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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

"This solution worked as expected and it is reliable."
"The most valuable aspect of the product is the policy driving resource management, to optimize the computing across data centers."
"Spectrum Computing is one of the best tools in the data management and services area, as it can process huge amounts of data with standardized data management and provides a great data governance capability."
"This solution is working for both VTL and tape."
"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."
"I have utilized IBM Spectrum Computing's intelligent workload management feature through Insights, which is connected to the cloud."
"This product has allowed us to see how dense we can make our ESXi clusters."
"I like Turbonomic's built-in reporting. It provides a ton of information out of the box, so I don't have to build panels for the monthly summaries and other reports I need to present to management. We get better performance and bottleneck reporting from this than we do from our older EMC software."
"Performance is something that should constantly be monitored and constantly be worked on, and Turbonomic is doing that in the background, without me having to manually do it, which is a great help."
"It allowed us to plan and scale our capacity based on our sales pipeline."
"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."
"Getting a better understanding on host utilization, providing better planning on infrastructure upgrades."
"We used Turbonomic to plan our hardware refresh, and it was right on the money."
"Starting from the reporting and recommendations, every feature has been very helpful."
 

Cons

"We are not fully satisfied with this product at the moment because we are having issues with reliability."
"This solution is no longer managing tapes correctly."
"Spectrum Computing is lagging behind other products, most likely because it hasn't been shifted to the cloud."
"Lack of sufficient documentation, particularly in Spanish."
"IBM's sales and support structure can be challenging."
"SMB storage and HPC is not compatible and it should be supported by IBM Spectrum Computing."
"In Pakistan, IBM's disadvantage is the lack of OEM support and presence."
"This solution is no longer managing tapes correctly."
"Turbonomic is not easy to use out of the box."
"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."
"Automatic upgrades that are hands off would be great, however the upgrades are pretty easy and take only a few minutes."
"We would also like to see expansion made in the UCS tools that they provide, to allow viewing the entire UCS environment and not just the equipment that hosts a hypervisor."
"Have plan data shared across user accounts within Turbonomic. Also more granular permissions."
"I would still like to see more canned reports for historical data."
"I'd like to see the creation of custom dashboards become a little more streamlined."
"The issue for us with the automation is we are considering starting to do the hot adds, but there are some problems with Windows Server 2019 and hot adds. It is a little buggy. So, if we turn that on with a cluster that has a lot of Windows 2019 Servers, then we would see a blue screen along with a lot of applications as well. Depending on what you are adding, cores or memory, it doesn't necessarily even take advantage of that at that moment. A reboot may be required, and we can't do that until later. So, that decreases the benefit of the real-time. For us, there is a lot of risk with real-time."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Spectrum Computing is one of the most expensive products on the market."
"This solution is expensive."
"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."
"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 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."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"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."
"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."
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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.
886,426 professionals have used our research since 2012.