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IBM Spectrum Computing vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

IBM and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. IBM is ranked #27 with an average rating of 8.0, while VMware is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.8. IBM holds a 1.1% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 10.6% mindshare. Additionally, 57% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.
IBM Spectrum Computing
Read 9 IBM Spectrum Computing reviews
  • 532 Views
  • 335 Comparison Views
57% willing to recommend
VMware Aria Automation
Read 170 VMware Aria Automation reviews
  • 8,330 Views
  • 4,498 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: July 2025).
Buyer's Guide
IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation
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
9
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (6th)
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
170
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)
 

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 VMware Aria Automation is 10.6%, down from 11.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
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.
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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

"This solution is working for both VTL and tape."
"The most valuable aspect of the product is the policy driving resource management, to optimize the computing across data centers."
"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."
"Spectrum Computing's best features are its speed, robustness, and data processing and analysis."
"The most valuable feature is the backup capability."
"IBM's ability to cluster compute resources is impressive, with built-in support for scenarios like VR and active-active configurations,"
"We are satisfied with the technical support, we have no issues."
"I have utilized IBM Spectrum Computing's intelligent workload management feature through Insights, which is connected to the cloud."
More IBM Spectrum Computing pros
"value; It has provided my development team a pure self-service portal. We deploy thousands of machines and reclaim. So, their time to business, and their time to market has been improved exponentially."
"We automated many tool deployments with the help of the product, cutting short manual deployments and eliminating the need for human interaction. Its most valuable features include integrating various tools and working with different products using plugins."
"It's much more stable than the highest available variant."
"I used the technical support during upgrades. They came onsite and are very technical. They are very good"
"We had a lot of config drift before, and this really helps us keep it on track. Speed to provision is probably our biggest, significant gain."
"To manage when VM's aren't being used, we have it set up so that it will auto-destroy them after a certain amount of time, obviously with permission from the user who owns it."
"We provided the ability to request virtual machines to our end users. Before, this was a very manual process, which took engineers to do. Now, it's an automated process."
"The product is stable."
More VMware Aria Automation pros
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"In Pakistan, IBM's disadvantage is the lack of OEM support and presence."
"We'd like to see some AI model training for machine learning."
"IBM's sales and support structure can be challenging."
More IBM Spectrum Computing cons
"We upgraded twice. The last upgrade was a bit problematic."
"Its configuration process could be better."
"I want to see HTML5. I want to get rid of JavaScript... we have a lot of issues with Java crashing when we're using vCenter. I obviously don't want that to happen with the vRealize Automation and Orchestrator side."
"The stability on the 6.2 version is very bad. It crashes. VMware tech support knows the IIS component is a bit buggy."
"The solution is intuitive, but not necessarily user-friendly. In particular, it's the documentation. It's a lot of going-through-the-weeds types of scenarios. There is just an abundance of information, so it's a matter of understanding how the objects or the relationships exist, and then, obviously, being able to access that information and knowing how to make use of it."
"The connectivity between VMs is easy, but they can be made more effective if we have a single proof point where we can configure all the biggest data at a single point."
"The stability is 95 percent. There are some situations where it gets a little bit clumsy. When it gets really big, when you're dealing with a very large deployment, it can be a little bit difficult, but it's better than nothing. It does a significant job, given what it's tasked to do."
"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."
More VMware Aria Automation cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution is expensive."
"Spectrum Computing is one of the most expensive products on the market."
"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."
"vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products."
"So much can be done with the Open Source side, and especially for smaller shops. I personally think the pricing for Enterprise is hard to justify."
"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."
"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."
"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."
"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."
More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
 

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...
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 26% of the time
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Compared 16% of the time
VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation Logo
VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation
Compared 14% 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
VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation
Compared 8% 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
August 2025
IBM Spectrum Computing reportDownload IBM Spectrum Computing product report
Buyer's Guide
VMware Aria Automation
August 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.

VMware
 

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
July 2025
Free Report: IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation
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