will keep our SLAs where they need to be. If we were to have downtime due to the fact that we had to add resources or take resources away and it was an emergency, then that would prevent us from meeting our SLAs. We also use it to monitor Azure and to monitor our machines in terms of the resources that are out there and the cost involved. In a lot of cases, it does a better job of giving us cost information than Azure itself does. We're able to see the cost per machine. We're able to see the unattached volume and storage that we are paying for. It gives us a great level of insight. Turbonomic gives us the time to be able to focus on innovation and ongoing modernization. Some of the tasks that it does are tasks that I would not necessarily have to do. It's very helpful in that I know that the resources are there where they need to be and it gives me an idea of what changes need to be made or what suggestions it's making. Even if I don't take them, I'm able to get a good idea of some best practices through Turbonomic. One of the ways that Turbonomic does to help bring new resources to market is that we are now able to see the resources (or at least monitor the resources) before they get out to the general public within our environment. We saw immediate value from the product in the test environment. We set it up in a small test environment and we started with just placement and we could tell that the placement was being handled more efficiently than what VMware was doing. There was value for us in placement alone. Then, after we left the placement, we began to look at the resources and there were resources. We immediately began to see a change in the environment. It has made the application and performance better, mainly due to the fact that we are able to give resources and take resources away based on what the need is. Our expenses, definitely, have been in a better place based on the savings that we've been able to make in the cloud and on-prem. Turbonomic has been very helpful in that regard. We've been able to see the savings easily based on the reports in Turbonomic. That, and just seeing the machines that are not being used to capacity allows us to set everything up so it runs a bit more efficiently.
reviewer1228836 - PeerSpot reviewer
Great tool for one-to-one migration, but not suitable for multi-cloud migration
Some of the tools relating to multi-cloud migration need to be improved as they have a very limited capability at this point in time. These tools are suitable for one-to-one migration scenarios but they are not fit for multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud environments. I would like to point out that I don't have a hands-on very large scale production implementation experience, as that is the job of our infra team. As I mentioned earlier, we find it very difficult to use these tools in a multi-cloud environment but they work well for single-cloud environments — from an on-premise environment to the public cloud. These tools are quite limited, making things much more complex in a multi-cloud environment. They should add a feature that supports multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environment migration properly. The world is going to be very different five years from now, how will they support these kinds of container-based migrations? Currently, infrastructure as code is very limited. It's not as simple as just moving the server or data. The customer wants you to move the entire application, exactly as it is, and then deploy it. From that perspective, these tools offer only part of the solution, they are not fulfilling the holistic need, which the customer or organization needs. As of now, Carbonite Migrate is helpful on an infrastructure level. If we had to move 100 applications across a multi-cloud environment, then this solution would not work. In the cloud-world (the migration part of it) there needs to be better automation. Let me explain: automation refers to your infra, app, and data. Together, these three components combine and automate will provide you to deploy faster on any cloud platform. As of now, this tool doesn’t fit too much into a multi-cloud environment cloud data migrations. Together, these three components combine and automate it allowing you to deploy it. As of now, these tools cannot deploy it into a multi-cloud environment. That's where the challenge is; that's for other tools. We need to see what this product can do in terms of app, data, and infra. It is automated from the infra point of view, but not in regards to the app and data. Other vendors understand this problem and have taken the necessary steps to address it. In short, multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments pose a problem for this solution. I would like to know how I can take the automated path — data, app, and infra all together. That is something they need to enhance. Recently, I have seen a lot of other companies implementing AI-based automation, where more things are taken care of by AI itself, and not people. Many of these migrations are too complex for humans to analyze and form solutions. It is better to use AI platforms to create recommendations and then automate them, that way you can reduce the burden. Currently, the migration time is vast, from six months to one year, it would be impossible to do 100 application migrations. This is very time consuming and needs to be improved.
Amit Kantia - PeerSpot reviewer
Its most valuable feature is the ability to capture attributes in the console, but it is not a stable solution
I recommend others to use Densify. They can not only use it for reporting but for automation as well. They can implement the policies on the console easily during the build-out procedure. Stability is the primary concern to us as it is causing lots of problems. We can only make significant decisions if Densify allows us, and it takes lots of time. Thus, I rate the tool as a six out of ten.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The automated memory balancing, where it looks at whether it's being used in the most efficient way and adds or takes away memory, is the best part. If it didn't do that, it would be something that I would have to do. We have too many machines for one person to do that. The automation helps me in that it is done in a really efficient way and a balanced way because of the policies. It really helps."
"I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance."
"Before implementing Turbonomic, we had difficulty reaching a consensus about VM placement and sizing. Everybody's opinion was wrong, including mine. The application developers, implementers, and infrastructure team could never decide the appropriate size of a virtual machine. I always made the machines small, and they always made them too big. We were both probably wrong."
"We like that Turbonomic shows application metrics and estimates the impact of taking a suggested action. It provides us a map of resource utilization as part of its recommendation. We evaluate and compare that to what we think would be appropriate from a human perspective to that what Turbonomic is doing, then take the best action going forward."
