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IBM Spectrum Computing vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

IBM and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. IBM is ranked #25 with an average rating of 8.0, while Broadcom is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.1. IBM holds a 1.0% mindshare in CM, compared to Broadcom’s 9.4% mindshare. Additionally, 57% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.
IBM Spectrum Computing
Read 9 IBM Spectrum Computing reviews
  • 528 Views
  • 359 Comparison Views
57% willing to recommend
VMware Aria Automation
Read 171 VMware Aria Automation reviews
  • 7,662 Views
  • 4,137 Comparison Views
94% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

IBM Spectrum Computing and VMware Aria Automation are competing in the domain of cloud management and automation. While IBM Spectrum Computing is favored for pricing and support, VMware Aria Automation is distinguished by its extensive features, providing value aligning with its higher costs.

Features: IBM Spectrum Computing offers powerful scalability and workload management, optimizing resource allocation in varied settings. Additionally, it provides effective high-performance computing solutions and integration capabilities with OpenStack. VMware Aria Automation excels in automation capabilities, integrating seamlessly with various platforms, and its blueprint functionality is intuitive and enhances operational efficiency.

Room for Improvement: IBM Spectrum Computing's complexity in setup could be simplified, as could its integration with other vendor tools. The system might also benefit from more user-friendly interfaces. VMware Aria Automation can enhance its cost transparency and simplification of initial configuration processes. Improvements in support for non-VMware ecosystems would increase its competitiveness.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Automation provides a streamlined deployment with comprehensive documentation and responsive customer service, making setup and maintenance efficient. IBM Spectrum Computing focuses on post-deployment support, ensuring system optimization. Although deployment is generally smooth, enhancing initial setup assistance could improve user experience.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Spectrum Computing is known for its cost-effectiveness and dependable ROI, attracting budget-conscious enterprises. VMware Aria Automation, with its superior features, justifies its higher initial investment through significant ROI, due to enhanced automation and integration capabilities.

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To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation Report (Updated: September 2025).
Buyer's Guide
IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation
September 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
25th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (6th)
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
171
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (6th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (16th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Spectrum Computing is 1.0%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 9.4%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware Aria Automation9.4%
IBM Spectrum Computing1.0%
Other89.6%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

OmarIsmail1 - PeerSpot reviewer
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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Le Quang Long - PeerSpot reviewer
Significantly streamlined operations with good automation that helps with simplifying workflows
It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users. It helps us automate the workflow of creating many VMs and the TensorFlow key method. I do not meet many people to operate it live beforehand. It operates for both of my products, but as a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products.
Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Spectrum Computing's best features are its speed, robustness, and data processing and analysis."
"IBM's ability to cluster compute resources is impressive, with built-in support for scenarios like VR and active-active configurations,"
"This solution is working for both VTL and tape."
"Easy to operate and use."
"The best features of IBM Spectrum Computing are common across many of their storage products."
"The most valuable aspect of the product is the policy driving resource management, to optimize the computing across data centers."
"The most valuable feature is the backup capability."
"We are satisfied with the technical support, we have no issues."
More IBM Spectrum Computing pros
"The automation functionality has been most valuable. With a click of a button, we are able to automate provisioning, the build of new hardware and apply patches. These are all extremely important and differentiated tasks that can be automated in SaltStack."
"vRA helps automate deployment for developers. We do a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment so it will suit each of our customers. So, we have different business units who have their own templates."
"It has integration with the rest of VMware solutions."
"We have integrated our CICD pipeline into an automatic catalog request through some API calls. It can request and provision new virtual machines behind the NSX load balancer, straight out of the CIDC pipeline and add those nodes to the load balancer, request SSL certs, do SSL termination at the load balancer so that it's not encrypted behind the scenes, all of which has really been helpful."
"I personally spend a lot of time in vRealize Orchestrator, so being able to directly tie into the back end on the APIs, I find that to be what really is the most advantageous thing for me."
"The self-service capabilities are by far the best that we've seen in terms of features. If the user is being able to log in and make requests himself, from the onboarding process all the way to the end, that's very helpful."
"I can make a blueprint with an Active Directory deployment. With everything prepared, people can start installing our products."
"vRA provides that single pane of glass for our cloud tenants to deploy, monitor, access, and manage their VMs/guest operating systems."
More VMware Aria Automation pros
 

Cons

"We'd like to see some AI model training for machine learning."
"In Pakistan, IBM's disadvantage is the lack of OEM support and presence."
"The deduplication software isn't quite up to speed with the market."
"We have not been able to use deduplication."
"This solution is no longer managing tapes correctly."
"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."
"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."
More IBM Spectrum Computing cons
"Something as simple as formatting the catalog in a different way would be helpful because there is no option for doing so. A lot of the contents for the virtual machine, blueprints that you can request, are hidden from view and there's no way to change the view."
"I would like to see support for Google Cloud and Azure. Because they don't support Google and Azure today, we need something that's cohesive with our entire landscape. There is a gap right now with VMware. If you want support for these environments, you have to go elsewhere right now."
"Broadcom has acquired the tool, which could lower its pricing. Many customers are moving away from VMware infrastructure towards enterprise systems like Azure or AWS. This shift could be due to two main reasons: pricing and uncertainty about the future, especially regarding how Broadcom will handle licenses and strategy."
"VMware Aria Automation could improve reporting of the policies. They are difficult to customize. We have many policies but they are not able to be modified to what we want."
"I would also like to see them streamline the install. It's split between Windows and Linux appliances, and it would be easier if it was all appliances. I think they're going that way."
"Automation or scripting should be simplified so that administrators who are not experts can have a better grasp of automation."
"It's not a smooth upgrade process. For a DTA environment, which is very simple, it is a smooth process, but for our production environment, which is quite enhanced and has a lot of dependencies, it's not easy at all, and it results in a lot of errors... It takes a lot of retries to upgrade which ends up being costly."
"Normally, on the first call to technical support, you don't get the right person. The log analysis takes a long time. This is something which should be improved."
More VMware Aria Automation cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Spectrum Computing is one of the most expensive products on the market."
"This solution is expensive."
"From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."
"The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."
"I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome."
"SaltStack is an open-source product."
"From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side."
"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."
"We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server."
"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."
More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
 

