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IBM Spectrum Computing vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) comparison

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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 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)
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)
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Ranking in Cloud Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
88
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (3rd), Virtualization Management Tools (2nd), Cloud Cost Management (3rd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (5th)
 

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 IBM Spectrum Computing is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 6.3%, up from 5.2% 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.
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…
Kyle Naidoo - PeerSpot reviewer
Nutanix gave us three and a half hours back
Recently, I have had quite a few issues with Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT). When you do a full update from LCM, your NGT doesn't automatically install on your VMs. You need to go back to Prism Central and select a list of VMs, then install NGT. You need to go to each of those VMs, then restart them to get the NGT installed. Also, there are some VMs that we have on our system that we used to run on an old environment, which was Hyper-V. Previously, we had VMware, so some of our VMs are Windows 7 32-bit and Windows 7 64-bit. However, the NGT no longer allows for installations on those. We constantly get packet drops. We are actually looking at upgrading them in the future. While Windows 7 is not supported anymore from a Microsoft perspective, Nutanix could allow NGT to still be installed since people still use Windows 7. I have five VMs currently running on Windows 7. This is not a major issue. The VMs still work, but you get an alert in the mornings, saying, "Hey, NGT is not installed." When we go there, we try to install NGT, but it won't allow us since Windows 7 is not allowed anymore.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Turbonomic can show us if we're not using some of our storage volumes efficiently in AWS. For example, if we've over-provisioned one of our virtual machines to have dedicated IOPs that it doesn't need, Turbonomic will detect that and tell us."
"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."
"The system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications."
"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."
"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."
"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."
"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."
"I like the analytics that help us optimize compatibility. Whereas Azure Advisor tells us what we have to do, Turbonomic has automation which actually does those things. That means we don't have to be present to get them done and simplifies our IT engineers' jobs."
"The most valuable feature is the backup 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."
"IBM's ability to cluster compute resources is impressive, with built-in support for scenarios like VR and active-active configurations,"
"Easy to operate and use."
"Spectrum Computing's best features are its speed, robustness, and data processing and analysis."
"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."
"We are satisfied with the technical support, we have no issues."
"Using X-Play is simple. In three steps you can define things and there is also a wizard to guide you... The wizard is the simplest way to automate and the resulting automation saves us time."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to automate. Nutanix has made it really easy to automate everything that we do. That's important to me and our organization. We can get more done every day by automating tasks."
"Nutanix Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations has multi-cloud capability, allowing users to switch between cloud providers or vendors without incurring egress or movement fees."
"It's easy to set up."
"Previous inquiries took us almost a full day to prepare the VM to the liking of our users. Now the deployment time is below 15 minutes and users can do it on their own! That leaves us to only update the blueprints if new requirements come in or new Windows Versions are published. As we have now predefined setups the testing team can rely on common ground for their product tests. Development teams can experiment with alpha versions in a secured environment (separate VLANs) without harming production machines."
"The executive dashboard is valuable and provides a complete sense of the whole infrastructure."
"It offers high availability and consistency."
 

Cons

"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 implementation could be enhanced."
"I would like Turbonomic to add more services, especially in the cloud area. I have already told them this. They can add Azure NetApp Files. They can add Azure Blob storage. They have already added Azure App service, but they can do more."
"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."
"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."
"I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge."
"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."
"They have a long road map when we ask for certain things that will make the product better. It takes time, but that's understandable because there are other things that are higher on the priority list."
"This solution is no longer managing tapes correctly."
"We have not been able to use deduplication."
"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."
"IBM's sales and support structure can be challenging."
"In Pakistan, IBM's disadvantage is the lack of OEM support and presence."
"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."
"There are some load-balancing features that are currently missing in the flow network security and could potentially be added in the future."
"The licensing procedures are not smooth and easy."
"There should be more APIs to integrate with different vendors and to integrate with the existing solutions that we use on-prem."
"If they integrated more with GPT, that would be ideal."
"While using Nutanix, we need to switch off the VM in case we are doing an update. We have to turn off the VM if we are updating the memory or hard disk space. In a normal scenario, we switch off the VM, update it and then update the RAM. Once updated, we need to switch on the machine and wait for the RAM to initialize. The same goes for hard drives as well."
"In the next release, I would like to see more cloud providers like Micro BH or local providers."
"We have faced some issues during operations, but when we log a case with Nutanix support, they help us to resolve them."
"I cannot say Calm is providing centralized control of all our applications because we have some legacy systems. We have IBM iSeries, which is another technology. But with Calm we can centralize all our x86 machines."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We see ROI in extended support agreements (ESA) for old software. Migration activities seem to be where Turbonomic has really benefited us the most. It's one click and done. We have new machines ready to go with Turbonomic, which are properly sized instead of somebody sitting there with a spreadsheet and guessing. So, my return on investment would certainly be on currency, from a software and hardware perspective."
"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."
"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"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."
"Spectrum Computing is one of the most expensive products on the market."
"This solution is expensive."
"It is expensive when you are looking at small locations that need low-latency workloads, but for larger locations, as compared to other guys, even using VMware, it is not that expensive because if you add it all up, it is going to be pretty much the same value."
"In Brazil, Nutanix Cloud Manager is not cheap. However, Nutanix offers different options such as long-term contracts."
"The product is very cheap."
"The company frequently changes its prices, and it is not clear how the subscription-based model works."
"In my opinion, the pricing is reasonable."
"I was not involved in purchasing Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), so I have no information on its pricing or cost. I do feel that it's fair that Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is a product sold as one but with multiple tiers, though you need to make sure it isn't oversold in terms of client needs."
"The five-year term for NCM's license cost and support was around five million."
"While the product may seem to be more expensive at first, it ultimately pays for itself within a short time frame due to the hours saved on maintenance."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
40%
Computer Software Company
9%
Retailer
7%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Computer Software Company
37%
Educational Organization
18%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Manufacturing Company
4%
 

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 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...
Which set of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) features do you find to be the most useful?
For me, the features related to cost savings are the best part of NCM. Of course, the whole product is worth using an...
Are the setup process and further maintenance of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) difficult?
When I came into my current organization, NCM was already set up. According to the team that dealt with it, the produ...
Is Nutanix Cloud Manager’s Intelligent Operations feature effective?
Yes, this is a highly effective feature and the rebranding only made things better as they introduced more improvemen...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
IBM Platform Computing
Nutanix Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations, Nutanix Cloud Manager Self-Service, Nutanix Cloud Management Cost Governance, Nutanix Cloud Manager Security Central
 

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.
London South Bank University, Transvalor, Infiniti Red Bull Racing, Genomic
JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Computing vs. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
847,625 professionals have used our research since 2012.