IBM Spectrum Computing vs OpenNebula comparison

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IBM Spectrum Computing

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

IBM Spectrum Computing and OpenNebula are competitors in cloud computing and resource management. IBM Spectrum Computing has the upper hand in scaling capabilities and workload management, while OpenNebula shines with its open-source flexibility and customization options.

Features: IBM Spectrum Computing offers dynamic resource allocation, integration with existing IT infrastructure, and expansive workload management capabilities. OpenNebula provides open-source flexibility, supports various virtualization platforms, and is easy to customize, making it highly adaptable to different organizational needs.

Room for Improvement: IBM Spectrum Computing could work on reducing complexity and enhancing user-friendliness, as well as simplifying the integration process. It also might benefit from a more transparent pricing structure. OpenNebula can improve by offering more comprehensive technical support, optimizing initial setup time, and enhancing its scalability for large-scale deployments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Spectrum Computing is streamlined for integration with enterprise-grade systems and provides robust customer support services. OpenNebula's deployment might take longer due to its open-source nature, and its community-driven support requires more in-house expertise compared to IBM's structured support offerings.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Spectrum Computing has higher setup costs but offers a good ROI for large-scale environments with its advanced features. OpenNebula offers lower initial costs, presenting a cost-effective solution for businesses focused on customization. The primary consideration is whether the organization requires a scalable solution or a highly customizable infrastructure.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Computing vs. OpenNebula Report (Updated: July 2025).

IBM Spectrum Computing vs. OpenNebula

July 2025

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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

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Hadoop (6th)

OpenNebula

Ranking in Cloud Management

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Spectrum Computing is 1.1%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 6.6%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

OmarIsmail1

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.

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FOURES Jean-Philippe

Products Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Reliable, simple to manage, and offers great technical support

The support of VXLAN fits with our network management. Thanks to this we can propose mixed solutions using virtual resources on OpenNebula and bare metal servers hosted in our facilities linked to each other on the sale network. This use case is very useful when some applications need bare metal power (Kubernetes workers, huge databases, AI models computations, et cetera). The cluster management is very useful for splitting our different clusters (mutual vs dedicated). We can manage deployments and capacity planning without pain. The API is also really simple and it helped us to develop the Terraform provider to manage OpenNebula like any other cloud infrastructure.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"IBM's ability to cluster compute resources is impressive, with built-in support for scenarios like VR and active-active configurations,"

"Spectrum Computing's best features are its speed, robustness, and data processing and analysis."

"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."

"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."

"The most valuable feature is the backup capability."

"This solution is working for both VTL and tape."

"I have utilized IBM Spectrum Computing's intelligent workload management feature through Insights, which is connected to the cloud."

More IBM Spectrum Computing pros

"OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage."

"For the entire data center, as a private cloud, I believe that user management, expert management, and the virtual data center is completely magic for the users."

"I also like the ability to build custom functions. I can define a function where I have two types of views and configure the dependencies. The virtual data centers concept allows me to define users. If a user wants to join certain kinds of machines, the host and the other user won't see them. It gives me the flexibility to define multiple views and data centers in one place."

"It's easy to integrate OpenNebula with our IT systems."

"What's best about OpenNebula that people like is that it's easy to deploy. It's also easy to manage. It's interesting because people choose OpenNebula over other solutions because of the ease of management."

"The most valuable feature of OpenNebula is that it scales very well."

"The ability to use it almost like a public cloud for an organization is a big asset, as it will create a value proposition and can control costs in a great way."

"The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often."

More OpenNebula pros

Cons

"Spectrum Computing is lagging behind other products, most likely because it hasn't been shifted to the cloud."

"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."

"The deduplication software isn't quite up to speed with the market. While IBM has excellent compression technology, specifically on their FlashCore modules, they lag behind competitors such as NetApp in deduplication capabilities."

"The deduplication software isn't quite up to speed with the market."

"Lack of sufficient documentation, particularly in Spanish."

More IBM Spectrum Computing cons

"It should have a simple REST API like most other tools. It's the industry standard format. An XML-RPC API gives you an XML document that you have to convert and then do something with that. REST API endpoint provides outputs in a JSON document. I would also like to see support for user data or heat templates, which OpenStack offers, but OpenNebula doesn't have this yet."

"They should add more features like object storage."

"Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement."

"As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today."

"The UI, monitoring, and alerting could benefit from further improvements."

"Most of the competitors are offering some sort of billing software to transform their installation to work as a small-sized public cloud, but those offerings from OpenNebula are still missing."

"The storage feature that they have is a bit confusing."

"There are small things that are hard. For example, making sure that it is going to be installable on public clouds."

More OpenNebula cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Spectrum Computing is one of the most expensive products on the market."

"This solution is expensive."

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."

"OpenNebuoa has recently come up with a new subscription model that is economical and a lot of new customers are choosing this as it is an easy subscription model."

"The solution is open source so is free."

"OpenNebula gives good value for money."

"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."

"The licensing for OpenNebula used to be free, but now it's no longer free. A customer contacted me asking to move to another provider because of the changes in the licensing terms for OpenNebula. I have no information on how much the OpenNebula license is because the customer pays for it, and I only do the integration."

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Top Industries

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Computer Software Company

20%

University

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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 do you like most about OpenNebula?

The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpenNebula?

OpenNebula gives good value for money.

What needs improvement with OpenNebula?

The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement. Another area for improvement is the integration with hardware to manage the lower layer of the n...

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Product Reports

Download IBM Spectrum Computing product report

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August 2025

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Also Known As

IBM Platform Computing

No data available

Overview

IBM Spectrum Computing uses intelligent workload and policy-driven resource management to optimize resources across the data center, on premises and in the cloud. Now up to 150X faster and scalable to over 160,000 cores, IBM provides you with the latest advances in software-defined infrastructure to help you unleash the power of your distributed mission-critical high performance computing (HPC), analytics and big data applications as well as a new generation open source frameworks such as Hadoop and Spark.

IBM

OpenNebula provides the most simple but feature-rich and flexible solution for the comprehensive management of virtualized data centers to enable private, public and hybrid IaaS clouds. OpenNebula interoperability makes cloud an evolution by leveraging existing IT assets, protecting your investments, and avoiding vendor lock-in.

OpenNebula is a turnkey enterprise-ready solution that includes all the features needed to provide an on-premises (private) cloud offering, and to offer public cloud services.

Sample Customers

London South Bank University, Transvalor, Infiniti Red Bull Racing, Genomic

Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.