IBM Spectrum Computing vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

IBM and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. IBM is ranked #23 with an average rating of 9.0, while VMware is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.5. IBM holds a 0.7% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 8.9% mindshare. Additionally, 57% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Computing and VMware Aria Operations 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 Operations Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Operations

October 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.3%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Computing is 0.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations is 8.9%, down from 9.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

SubashSubbiah

Assistant Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Dec 10, 2022

It can tell us where performance is lagging on the hardware layer, but the reporting on the application layer is lacking

The automation area could be improved, and the generic reports are poor. We want more details in the analysis report from the application layer. The reports from the infrastructure layer are satisfactory, but Turbonomic won't provide much information if we dig down further than the application layer. I would like them to add some apps for physical device load resourcing and physical-to-virtual calculation. It gives excellent recommendations for the virtual layer but doesn't have the capabilities for physical-to-virtual analysis. Automated deployment is something else they could add. Some built-in automation features are helpful, but we aren't effectively using a few. We want a few more automated features, like autoscaling and automatic performance optimization testing would be useful.

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Avra Jyoti Ghosh

Data QualityTechnical Architect at Mindtree

Aug 25, 2022

One of the best tools in the data management and services area

I mainly used Spectrum Computing for data management, governance, quality, and ETL activity Spectrum Computing's best features are its speed, robustness, and data processing and analysis. Spectrum Computing is lagging behind other products, most likely because it hasn't been shifted to the…

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Edward Hore

L3 Infrastructure Engineer at Specsavers

Oct 24, 2024

Effortless configuration management with cost concerns and an easy installation

We use Aria Operations for hosting our retail environment at remote locations, and for hosting our internal systems We have an established environment with VMware solutions, which has been very robust and reliable. Ease of use and the ability to do what I need to do is very easy. I know where to…

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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

"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."

"I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance."

"It has automated a lot of things. We have saved 30 to 35 percent in human resource time and cost, which is pretty substantial. We don't have a big workforce here, so we have to use all the automation we can get."

"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."

"We have a system where our developers automate machine builds, and that is constantly running out of resources. Turbonomic helps us with that, so I don't have to keep buying hardware. The developers always say, "They don't have enough. They don't have enough. They don't have enough," when they just configured it improperly. Therefore, Turbonomic helps us identify configuration issues on their side so it doesn't cost me money on the other end to buy resources that I don't really need."

"The solution has a good optimization feature."

"Before implementing Turbonomic, we had difficulty reaching a consensus about VM placement and sizing. Everybody's opinion was wrong, including mine. The application developers, implementers, and infrastructure team could never decide the appropriate size of a virtual machine. I always made the machines small, and they always made them too big. We were both probably wrong."

"I like Turbonomic's built-in reporting. It provides a ton of information out of the box, so I don't have to build panels for the monthly summaries and other reports I need to present to management. We get better performance and bottleneck reporting from this than we do from our older EMC software."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"The most valuable feature is the backup capability."

"Easy to operate and use."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"I think vROps is scalable and suitable for our environment."

"VM rightsizing is another very good feature and capacity planning is something else that I like about it."

"Some of the forecasting features give us a picture of, let's say, in six months I know that my storage will be full, or I'll be out of resources. It gives us a little bit of forecasting."

"It gives us visibility into the virtual infrastructure, and even the physical infrastructure, and into the workloads running. We have visibility even at the level of the appliance services. We can monitor everything. We can also create dependency reports, so if a service is down, it will not impact things. It gives us those dependencies brilliantly."

"It visualizes stuff better, so we can pinpoint or see problems"

"We went from using industry standard KPIs to going to a complete on-demand model based on the algorithms from vRealize Operations. It has enabled us to drive more utilization out of our existing compute infrastructure to the point where, for a period of six months, we didn't purchase a single server or any additional compute. We were able to continue to sweat our existing assets."

"We use vRealize Operations Manager primarily for capacity management within our environment."

"We use the product to minimize downtime, as well as be in a position to plan for future growth."

More VMware Aria Operations pros

Cons

"It would be good for Turbonomic, on their side, to integrate with other companies like AppDynamics or SolarWinds or other monitoring softwares. I feel that the actual monitoring of applications, mixed in with their abilities, would help. That would be the case wherever Turbonomic lacks the ability to monitor an application or in cases where applications are so customized that it's not going to be able to handle them. There is monitoring that you can do with scripting that you may not be able to do with Turbonomic."

"I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge."

"Since the introduction of a HTML 5 based interface, our main - but minor - criticism of a less than intuitive operation managers' GUI would be the area of improvement."

"Before IBM bought it, the support was fantastic. After IBM bought it, the support became very disappointing."

"The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens."

"After running this solution in production for a year, we may want a more granular approach to how we utilize the product because we are planning to use some of its metrics to feed into our financial system."

