IBM Spectrum Computing vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

IBM and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. IBM is ranked #26 with an average rating of 8.0, while VMware is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.6. IBM holds a 1.1% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 7.7% 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

565 Views
350 Comparison Views

57% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Operations

Read 374 VMware Aria Operations reviews

6,636 Views
3,783 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

IBM Spectrum Computing

VMware Aria Operations

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

IBM Spectrum Computing and VMware Aria Operations compete in enterprise computing and operations management. IBM Spectrum Computing holds an advantage in terms of pricing and support services, while VMware Aria Operations is superior in offering comprehensive features justifying its higher cost.

Features: IBM Spectrum Computing stands out with its workload management, efficient resource utilization, and cost-effectiveness for high-performance computing environments. VMware Aria Operations excels with operational insights, automation capabilities, and advanced analytics for performance management.

Room for Improvement: IBM Spectrum Computing could enhance its advanced analytics and automation features. Integrating more complex operational insights would also be beneficial. VMware Aria Operations would benefit from simplifying its deployment process and reducing its cost complexity. Improving support for non-technical users could also be advantageous.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Spectrum Computing provides straightforward deployment with supportive customer service, easing setup and operations. VMware Aria Operations, while more complex to deploy, offers sophisticated analytics and automation that deliver long-term benefits, albeit with a steeper learning curve initially.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Spectrum Computing has a lower initial cost, attracting budget-conscious buyers with a strong ROI through resource optimization. VMware Aria Operations demands higher upfront investment but offers significant ROI with enhanced operations management, ideal for businesses needing extensive operational oversight.

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

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Operations

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

26th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Hadoop (6th)

VMware Aria Operations

Ranking in Cloud Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

374

Ranking in other categories

Virtualization Management Tools (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Spectrum Computing is 1.1%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations is 7.7%, down from 9.6% 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.

Read full review

Amar Sorro

Team Lead Virtualization at Hybrid Tech

Manage and monitor crucial banking operations with deep logging and efficient alerting

The most valuable features of VMware Aria Operations include its excellent monitoring capabilities. It allows me to perform deep monitoring and logging of the entire environment, providing a quick alarm and warning system through email. These features help me in efficiently managing virtual machines. The solution also offers easy access to VMware KB articles for problem resolution, ensuring quick access to troubleshooting information.

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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

"The most valuable feature is the backup capability."

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

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

"Easy to operate and use."

"We are satisfied with the technical support, we have no issues."

"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."

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

"The most valuable aspect of the product is the policy driving resource management, to optimize the computing across data centers."

More IBM Spectrum Computing pros

"Heat maps are valuable."

"It helped troubleshooting issues with storms of software data that cost a lot of IO."

"The main point of installing, deploying, and troubleshooting with vRealize Operations is to provide visual dashboards to ensure that the entire workload is functioning properly."

"The most valuable features are the Blueprints and Workflows, to be able to hand the self-service portal out; to get out of the way and let the developers spin up their workloads as they need them."

"The dashboards and the interface are very easy to understand, very lively, and very dynamic."

"It gives us a lot of details about the environment that we normally wouldn't be able to see without using other tools. We get visibility into our infrastructure, a single interface to see storage performance, VM performance, and to find issues in the environment that we wouldn't normally see."

"With this solution, we are able to see where problems are happening quickly and improve turnaround time, which matters to us."

"Can be customized according to customer requirements."

More VMware Aria Operations pros

Cons

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

"In Pakistan, IBM's disadvantage is the lack of OEM support and presence."

"We have not been able to use deduplication."

"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."

"This solution is no longer managing tapes correctly."

"Lack of sufficient documentation, particularly in Spanish."

"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."

More IBM Spectrum Computing cons

"One area that needs improvement is the solution's connectivity and integration with other products, such as IBM and Huawei servers and storage."

"They should make it easier to find those granular things that you're always looking for. You're always running into a situation where you want to use the tool to figure out a problem, but the amount of effort needed to delve into vROps and find the exact metric you're looking for is always so difficult."

"The solution could improve by having more APIs, customized alerts, and documentation."

"It was not intuitive and user-friendly in the versions leading up to 6.5."

"It requires a lot of knowledge to manage. For example, if you are collecting a lot of data for analysis, the virtual appliance drive spaces can fill up. In this case, you need engineers who know how to expand those spaces."

"VMware Aria Operations is considered overpriced. Customers have commented on the pricing issues, noting that doubling the price is not normal. They are reviewing other options due to this pricing concern."

"From a personal perspective, I would like it made clearer what options are available in the suite that the customer is not using."

"The room for improvement is in the definition of the metrics. There are millions of metrics inside the solution, but there is no documentation from VMware for what those exact metrics are. That is a trouble point at times."

More VMware Aria Operations cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution is expensive."

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

"The solution requires an annual license which is very expensive."

"VMware support is very costly compared to other organizations' support. When you purchase a VMware product, such as vSphere or vROps, the license is perpetual, but you also have to purchase the support service for a number of years. The support service pricing is very high compared to the license, and compared to competitive vendors."

"The solution has helped to reduce the time to troubleshoot issues."

"I would like to see a free offering. Cost is always a factor in any sort of line. Obviously, the value added is there and it's worth it."

"Every VMware product is a licensing challenge. It's always costly. It's based on processors. From a technical side, the product is very good. The challenging part is always the licensing. They should have some kind of alternate pricing models."

