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CloudCheckr vs IBM Spectrum Computing comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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 Management
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
CloudCheckr
Ranking in Cloud Management
27th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Cost Management (10th), Managed Cloud Services (4th)
IBM Spectrum Computing
Ranking in Cloud Management
23rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 5.7%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CloudCheckr is 1.1%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Computing is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
 

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.
Nigel Mullings - PeerSpot reviewer
Beneficial granular reporting, highly stable, and excellent support
I have worked in the cost-management tools from many cloud providers, such as Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Services, and Azure. CloudCheckr CMx High Security has a lot more detail than the native cloud service cost-management tools. If you want an enterprise-grade solution, CloudCheckr CMx High Security would be a good fit. If you want something simple, out of the box, then you can use the cloud service's native tools.
Avra Jyoti Ghosh - PeerSpot reviewer
One of the best tools in the data management and services area
I mainly used Spectrum Computing for data management, governance, quality, and ETL activity Spectrum Computing's best features are its speed, robustness, and data processing and analysis.  Spectrum Computing is lagging behind other products, most likely because it hasn't been shifted to the…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I have the ability to automate things similar to the Orchestrator stuff. I do have the ability to have it do some balancing, and if it sees some different performance metrics that I've set not being met, it'll actually move some of my virtual machines from, let's say, one host to another. It is sort of an automation tool that helps me. Basically, I specify the metric, and if I get a certain host or something being over-utilized, it'll automatically move the virtual machines around for me. It basically has to snap into my vCenter and then it can make adjustments and move my virtual machines around. It also has some very nice reporting tools built around virtual machines. It tells you how much storage, memory, or CPU is being used monthly, and then it gives you a very nice way to be able to send out billing structure to your end users who use servers within your environment."
"The automation and orchestration components are definitely the best part, as you can tell it what it can do and when, and just let it be."
"On-premises, one advantage I find particularly appealing is the ability to create policies for automatic CPU and memory scaling based on demand."
"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."
"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."
"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."
"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."
"The primary features we have focused on are reporting and optimization."
"The most valuable feature of CloudCheckr CMx High Security is granular reporting. Additionally, the user interface is easy to use."
"The recommendation section is pretty helpful."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It will automatically suggest areas for optimization."
"The solution is mostly stable."
"It's one of the leading players for cloud optimization. It's hard to find anything better."
"The solution is scalable for our purposes."
"The best feature I like about CloudCheckr CMx High Security is its simplicity. I love that it's not rocket science to use the solution. Even if you're not familiar with the cloud, you can easily figure out how to use CloudCheckr CMx High Security. You can use AWS, you can use Azure, and you can use GCP with the solution because the integration is quite simple. You can also use multi-cloud with it, and you could see the billing part. You'll have complete visibility into your cost which I love about the solution. I also love that data on any security issues and vulnerabilities are available on the go with CloudCheckr CMx High Security. You don't need to do anything different. Just run the scan and you'll have all these open findings in the tool, in terms of the priority level, so if it's critical, it will tell you, "It's critical," and you need to fix it right away."
"We are satisfied with the technical support, we have no issues."
"The most valuable aspect of the product is the policy driving resource management, to optimize the computing across data centers."
"Spectrum Computing's best features are its speed, robustness, and data processing and analysis."
"Easy to operate and use."
"IBM's ability to cluster compute resources is impressive, with built-in support for scenarios like VR and active-active configurations,"
"The most valuable feature is the backup capability."
"This solution is working for both VTL and tape."
"The comparison was challenging, but the IBM Spectrum Scale offered a balanced solution. Our engineers rated itsanalytics capabilities equally high as Pure Storage. For workload management, Spectrum Computing provided effective solutions that met our needs. Workload management is part of a complete solution that uses different tools. There were the cloud and HPC parts; within HPC, there were parts like liquid cooling, simple computing, storage, and orchestration. The orchestration team handled the workload management."
 

