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Flexera Cloud Management Platform (CMP) 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 (2nd), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
Flexera Cloud Management Pl...
Ranking in Cloud Management
23rd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Spectrum Computing
Ranking in Cloud Management
22nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 5.6%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Flexera Cloud Management Platform (CMP) is 1.2%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Computing is 0.8%, 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.
reviewer2035479 - PeerSpot reviewer
Good CMPs for cloud provisioning and excellent scalability
There is a problem with integration due to invalid private node security certificates. However, the issue can be resolved by correcting the certificates. Getting OEMs like Huawei or Morpheus to change their products is difficult, but we found a middle ground where both Huawei and Morpheus can integrate seamlessly through Terraform. So far, the integration has been successful, but it may create a problem when the platform is under a huge load of 46 million students. We have already requested the World Bank and universities to build their case. If that kind of situation arises, they can approach Huawei and Morpheus or go with Plexadera in the end. Although the RSP or SMAX are built around Morpheus specifications specifically, we still have more certified engineers in Pakistan to win that project. The higher education commission of Pakistan has already taken up the matter with both Morpheus and Huawei. VMware refused to do anything, but Huawei has agreed to change the certificate if there is an issue. We have already identified the issue, so they will correct it if the cloud solution is finally deployed for that number of students.
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

"It helps us get a consolidated view of all customer spending into a single dashboard, allowing us to identify opportunities to improve their current spending."
"With over 2500 ESX VMs, including 1500+ XenDesktop VDI desktops, hosted over two datacentres and 80+ vSphere hosts, firefighting has become something of the past."
"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."
"The solution has a good optimization feature."
"It also brings up a list of machines and if something is under-provisioned and needs more compute power it will tell you, 'This server needs more compute power, and we suggest you raise it up to this level.' It will even automatically do it for you. In Azure, you don't have to actually go into the cloud provider to resize. You can just say, 'Apply these resizes,' and Turbonomic uses some back-end APIs to make the changes for you."
"On-premises, one advantage I find particularly appealing is the ability to create policies for automatic CPU and memory scaling based on demand."
"The proactive monitoring of all our open enrollment applications has improved our organization. We have used it to size applications that we are moving to the cloud. Therefore, when we move them out there, we have them appropriately sized. We use it for reporting to current application owners, showing them where they are wasting money. There are easy things to find for an application, e.g., they decommissioned the server, but they never took care of the storage. Without a tool like this, that storage would just sit there forever, with us getting billed for it."
"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."
"With this platform, users could migrate to the cloud on the go and use public cloud services like Oracle database while integrating with their own local storage."
"The most valuable feature is Optima, which is something that we use quite extensively."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the backup capability."
"The most valuable aspect of the product is the policy driving resource management, to optimize the computing across data centers."
"Easy to operate and use."
"We are satisfied with the technical support, we have no issues."
"Spectrum Computing's best features are its speed, robustness, and data processing and analysis."
"IBM's ability to cluster compute resources is impressive, with built-in support for scenarios like VR and active-active configurations,"
"This solution is working for both VTL and tape."
 

Cons

"There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit. It does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes. It goes out there and just kind of goes crazy. There needs to be something that kind of throttles things back a little bit. I have personally seen where we've been working on things, then pulled servers out of the VMware cluster and found that Turbonomic was still trying to ship resources to and from that node. So, there has to be some kind of throttling or ability for it to not be so buggy in that area. Because we've pulled nodes out of a cluster into maintenance mode, then brought it back up, and it tried to put workloads on that outside of a cluster. There may be something that is available for this, but it seems very kludgy to me."
"The reporting needs to be improved. It's important for us to know and be able to look back on what happened and why certain decisions were made, and we want to use a custom report for this."
"The GUI and policy creation have room for improvement. There should be a better view of some of the numbers that are provided and easier to access. And policy creation should have it easier to identify groups."
"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."
"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."
"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."
"The way it handles updates needs to be improved."
"I like the detail I get in the old user interface and will miss some of that in the new interface when we perform our planned upgrade soon."
"There is a problem with integration due to invalid private node security certificates."
"Technical support is an area that can be improved."
"Spectrum Computing is lagging behind other products, most likely because it hasn't been shifted to the cloud."
"SMB storage and HPC is not compatible and it should be supported by IBM Spectrum Computing."
"Lack of sufficient documentation, particularly in Spanish."
"In Pakistan, IBM's disadvantage is the lack of OEM support and presence."
"We'd like to see some AI model training for machine learning."
"This solution is no longer managing tapes correctly."
"IBM's sales and support structure can be challenging."
"We have not been able to use deduplication."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"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."
"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."
"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm."
"The price is higher than an open-source product, or CloudForms, or IBM Cloud Pak, but it is still not very high."
"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%
No data available
Financial Services Firm
43%
Computer Software Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Insurance Company
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 do you like most about RightScale Cloud Management Platform?
With this platform, users could migrate to the cloud on the go and use public cloud services like Oracle database whi...
What needs improvement with RightScale Cloud Management Platform?
There is a problem with integration due to invalid private node security certificates. However, the issue can be reso...
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
RightScale Cloud Management Platform, MultiCloud Platform
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.
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Rackspace, Softlayer, Cloudstack, OpenStack, Vmware
London South Bank University, Transvalor, Infiniti Red Bull Racing, Genomic
Find out what your peers are saying about Flexera Cloud Management Platform (CMP) vs. IBM Spectrum Computing and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,640 professionals have used our research since 2012.