"vRealize Operations has proved to be a cost effective solution for our big environment."

"The initial costs are a bit on the higher side but the licensing is flexible."

"The pricing: It's expensive."

More VMware Aria Operations pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

35%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Transportation Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

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?

It is expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Computing?

IBM's sales and support structure can be challenging. To work on an IBM deal, you often need to involve multiple specialists, each knowledgeable about only part of the product, rather than having a...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for IBM Spectrum Computing?

It is big on resilience and security. Their focus is on providing robust and secure solutions. Due to their high-end server models, IBM products are often more expensive than competitors. While IBM...

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 VMware Aria Operations a user friendly solution?

In terms of user-friendliness, VMware Aria Operations is one of the best solutions out there. It is not overly complex to set up and you can rely on the technical support to provide you with assis...

See all answers

What is the most useful new feature of VMware Aria Operations?

For me, the alerts features are the most unique part of this product, no matter the current name it uses. When they introduced the new version of VMware Aria Operations, they also introduced more a...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 32% of the time

Cloudera Data Platform vs IBM Spectrum Computing

Compared 27% of the time

Morpheus vs IBM Spectrum Computing

Compared 26% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs IBM Spectrum Computing

Compared 15% of the time

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VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 20% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 11% of the time

VMware vSphere vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 10% of the time

Nutanix Prism vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 9% of the time

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 8% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Hadoop

June 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Computing product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations

June 2025

Download VMware Aria Operations product report

Also Known As

IBM Platform Computing

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager (VCOPS)

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 Operations is a high-ranking virtualization management and cloud management tool that automates and simplifies IT management to the applications it supports. It achieves this through full-stack visibility from physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. The product allows users to enable self-driving IT operations management across private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. This is conducted with the unified operations platform that delivers continuous performance, capacity and cost optimization, and integrated compliance through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and predictive analytics.

VMware Aria Operations Use Cases

VMware Aria Operations has several use cases, some of which include:

Continuous performance optimization: VMware Aria Operations allows users to assure application performance at a minimal cost, facilitated by real-time predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. The product can be used to automatically balance workloads, improve consolidation rations, optimize and rightsize workloads, and avoid contention.
Capacity and cost management: VMware Aria Operations can be utilized to reduce cost and improve efficiency with real-time ML-based capacity and cost analytics. The solution uses these tools to visualize cost savings opportunities and accelerate decision-making.
Intelligent remediation: This product can also be used to predict, prevent, and troubleshoot issues with actionable insights. Through other VMware integrations, users can streamline and centralize IT operations.
Integrated compliance: The solution can be utilized to reduce risk and enforce IT regulatory standards for VMware Cloud through integrated compliance and automated drift remediation.

VMware Aria Operations Features

The product has various features which users can utilize. Several of the features that the 2022 version of VMware Aria Operations introduced include:

Management pack builder: This feature is a no-code solution that allows users to expand their operations visibility to anywhere they wish. The builder allows users to connect to a data source using an HTTP or Amazon AWS data source, as well as to make API calls, create objects, and build out relationships with other objects in the product.
Public cloud basic actions: This is a set of features that allows VMware Aria Operations users to initiate actions automatically via the product's UI for AWS, Microsoft Azure, or GCP CE instances.
Rule-based application discovery: Through this new feature of the product, users can easily discover multiple applications running in all or specific areas of infrastructure and view associated resources. This can be achieved through simple user-defined rules, including discovering applications based on tags, object names, and properties.
Aria Operations capacity management: This feature allows organizations to view the results of what-if analysis based on their allocation model and specify business hours for capacity calculations.
Alerts: This is a set of features that include components called Conditions and Symptoms, which are used to alert different types of issues on the platform.
User access management: Through this feature, users can benefit from improved ways to configure in VMware Aria Operations with the introduction of scopes.
Support for raw device mapping storage: This feature allows users to get configuration details about their raw device mapping (RDM), such as disk sharing, compatibility mode, and SCSI Bus Sharing.

VMware Aria Operations Benefits

VMware Aria Operations brings various benefits to the organizations using it. Among them are the following:

The product helps organizations reduce unplanned downtime and maximize return on investment (ROI) in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
VMware Aria Operations simplifies management for hybrid clouds from migration assessments.
Users can benefit from an accelerated journey to VMware Cloud on AWS through this solution.
The product can be delivered on premises or as a service, providing flexibility for its users.
VMware Aria Operations can increase operational efficiency through monitoring and management features.
The solution accelerates decision-making through detailed cost analytics, which is visualized for users' convenience.
VMware Aria Operations allows users to both utilize standard compliance templates and create their own custom ones.

Reviews from Real Users

Mohamed N., a tech lead VMware support engineer at a tech services company, appreciates VMware Aria Operations because it is easy to use, stable, and support is always available.

Mojtaba K., a senior system administrator at a comms service provider, values VMware Aria Operations due to the fact that its dashboards give you a glimpse of what is really going on in your virtualized environment.

VMware

Sample Customers

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

Science Applications International Corporation, Tribune Media, Heartland Payment Systems, Telkom Indonesia, Columbia Sportswear, iGATE, CSS Corp, Angel Broking, Adira Finance, Hipskind, Beiersdorf Shared Services, Innovate Mas Indonesia, Adobe, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi , Join Experience S.A, Borusan Holdings, Department of Transport - Abu Dhabi

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Operations

July 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Operations

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