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AWS Snowball vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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

AWS Snowball
Ranking in Cloud Migration
15th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Data Migration Appliances (1st)
IBM Turbonomic
Ranking in Cloud Migration
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (3rd), IT Financial Management (3rd), IT Operations Analytics (9th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (3rd), AIOps (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Cloud Migration category, the mindshare of AWS Snowball is 2.3%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.2%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Migration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic6.2%
AWS Snowball2.3%
Other91.5%
Cloud Migration
 

Featured Reviews

Kevin-Davis - PeerSpot reviewer
Global CTO AWS Business Group at Eviden
Seamless data transfer and efficient migration with customizable storage sizes
I like that I can take data and send it straight to S3 when it loads in. The interface for getting my data onto the Snowball is so streamlined. I don't know if you've ever seen it before. It's really cool. I connect them to the backplane of our existing network. I'm able to address it quickly and move the data quickly inside my customers' data centers. There's a little screen on it, which changes the UPS codes and all that stuff. The label and everything AWS electronic, so I don't have to deal with shipping issues. It makes it super simple and easy to use from end to end.
Dan Ambrose - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Engineer 4 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Helps visibility, bridges the data gap, and frees up time
We use IBM Turbonomic in a hybrid cloud environment. Although it supports multi-cloud capabilities, we currently operate in a single-cloud setting. Turbonomic offers visibility into our environment's performance, spanning across applications, underlying infrastructure, and protection resources. The visibility and analytics help to bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams such as applications and infrastructure. This is important for awareness collaboration, cost saving, and helping to design and improve our application. Enhanced visibility and data analytics have contributed to a significant reduction in our mean time to resolve. Tools like Turbonomic provide crucial visualization and insights, empowering us to make data-driven decisions instead of relying on assumptions as we did before. This newfound transparency translates to a massive improvement, going from complete darkness to having a clear 100 percent view of the situation. Although our applications are not optimized for the cloud we have seen some improvement in response time. IBM Turbonomic empowers us to achieve more with fewer people thanks to automation. Previously, customers frequently contacted us requesting resource increases to resolve issues. Now, we have a tool that allows us to objectively assess their needs, leading to a deeper understanding of our applications. This solution also generates significant cost savings in the cloud and optimizes hardware utilization within our data centers. Its AI algorithm intelligently allocates servers on hosts, maximizing efficiency without compromising performance. By fine-tuning resource allocation without causing performance bottlenecks, Turbonomic extends the lifespan of existing hardware, postponing the need for new purchases. This effectively stretches our capital expenditure budget. We started to see the benefits of IBM Turbonomic within the first 60 days. IBM is a fantastic partner. Their tech support has been outstanding, and the product itself is excellent - a very solid offering. By automating resource management with Turbonomic, our engineers are freed up to focus on more strategic initiatives like innovation and ongoing organizational projects. Previously, manually adding resources was a time-consuming process that interrupted workflows. Now, automation handles scaling efficiently, saving us thousands of man-hours and significant costs. It has illuminated the need for SetOps. It has highlighted areas of overspending, and the actions we've taken have demonstrated significant cost savings. IBM Turbonomic has positively impacted our overall application performance. IBM Turbonomic has helped reduce both CAPEX and OPEX. It has also significantly reduced cloud build times.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"You are able to scale the solution vertically. It's very scalable."
"The interface is great! It's user-friendly."
"I like that I can take data and send it straight to S3 when it loads in."
"The flexibility of AWS Snowball is valuable. Its security allows for the ability to move and secure data without concern if the device is lost and the option to trace it back to AWS data centers."
"The way the data is moved is very clever. Also, the interface is very simple and user-friendly."
"We are a very large company with around 20 million users that include architects, developers, and admin staff, and it's a very nice service we would highly recommend."
"AWS helps save time and costs, being a managed cloud provider with evolving services."
"The features I like best are the tool's high capacity, scalability, end-to-end encryption for data security, ease of use, durability, and cost-effectiveness. It's particularly cost-effective for transferring large amounts of data compared to high-speed internet transfers."
"Policy/Automation: We set up a policy of automatically adding more vCPUs to the VMs based on Turbonomic's recommendation and continuous monitoring."
"The automation in Turbonomic is priceless, and all the dashboards, native or custom build, give a complete virtual and physical hardware performance view."
"Our ROI can be measured in the amount of server hardware that we have not had to purchase due to using VMTurbo Operations Manager."
"It allowed us to plan and scale our capacity based on our sales pipeline."
"It is like we hired a junior system admin that works 24 hours a day to keep our environment in top form."
"Limits the amount of time I have to spend staring at a screen to find bottlenecks and slowdowns in my virtual environment."
"The software is very cost effective, especially in comparison to other products."
"Customer Service: This is one of the areas that Turbonomic shines."
 

Cons

"24/7 support is more expensive on AWS compared to Azure."
"I think AWS Snowball could improve by expanding its availability to more countries."
"Snowball is not interesting and is a pain to deal with."
"If AWS Snowball is intercepted, there is a potential risk of unauthorized access to the data."
"There's always room for improvement as you use the service more and gain expertise. Some challenges I've faced include the time factor (data transfer can be time-consuming), data validation after the transfer, risks associated with physical handling and shipping of the device, and ensuring data security during transit."
"AWS support could be more responsive."
"It does have room for improvement. The ability to better ingest some of the big data."
"The costs of services the customer needs also matter, such as storage requirements and whether storage is rational."
"GUI can be more user friendly."
"It was definitely more stable on-prem. The reason I say that is because we've had several times where we have run into licensing issues."
"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."
"Some of the previous versions have had some issues with the stability, but the latest versions, >=5.7, seems to have fixed this."
"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."
"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."
"Price is a little bit steep – if you have a targeted project, then its worth it, otherwise ongoing costs can be a little steep."
"It does take a while to figure out their way of doing things."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing depends on the type of Snowball device you choose, the amount of data you need to transfer, and the service fees involved. There’s a standard price for larger data transfers and a flat job fee, which includes the first ten days of on-site usage. Typically, there are no additional data transfer fees."
"It's not a cheap solution, but the price is right for the product."
"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 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."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"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."
"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."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business42
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

Which is better - Microsoft Azure Data Box or AWS Snowball?
Microsoft Azure Databox is a 45-pound, super rugged, tamper-resistant, human-managed hardware appliance that can transfer up to 100TB of data capacity to copy, store, then send to the Azure cloud. ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Snowball?
Depending of what is your priority; UseAWS Snowball if you are heavily invested in AWS or need edge computing features Choose Azure Data Box for smooth integration with Azure and potentially lower ...
What needs improvement with AWS Snowball?
It's difficult to make a comparison and it depends on the customer. When analyzing costs, I must see how the customer uses AWS, Azure, or Google. Google is particularly interesting, for example, fo...
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Also Known As

Amazon AWS Snowball, Amazon Snowball, Snowball
Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Wazee Digital, Craftsy, Live Nation, Essess
IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Snowball vs. IBM Turbonomic and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,574 professionals have used our research since 2012.