Google Cloud Spanner vs vCloud Air comparison

Google and Virtustream are both solutions in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category. Google is ranked #9 with an average rating of 9.0, while Virtustream is ranked #16. Google holds a 4.4% mindshare in DS, compared to Virtustream’s 0.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Google users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Virtustream users who would recommend it.

Google Cloud Spanner

Read 5 Google Cloud Spanner reviews

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649 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

vCloud Air

Read 3 vCloud Air reviews

89 Views
64 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Google Cloud Spanner

vCloud Air

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 2024

vCloud Air and Google Cloud Spanner are cloud-based services tailored for different use cases. Google Cloud Spanner has the upper hand due to its advanced features and reliability, while vCloud Air is preferred for easier deployment and support.

Features: vCloud Air offers seamless integration with VMware environments, strong hybrid cloud capabilities, and user-friendly deployment. Google Cloud Spanner is known for scalability, consistency, and global availability for large-scale applications.

Room for Improvement: vCloud Air needs enhanced disaster recovery, better performance during high traffic, and more robust overall performance. Google Cloud Spanner could improve hybrid environment support, reduce latency in certain regions, and enhance hybrid compatibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: vCloud Air allows straightforward deployment within VMware ecosystems and provides responsive customer service. Google Cloud Spanner, although more complex to deploy, offers comprehensive documentation and support for large-scale databases.

Pricing and ROI: vCloud Air shows reasonable setup costs and decent ROI for hybrid cloud initiatives. Google Cloud Spanner is perceived as more expensive but offers superior returns with its extensive features and performance for high scalability needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Database as a Service (DBaaS) Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

March 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

Google Cloud Spanner

Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)

9th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

vCloud Air

Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)

16th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (23rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Google Cloud Spanner is 4.4%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vCloud Air is 0.4%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

Featured Reviews

Ethan Lo

Infrastructuer Security at Premise Data

A stable and scalable relational database that ensures a return on investment for its users

The most valuable feature of the solution is its scalability. Scalability comes with two options, among which Google Cloud Spanner can scale horizontally, compared to other relational databases that scale vertically. You can change Google Cloud Spanner's resource configuration, which is done through processing units. Suppose you set up Google Cloud Spanner initially with a hundred processing units, and then you run out of resources since your database used too much CPU. In the aforementioned scenario, you can scale up or down and face no downtime in the production phase. The solution's features are important when running a company twenty-four hours, seven days a week.

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Saurabh Chandratre

Director Solutions Architect - EMEA & APAC at Blue Medora

With the VPC, you can run your workloads in an active state, use it for development work and for hosting SQL/Exchange Servers in IaaS; RaaS/DaaS for DR activities.

All three components of the vCloud Air are equally valuable and important, i.e., IaaS, DaaS and RaaS. I like the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering compared to the Dedicated Cloud. It gives me the flexibility to utilize the pay-as-you-go option. You can run your workloads in an active state at reasonable prices. I have seen lots of companies use it for their development work, as well as for hosting SQL and Exchange Servers, i.e., in the active-passive mode instead of Replication (RaaS). Disaster Recovery is also a great feature that is affordable and easy to use. Disaster Recovery is a great component of the vCloud Air, where you can protect the on-premises cloud infrastructure, by providing self-service recovery options using the vSphere Replication. Some of the features that really stand out and I have used in my projects are: * Direct Connect: It provides high speed and private line connectivity. * Offline Data Transfer: For encrypted bulk data transport.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

14%

Retailer

Government

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your primary use case for Google Cloud Spanner?

Google Cloud Spanner has all the features of a traditional relational database, including schemas, SQL queries, ACID transactions, and provides excellent integration and monitoring tools as well as...

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What do you like most about Google Cloud Spanner?

Google Cloud Spanner is stable.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Cloud Spanner?

Price-wise, I heard that Google Cloud Spanner is on the higher side. I am not sure if this is a rumor or if it's fake news, but I believe that having BigQuery and GCP together could be a little cos...

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Comparisons

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Compared 32% of the time

MongoDB Atlas vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 17% of the time

SingleStore vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 14% of the time

Google Cloud SQL vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 13% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 10% of the time

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Microsoft Azure vs vCloud Air

Compared 63% of the time

Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs vCloud Air

Compared 37% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

March 2025

Download Google Cloud Spanner product report

Buyer's Guide

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

March 2025

Download vCloud Air product report

Also Known As

Google Spanner

No data available

Overview

Cloud Spanner is the first and only relational database service that is both strongly consistent and horizontally scalable. With Cloud Spanner you enjoy all the traditional benefits of a relational database: ACID transactions, relational schemas (and schema changes without downtime), SQL queries, high performance, and high availability. But unlike any other relational database service, Cloud Spanner scales horizontally, to hundreds or thousands of servers, so it can handle the highest of transactional workloads. With automatic scaling, synchronous data replication, and node redundancy, Cloud Spanner delivers up to 99.999% (five 9s) of availability for your mission critical applications. In fact, Google’s internal Spanner service has been handling millions of queries per second from many Google services for years.

Google

vCloud Air is a public cloud platform built on the trusted foundation of vSphere, compatible with your on-premises data center, that includes infrastructure, disaster recovery, and various applications as service offerings. vCloud Air allows you to extend your workloads into the cloud with ease. You can migrate existing onsite virtual machines (VMs) to the public cloud or start up new application VMs directly in the cloud.

Virtustream

Sample Customers

Streak, Optiva, Mixpanel

Lumeta, LifeSite, Clear Tec Solutions, National Physician Services, Queens University of Charlotte, California Natural Resources Agency, Pacific Disaster Center, Seventy Seven Energy Inc., Columbia Sportswear , CSS Corp

Buyer's Guide

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

March 2025

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