No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

IBM Spectrum Computing vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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 Spectrum Computing
Ranking in Cloud Management
27th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (7th)
IBM Turbonomic
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (3rd), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (11th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Spectrum Computing is 1.5%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 4.0%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic4.0%
IBM Spectrum Computing1.5%
Other94.5%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

OmarIsmail1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Technical Specialist II at Clicks Group
Senior Technical Specialist appreciates intelligent workload management, strong support, and scalability
The best features of IBM Spectrum Computing are common across many of their storage products. The software is solid, meaning that the code is stable. They take business seriously, which is what IBM stands for - International Business Machines. They always maintain a business-oriented approach in their software development. It's not simply clicking through interfaces; in IBM software, they consider their actions, process flows, and workflows around business processes. It requires understanding IBM and their methodology, as the software operates accordingly. I have utilized IBM Spectrum Computing's intelligent workload management feature. We use Insights, which is connected to the cloud. This provides AI capabilities for analyzing the configuration, offering smart recommendations on new code, warning about bugs in current code, and suggesting configuration improvements through its advisor tool. The predictive analytics feature in IBM Spectrum Computing enables optimal software performance through Insights. However, being a storage administrator requires foundational knowledge and understanding beyond these tools. For troubleshooting, it's efficient in spotting bottlenecks, but understanding the terms and metrics is essential as it provides answers that need interpretation.
reviewer1446966 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
The solution reduced our operational expenditures and is able to identify points before we even noticed them
The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens. When I change the resolution to 1080, I only see half of what I would on my big 4K monitor. It would be annoying to have to scroll to see the flow chart. They have a flow chart that goes top to bottom like a tree. On a lower resolution, it might be nice if that scrolls horizontally because it's long, narrow, and tall. It's only three icons wide, but it's 15 icons tall. I think it would be helpful to have the ability to change that for a smaller screen and customize the widget.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We are satisfied with the technical support, we have no issues."
"I tell everyone that they should go with IBM Spectrum Computing."
"This solution worked as expected and it is reliable."
"This solution is working for both VTL and tape."
"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."
"Spectrum Computing's best features are its speed, robustness, and data processing and analysis."
"I have utilized IBM Spectrum Computing's intelligent workload management feature through Insights, which is connected to the cloud."
"The software has truly improved the performance of our VM environment."
"Limits the amount of time I have to spend staring at a screen to find bottlenecks and slowdowns in my virtual environment."
"We see increased speed in our environment as VM's are moved based on needs and requirements."
"Customer Service: Excellent. Technical Support: Excellent."
"With a high memory contention environment Turbonomic has been invaluable in maintaining excellent performance across all of our clusters."
"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."
"We have easily saved tens of thousands of dollars over the last 2 years by enabling right-sizing and automated workload placement."
"Customer Service: Excellent. My rep always stays in touch and keeps us in the loop when changes are coming."
 

Cons

"SMB storage and HPC is not compatible and it should be supported by IBM Spectrum Computing."
"We are not fully satisfied with this product at the moment because we are having issues with reliability."
"Software sometimes is a little slower. It takes two or three days sometimes."
"The deduplication software isn't quite up to speed with the market."
"SMB storage and HPC is not compatible and it should be supported by IBM Spectrum Computing."
"Lack of sufficient documentation, particularly in Spanish."
"We'd like to see some AI model training for machine learning."
"This solution is no longer managing tapes correctly."
"It would be good for Turbonomic, on their side, to integrate with other companies like AppDynamics or SolarWinds or other monitoring software."
"The appliance interface doesn’t list the features/capabilities that licenses can be purchased for, so unless you were directly involved in the negotiations, there is no way to tell what feature set you have."
"There needs to be a way to permanently ignore certain alerts, such as if you have a server where you know the HDD space is low but also know it's never going to grow any to tell it to always ignore that one."
"We would like to see VMTurbo develop more application-specific modules that give us additional visibility into the end-user experience."
"The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like."
"It would be nice if it was easier to remove a host from that we would not want to manage (licenses)."
"The biggest issue that I ever had was that the old interface was buggy sometimes."
"Personally, I find the interface, especially for a new user, to be less than user friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Spectrum Computing is one of the most expensive products on the market."
"This solution is expensive."
"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."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
"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."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
"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."
"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."
"The pricing and licensing are fair. We purchase based on benchmark pricing, which we have been able to get. There are no surprise charges nor hidden fees."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.
886,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Construction Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Computing?
IBM Spectrum Computing consistently offers competitive pricing. When solutioning new implementations, IBM always presents the best solution and price. In a recent comparison with Pure Storage and N...
What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Computing?
IBM Spectrum Computing had limitations with remote copy services between head office and disaster recovery sites. In the last year, IBM has improved the code by re-engineering it to policy-based re...
What is your primary use case for IBM Spectrum Computing?
The typical use case for IBM Spectrum Computing is that it's an all-rounder. It can be used in various scenarios, such as the retailer I work for that has batch processing. It's on-demand when perf...
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 set as a percentage of the consumption of some of our customers' services. The ...
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. This helps us get a consolidated view of all customer spending into a single d...
 

Also Known As

IBM Platform Computing
Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

London South Bank University, Transvalor, Infiniti Red Bull Racing, Genomic
IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Computing vs. IBM Turbonomic and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
886,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.