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AWS Snowball vs Carbonite Migrate 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

IBM Turbonomic
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Migration
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
AWS Snowball
Ranking in Cloud Migration
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Data Migration Appliances (1st)
Carbonite Migrate
Ranking in Cloud Migration
11th
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Migration Tools (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Cloud Migration category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 4.0%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Snowball is 0.7%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Carbonite Migrate is 4.9%, up from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Migration
 

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.
Kevin-Davis - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
reviewer1228836 - PeerSpot reviewer
Great tool for one-to-one migration, but not suitable for multi-cloud migration
Some of the tools relating to multi-cloud migration need to be improved as they have a very limited capability at this point in time. These tools are suitable for one-to-one migration scenarios but they are not fit for multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud environments. I would like to point out that I don't have a hands-on very large scale production implementation experience, as that is the job of our infra team. As I mentioned earlier, we find it very difficult to use these tools in a multi-cloud environment but they work well for single-cloud environments — from an on-premise environment to the public cloud. These tools are quite limited, making things much more complex in a multi-cloud environment. They should add a feature that supports multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environment migration properly. The world is going to be very different five years from now, how will they support these kinds of container-based migrations? Currently, infrastructure as code is very limited. It's not as simple as just moving the server or data. The customer wants you to move the entire application, exactly as it is, and then deploy it. From that perspective, these tools offer only part of the solution, they are not fulfilling the holistic need, which the customer or organization needs. As of now, Carbonite Migrate is helpful on an infrastructure level. If we had to move 100 applications across a multi-cloud environment, then this solution would not work. In the cloud-world (the migration part of it) there needs to be better automation. Let me explain: automation refers to your infra, app, and data. Together, these three components combine and automate will provide you to deploy faster on any cloud platform. As of now, this tool doesn’t fit too much into a multi-cloud environment cloud data migrations. Together, these three components combine and automate it allowing you to deploy it. As of now, these tools cannot deploy it into a multi-cloud environment. That's where the challenge is; that's for other tools. We need to see what this product can do in terms of app, data, and infra. It is automated from the infra point of view, but not in regards to the app and data. Other vendors understand this problem and have taken the necessary steps to address it. In short, multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments pose a problem for this solution. I would like to know how I can take the automated path — data, app, and infra all together. That is something they need to enhance. Recently, I have seen a lot of other companies implementing AI-based automation, where more things are taken care of by AI itself, and not people. Many of these migrations are too complex for humans to analyze and form solutions. It is better to use AI platforms to create recommendations and then automate them, that way you can reduce the burden. Currently, the migration time is vast, from six months to one year, it would be impossible to do 100 application migrations. This is very time consuming and needs to be improved.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The recommendation of the family types is a huge help because it has saved us a lot of money. We use it primarily for that. Another thing that Turbonomic provides us with is a single platform that manages the full application stack and that's something I really like."
"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."
"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."
"My favorite part of the solution is the automation scheduling. Being able to choose when actions happen, and how they happen..."
"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."
"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."
"In our organization, optimizing application performance is a continuous process that is beyond human scale. We would not be able to do the number of actions that Turbonomic takes on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It is humanly impossible with the little micro adjustments that it can make. That is a huge differentiator. If you just figure each action could take anywhere very conservatively from five to 10 minutes to act upon, then you multiply that out by thousands of actions every month, it is easily something where you could say, "I am saving a couple of FTEs.""
"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."
"The solution is elastic."
"AWS helps save time and costs, being a managed cloud provider with evolving services."
"The way the data is moved is very clever. Also, the interface is very simple and user-friendly."
"I like that I can take data and send it straight to S3 when it loads in."
"You are able to scale the solution vertically. It's very scalable."
"AWS offers managed services which save time and reduce administrative overhead."
"The support team's awesome, and they've always been very responsive."
"It's a nice way of shipping a lot of data without using a network."
"Carbonite Migrate works well in Windows platform migrations and in the case of a VML platform. The migration is smooth in Windows environments."
"Carbonite Migrate is helpful on an infrastructure level."
"The solution is user-friendly."
 

Cons

"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."
"It would be good for Turbonomic, on their side, to integrate with other companies like AppDynamics or SolarWinds or other monitoring softwares. I feel that the actual monitoring of applications, mixed in with their abilities, would help. That would be the case wherever Turbonomic lacks the ability to monitor an application or in cases where applications are so customized that it's not going to be able to handle them. There is monitoring that you can do with scripting that you may not be able to do with Turbonomic."
"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."
"The implementation could be enhanced."
"We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The stability of the solution isn't ideal and should be improved."
"Snowball is not interesting and is a pain to deal with."
"It's not an easy product to start using for a beginner, but If you're a professional, it's easy to understand."
"It would be helpful if Snowball provided more kinds of connectivity. That will make it easier to add and move data."
"It's not cheap."
"The costs of services the customer needs also matter, such as storage requirements and whether storage is rational."
"We find it very difficult to use these tools in a multi-cloud environment"
"Carbonite failed when moving GIS data."
"Migration in RHEL and Linux environments can be improved. During RHEL migration with multiple data areas, you have to create a similar source environment at the destination. This can be challenging because you have to install it, create the VM, install over it, and mount it at the mount point. Only then can you do the migration."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"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 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."
"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."
"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."
"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"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."
"The licensing costs are really high."
"In terms of pricing, I think it's an expensive tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
25%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

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...
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 tran...
What do you like most about AWS Snowball?
The most valuable features of AWS Snowball for me are its security measures and its flexibility.
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 feature...
What needs improvement with Carbonite Migrate?
Carbonite failed when moving GIS data. Therefore, scalability is an issue as it struggles with migrating heavy data, ...
What is your primary use case for Carbonite Migrate?
We initially used Carbonite for cloud migration, specifically for moving data from one cloud to another. We moved fro...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
Amazon AWS Snowball, Amazon Snowball, Snowball
No data available
 

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.
Wazee Digital, Craftsy, Live Nation, Essess
Computrade Malaysia
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Snowball vs. Carbonite Migrate and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
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