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 Business32
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise130
 

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...
See all answers
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...
See all answers
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...
See all answers
What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?
vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over applic...
See all answers
Is there any way to try VMware Aria Automation for free?
When it comes to VMware Aria Automation, you have three choices for free runs: Hands-on Lab (HOL) Advanced lab A free trial I cannot describe in detail the second and third options as my company ...
See all answers
Which sectors can benefit the most from VMware Aria Automation?
I was looking at VMware Aria Automation case studies recently and I got the impression that three main kinds of companies were using it most often: Social organizations Financial institutions and ...
See all answers
 

Comparisons

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Compared 16% of the time
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Compared 14% of the time
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Compared 15% of the time
VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation Logo
VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation
Compared 12% of the time
Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation Logo
Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation
Compared 10% of the time
VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation Logo
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Compared 7% of the time
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation Logo
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation
Compared 6% of the time
More VMware Aria Automation Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
Hadoop
September 2025
IBM Spectrum Computing reportDownload IBM Spectrum Computing product report
Buyer's Guide
VMware Aria Automation
October 2025
VMware Aria Automation reportDownload VMware Aria Automation product report
 

Also Known As

IBM Platform Computing
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

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

VMware Aria Automation is a cloud management tool that allows companies to simplify their cloud experience through a modern automation platform. The solution is designed to deliver self-service clouds, multi-cloud automation with governance, and DevOps-based security and infrastructure management. It helps organizations improve IT agility, efficiency, and productivity through its various features. 

VMware Aria Automation has multiple use cases that include the following:

  • Self-service multi-cloud: VMware Aria Automation can be used to deliver consistent self-service consumption. Another use case in this area is for delivering infrastructure across VMware Clouds as well as public clouds.

  • Multi-cloud governance: The solution can be used to manage cost, performance, networking, configuration, and security at scale for multi-cloud environments. VMware Aria Automation offers all this with an everything-as-code approach.

  • DevOps for infrastructure: Through VMware Aria Automation, companies can enable a powerful infrastructure as code platform with support for iterative development and infrastructure pipelining.

  • Kubernetes automation: Users can utilize VMware Aria Automation to automate the management of Kubernetes clusters and namespaces with support for vSphere with Tanzu.

  • Security operations: VMware Aria Automation facilitates event-driven automation to deliver full-service IT system compliance enforcement and vulnerability remediation.

VMware Aria Automation Features

VMware Aria Automation has various features that allow users to easily perform operations. Some of the solution's capacities include:

  • VMware Cloud agnostic template: This feature allows organizations to use a single cloud template to deploy with Infrastructure as a Code. Deployment options include VMware Cloud as well as major public cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and more.

  • Extensibility and customization: This VMware Aria Automation feature allows users to get full extensibility and customization. This can be achieved through Aria Automation Orchestrator, Action-Based Extensibility (ABX), and built-in integrations with common third-party tools.

  • Self-service multi-cloud: This feature enables users to request and provision infrastructure resources. It can be done across clouds using a unified and consistent Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consumption layer, idempotent REST API, and self-service catalog.

  • Centralized policies and governance: VMware Aria Automation offers a feature for users to manage multiple clouds with templatized cloud and policy definition, automated remediation, and cloud environment visibility.

  • Configuration management: Through this feature of the product, day 1 and 2 control can be achieved for virtualized and cloud environments. This can be done with intuitive configuration automation, compliance enforcement, and vulnerability remediation.

  • Infrastructure pipelining: Through this feature, organizations can access user-friendly release automation pipelines. They can be specifically tailored for CI/CD in infrastructure use cases.

VMware Aria Automation Benefits

VMware Aria Automation offers its users various benefits. Some of the biggest advantages that the solution brings to companies that utilize it include:

  • VMware Aria Automation provides faster time to market for companies through offloading manual tasks with advanced workflows and agile templating.

  • The solution offers high levels of security and control.

  • This product is suitable for beginners, as it offers a self-service consumption experience for users.

  • VMware Aria Automation accelerates innovation through Infrastructure as Code and DevOps principles.

  • The product provides users with flexibility, as it is compatible with the most popular public cloud solutions.

  • The solution offers fast deployment because of all natively integrated functions.

Reviews from Real Users

Awais J., CTO/CEO at a tech services company, likes VMware Aria Automation because it saves a lot of time, provides more visibility, and has extensive automation capabilities.

An IT consultant at a government rates VMware Aria Automation highly because the product gives you flexibility to analyze and consume resources.

Broadcom
 

Sample Customers

London South Bank University, Transvalor, Infiniti Red Bull Racing, Genomic
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Buyer's Guide
IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation
September 2025
Free Report: IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation
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