Cons

"I do not like Turbonomic's new licensing model. The previous model was pretty straightforward, whereas the new model incorporates what most of the vendors are doing now with cores and utilization. Our pricing under the new model will go up quite a bit. Before, it was pretty straightforward, easy to understand, and reasonable."
"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
"It would be nice for them to have a way to do something with physical machines, but I know that is not their strength Thankfully, the majority of our environment is virtual, but it would be nice to see this type of technology across some other platforms. It would be nice to have capacity planning across physical machines."
"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."
"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."
"Since the introduction of a HTML 5 based interface, our main - but minor - criticism of a less than intuitive operation managers' GUI would be the area of improvement."
"Before IBM bought it, the support was fantastic. After IBM bought it, the support became very disappointing."
"The implementation could be enhanced."
"CloudCheckr CMx High Security is complex. There are a lot of menus, and if you do not know what you are looking for you can get lost. However, the interface is self-explanatory. It's easy to understand where to go to get what you want."
"Self-healing could be a bit smoother and a bit cleaner, easier to access and more functional. That would help."
"The solution needs to work better with larger capacities of data."
"What needs to be improved in CloudCheckr CMx High Security is integration. All the clouds are going quite fast, for example, all the cloud providers: Microsoft, Google, etc. CloudCheckr CMx High Security is good with AWS, no doubt about it, but with Azure and Google Cloud, I find that the solution is slow in that direction. If the vendor planned for CloudCheckr CMx High Security to be automated just for AWS, then it does make sense. If not, if the vendor is also targeting good integration with Google and Microsoft, then CloudCheckr CMx High Security integration needs improvement, in particular, it has to be faster. At the moment, its integration with Azure is not as good as its integration with AWS. With GCP, integration is nowhere."
"The reporting and analytic capabilities are very limited."
"Many features still need to be implemented in this tool."
"The performance of the tool really needs to be improved."
"The solution must improve its user interface."
"Lack of sufficient documentation, particularly in Spanish."
"This solution is no longer managing tapes correctly."
"SMB storage and HPC is not compatible and it should be supported by IBM Spectrum Computing."
"We'd like to see some AI model training for machine learning."
"Spectrum Computing is lagging behind other products, most likely because it hasn't been shifted to the cloud."
"IBM's sales and support structure can be challenging."
"We have not been able to use deduplication."
"In Pakistan, IBM's disadvantage is the lack of OEM support and presence."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."
"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."
"When we have expanded our licensing, it has always been easy to make an ROI-based decision. So, it's reasonably priced. We would like to have it cheaper, but we get more benefit from it than we pay for it. At the end of the day, that's all you can hope for."
"I know there have been some issues with the billing, when the numbers were first proposed, as to how much we would save. There was a huge miscommunication on our part. Turbonomic was led to believe that we could optimize our AWS footprint, because we didn't know we couldn't. So, we were promised savings of $750,000. Then, when we came to implement Turbonomic, the developers in AWS said, "Absolutely not. You're not putting that in our environment. We can't scale down anything because they coded it." Our AWS environment is a legacy environment. It has all these old applications, where all the developers who have made it are no longer with the company. Those applications generate a ton of money for us. So, if one breaks, we are really in trouble and they didn't want to have to deal with an environment that was changing and couldn't be supported. That number went from $750,000 to about $450,000. However, that wasn't Turbonomic's fault."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"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."
"We felt the pricing was very fair for the product. It is in no way prohibitive for larger deployments, unlike other similar product on the market."
"The solution is reasonably priced."
"A license is needed to use CloudCheckr CMx High Security, but because we are a managed service provider, the price of the license would vary. It depends on the type of cloud users we have, for example, it would be some type of percentage or monthly billing, etc."
"The cost is on par with other providers."
"Spectrum Computing is one of the most expensive products on the market."
"This solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
19%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
40%
Computer Software Company
9%
Retailer
7%
Real Estate/Law Firm
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 do you like most about CloudCheckr ?
The recommendation section is pretty helpful.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudCheckr ?
The price depends on the actual Azure consumption and what we feed into it. The cost is on par with other providers.
What needs improvement with CloudCheckr ?
We are not happy with the product’s reporting capabilities. We are planning to change the solution. The security comp...
What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Computing?
IBM's sales and support structure can be challenging. To work on an IBM deal, you often need to involve multiple spec...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
CloudCheckr CMx High Security, CloudCheckr CMP
IBM Platform Computing
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Accenture, Logitech, Ingram, Cloudar, Infor, DXC, Cornell University, DLT, Lumen, Lightstream, Choice Hotels, B-Tech, SmileShark, PTP, Explicity, JCH Technology, Siemens Mobility
London South Bank University, Transvalor, Infiniti Red Bull Racing, Genomic
Find out what your peers are saying about CloudCheckr vs. IBM Spectrum Computing and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.