IBM Spectrum Computing vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Computing and VMware Aria Automation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cloud Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured 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.""We are satisfied with the technical support, we have no issues.""This solution is working for both VTL and tape.""The most valuable feature is the backup capability.""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."

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"The blueprint functionality of the product is intuitive and user-friendly. The concept of the blueprints is visual and easy to use.""Our users can order VMs using the API.""The initial setup is straightforward. It's not that difficult.""Among the valuable features are the ease and speed of creating the VMs. Originally, we provisioned them manually and it would take us two days to do the provisioning... but with the automation, we are able to provision a VM with the click of a button, within seconds. It cut down on the time as well as cut down on the expense and employee cost in provisioning.""The preset policies and templates are useful. I would say that vRA is one of the best solutions we have. The CI/CD features also look helpful even though we aren't using them at the moment. We plan to get more involved and train our customers as much as possible.""vRA provides that single pane of glass for our cloud tenants to deploy, monitor, access, and manage their VMs/guest operating systems.""The most valuable feature is the consistency it delivers, at the end of the day. We know that we have consistent images based off consistent Blueprints, check-pointed or QA'ed in a consistent manner.""The most valuable feature that we have is that it's able to deploy several different operating systems, it's able to deploy whatever we want. We can take a template, spin it up, revise it, save it back off, and be able to have that for other departments. We can have one for our Dev team and one for our research team which has some specific requirements. We can keep track of them and deploy things automatically."

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Cons
"This solution is no longer managing tapes correctly.""We'd like to see some AI model training for machine learning.""Lack of sufficient documentation, particularly in Spanish.""We have not been able to use deduplication.""SMB storage and HPC is not compatible and it should be supported by IBM Spectrum Computing.""Spectrum Computing is lagging behind other products, most likely because it hasn't been shifted to the cloud."

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"The initial setup was complex from beginning to delivery. The current version is a bit more complex than version 7 to deploy.""It was a complex setup. We had to use the consultant from VMware to make the solution work well.""We still struggle a little bit with the configuration as far as making sure that we have all the endpoints where they need to be, because that's not as agile as we'd like in the back-end. We're working towards that with our DevOps teams to make sure that we're touching the right endpoints and getting the right data.""I would like to see a simpler way of provisioning it. As is, we can automate the provisioning of a VM, however, when it comes to the external IPs, that is outside of VMware. But that has to be automated as well. If there was a way for us to have the virtual machines connect to switches that are external to VMware, that would be great. That way, it would handle the entire workflow from creation and provisioning of a VM to the connectivity to the external IP addresses which allow our customers to have access to the VM. Currently, that IP configuration has to be done manually.""The basic support is not there for Google Cloud and Azure. They are unable to provision nor do cost controls. Google is still left out. It is great that they have done AWS, but we are a retailer which means nothing to us because it is a competitor. Azure is good, but Google is where a lot of our development environments are.""We are migrating from vRA version 7 to 8, but the migration is really hectic and time-consuming. There are no straightforward paths to migrate. We are doing an entirely new deployment to go to vRA version 8.0, then somehow get all of the VMs to vRA 8.0. Therefore, it would have been great if VMware had some solutions to upgrade from vRA 7 to 8 seamlessly. This includes the management of all the objects or VMs from the older version. Unfortunately, it is not there.""VMware should go the way of vROps, with everything in one machine, the ability to scale out, and a more distributed environment instead of having the usual centralized SQL database.""There is an area of improvement. For example, you are migrating from a customer's existing data center to a new target data center. To facilitate this transition, you'll initially need to evaluate the customer's aging hardware hosting VMware, which is nearing the end of its operational life. The customer expresses the intention to upgrade to a newer version, necessitating an overhaul of everything in the new data center. As a Systems Integrator (SI), consultant, or architect, your recommendation would be to acquire the latest hardware with a specified configuration and then install VMware on top of it. However, there's a crucial aspect related to the infrastructure requirements for VMware to run seamlessly on that hardware. If there's an opportunity to potentially reduce these infrastructure prerequisites, it would be highly beneficial."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "This solution is expensive."
  • "Spectrum Computing is one of the most expensive products on the market."
  • More IBM Spectrum Computing Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."
  • "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."
  • "Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
  • "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."
  • "The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."
  • "There is confusion between licensing levels. There are three different licensed versions of vRealize Automation, and there are different things which can happen in each of them."
  • "vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products."
  • "As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will."
  • More VMware Aria Automation Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:This solution is too expensive for a lot of our customers.
    Top Answer:The biggest problem is the lack of documentation in general, and documentation in Spanish, in particular.
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Ranking
    10th
    out of 75 in Cloud Management
    Views
    4,149
    Comparisons
    3,809
    Reviews
    1
    Average Words per Review
    240
    Rating
    9.0
    1st
    out of 75 in Cloud Management
    Views
    8,994
    Comparisons
    5,286
    Reviews
    14
    Average Words per Review
    609
    Rating
    7.9
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    IBM Platform Computing
    VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite
    Learn More
    IBM
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    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.

    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.

    Sample Customers
    London South Bank University, Transvalor, Infiniti Red Bull Racing, Genomic
    Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Comms Service Provider31%
    Media Company16%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Computer Software Company10%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Healthcare Company15%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Government9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business43%
    Large Enterprise57%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business15%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise67%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise78%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise69%
    Buyer's Guide
    IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    IBM Spectrum Computing is ranked 10th in Cloud Management with 6 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 132 reviews. IBM Spectrum Computing is rated 7.8, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Computing writes "Provides stable backup for our databases and has good technical support ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". IBM Spectrum Computing is most compared with Apache Spark, HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric and IBM Turbonomic, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Morpheus and vCenter Orchestrator. See our IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation report.

    See our list of best Cloud Management vendors.

    We monitor all Cloud Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.