"Turbonomic has helped optimize cloud operations and reduced our cloud costs significantly. Overall, we are at about 40 percent savings, and we spend about three million a year just in Azure. It reduces the size of the VMs, putting them into the right template for usage. People don't realize that you don't have to future-proof a virtual machine in Azure. You just need to build it for today. As the business or service grows, you can scale up or out. About 90 percent of all the costs that we've reduced has been from sizing machines appropriately."
"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."
"Turbonomic helps us right-size virtual machines to utilize the available infrastructure components available and suggest where resources should exist. We also use the predictive tool to forecast what will happen when we add additional compute-demanding virtual machines or something to the environment. It shows us how that would impact existing resources. All of that frees up time that would otherwise be spent on manual calculation."
"With Turbonomic, we were able to reduce our ESX cluster size and save money on our maintenance and license renewals. It saved us around $75,000 per year but it's a one-time reduction in VMware licensing. We don't renew the support. The ongoing savings is probably $50,000 to $75,000 a year, but there was a one-time of $200,000 plus."
"Carbonite Migrate is helpful on an infrastructure level."
"Carbonite Migrate works well in Windows platform migrations and in the case of a VML platform. The migration is smooth in Windows environments."
"The solution is user-friendly."
"One would be the automatic rebalancing of the environment. That was one feature which helped. With that, we could improve our efficiency of our VMware infrastructure."
"Densify's ability to aggregate multiple on-premise vCenters and multiple cloud accounts, gives it a level of visibility not found in many places."
"The Control Console provides a very easy to read dashboard of "too little/just right/too much" resources both for current data and on a historical or predictive basis."
"The Control Console is an incredible way to give a quick view of current capacity utilization allowing technical people to drill down quickly and allowing business/management people to get a quick overview of the environment."
"The solution's tech support is excellent."
"The Densify Control Console, and Environment Status."
"The ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs."
"I would say that the initial thing is that it provides us with a technological basis to expand capacity management beyond Excel."
 

Cons

"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
"The planning and costing areas could be a little bit more detailed. When you have more than 2,000 machines, the reports don't work properly. They need to fix it so that the reports work when you use that many virtual machines."
"After running this solution in production for a year, we may want a more granular approach to how we utilize the product because we are planning to use some of its metrics to feed into our financial system."
"The automation area could be improved, and the generic reports are poor. We want more details in the analysis report from the application layer. The reports from the infrastructure layer are satisfactory, but Turbonomic won't provide much information if we dig down further than the application layer."
"We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps."
"In Azure, it's not what you're using. You purchase the whole 8 TB disk and you pay for it. It doesn't matter how much you're using. So something that I've asked for from Turbonomic is recommendations based on disk utilization. In the example of the 8 TB disk where only 200 GBs are being used, based on the history, there should be a recommendation like, "You can safely use a 500 GB disk." That would create a lot of savings."
"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."
"Recovering resources when they're not needed is not as optimized as it could be."
"Migration in RHEL and Linux environments can be improved. During RHEL migration with multiple data areas, you have to create a similar source environment at the destination. This can be challenging because you have to install it, create the VM, install over it, and mount it at the mount point. Only then can you do the migration."
"We find it very difficult to use these tools in a multi-cloud environment"
"Carbonite failed when moving GIS data."
"Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level."
"Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented."
"Initially we talked about some custom reporting, wherein our customer expected certain reports on a few areas, like how the storage is allocated, how the network performance is doing, and how the network utilization is happening for a virtual machine."
"A closer integration to the service management processes."
"In terms of integration, the tool has great data. However, it's not always meaningful because the true business attributes of how most Fortune 500 companies operate are not maintaining in one tool, they're in a school of many tools."
"It seems that the mechanism for integration is, it goes so far but I think there could be some standard integration to normal remedy service now etc. I think that should be out of the box."
"The solution's stability is the primary concern for me."
"Some parts of the interface are rather complex and require a bit of time to navigate, but this has never stopped us as a Densify advisor is readily available to help with our "how to" queries."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Contact the Turbonomic sales team, explain your needs and what you're looking to monitor. They will get a pre-sales SE on the phone and together work up a very accurate quote."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools."
"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."
"If you're a super-small business, it may be a little bit pricey for you... But in large, enterprise companies where money is, maybe, less of an issue, Turbonomic is not that expensive. I can't imagine why any big company would not buy it, for what it does."
"The product is fairly priced right now. Given its capabilities, it is excellently priced. We think that the product will become self-funding because we will be able to maximize our resources, which will help us from a capacity perspective. That should save us money in the long run."
"It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year."
"In terms of pricing, I think it's an expensive tool."
"The licensing costs are really high."
"Densify has licensing setup so you can collect data without licensing. It gives you the ability to collect on everything, then choose later what you would like to license."
"Setup cost is negligible, as it scales fairly well."
"Cost is always involved, but then I feel that this solution is better than other products that we have."
"There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
27%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
University
6%
Manufacturing Company
26%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?
It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...
What needs improvement with Carbonite Migrate?
Carbonite failed when moving GIS data. Therefore, scalability is an issue as it struggles with migrating heavy data, ...
What is your primary use case for Carbonite Migrate?
We initially used Carbonite for cloud migration, specifically for moving data from one cloud to another. We moved fro...
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Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
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Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Computrade Malaysia
AIG, Bank of America, Cigna, Citi
Find out what your peers are saying about Carbonite Migrate vs. Densify and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.