"In Azure, it's not what you're using. You purchase the whole 8 TB disk and you pay for it. It doesn't matter how much you're using. So something that I've asked for from Turbonomic is recommendations based on disk utilization. In the example of the 8 TB disk where only 200 GBs are being used, based on the history, there should be a recommendation like, "You can safely use a 500 GB disk." That would create a lot of savings."

"Enhanced executive reporting standard with the tool beyond the reports that can be created today. Something that can easily be used with upper management on a monthly or quarterly basis to show the impact to our environment."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"We'd like to see some AI model training for machine learning."

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

"We have not been able to use deduplication."

"Lack of sufficient documentation, particularly in Spanish."

"This solution is no longer managing tapes correctly."

"SMB storage and HPC is not compatible and it should be supported by IBM Spectrum Computing."

"IBM's sales and support structure can be challenging."

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

"I would like more application dashboards to be available."

"There is room for improvement in asset management and resource usage."

"There are some metrics that are not included in the canned set, that we've created. They call them super metrics in the tool, where you create your own metric. But the super metrics are not really reliable. It might be because we didn't create them correctly, although we did have help from VMware. They also don't translate into newer versions like a canned metric would. One of them is a vCPU to pCPU ratio. That's one that is missing, which should be very simple for them to collect."

"Adding some intelligence to VMware Aria Operations, such as event correlation, and some level of AI apps will improve the solution, similar to what we see with the more advanced monitoring solutions that we don't currently have."

"The UI interface of the application has been stagnant for a long time."

"I would like to find a tool that is a single pane of glass for everything. The endpoint operations agent doesn't really do much when you install it on an endpoint - for example, on a Windows Server or a Linux server. You don't really get any beneficial information at the OS level from VMware tools."

"It's mostly user-friendly and intuitive. They're improving their dashboards which makes it a lot easier. Sometimes, drilling down and trying to find the exact thing you're looking for can prove challenging at first, but it's getting better."

"There are some delays in response to the solution's technical support, making it an area where improvements are needed."

More VMware Aria Operations cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I consider the pricing to be high."

"We see ROI in extended support agreements (ESA) for old software. Migration activities seem to be where Turbonomic has really benefited us the most. It's one click and done. We have new machines ready to go with Turbonomic, which are properly sized instead of somebody sitting there with a spreadsheet and guessing. So, my return on investment would certainly be on currency, from a software and hardware perspective."

"When we have expanded our licensing, it has always been easy to make an ROI-based decision. So, it's reasonably priced. We would like to have it cheaper, but we get more benefit from it than we pay for it. At the end of the day, that's all you can hope for."

"I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools."

"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."

"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."

"The product is fairly priced right now. Given its capabilities, it is excellently priced. We think that the product will become self-funding because we will be able to maximize our resources, which will help us from a capacity perspective. That should save us money in the long run."

"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

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

"This solution is expensive."

"We have licenses on a three year basis. Licensing costs are much higher, but given the stability of the solution, it is a reasonable price."

"So, besides the license overall, you have to pay for the type of support you want. With the license, there is a support cost as well."

"If one is low price and ten is high price, I rate the product price a ten."

"Bundle it in with your license rather than buying it as a separate product. It saves a lot of money that way."

"We have seen good ROI results. It has made our lives easier."

"Pricing could always be cheaper, but it's acceptable."

"It was cost effective, because it fixed our problems."

"We did an enterprise license agreement with our VMware partner and put this in our bundle. We tried it and loved it, so we use it now."

More VMware Aria Operations pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

40%

Computer Software Company

10%

Retailer

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?

It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...

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What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

The implementation could be enhanced.

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What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?

We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...

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What do you like most about IBM Spectrum Computing?

Easy to operate and use.

See all answers

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 spec...

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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 y...

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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 compl...

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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 i...

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Comparisons

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 12% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 9% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 9% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

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Morpheus vs IBM Spectrum Computing

Compared 39% of the time

HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric vs IBM Spectrum Computing

Compared 32% of the time

Red Hat CloudForms vs IBM Spectrum Computing

Compared 30% of the time

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VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 18% of the time

VMware vSphere vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 12% of the time

Nutanix Prism vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 10% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 7% of the time

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 7% of the time

More VMware Aria Operations Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

October 2024

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

Hadoop

October 2024

Download IBM Spectrum Computing product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations

October 2024

Download VMware Aria Operations product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

IBM Platform Computing

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

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VMware

Overview

IBM Turbonomic is a performance and cost optimization platform for public, private, and hybrid clouds used by companies to assure application performance while eliminating inefficiencies by dynamically resourcing applications through automated actions.

IBM Turbonomic leverages AI to continuously analyze application resource consumption, deliver insights and dashboards, and make real-time adjustments. Common use cases include cloud cost optimization, cloud migration planning, data center modernization, FinOps acceleration, Kubernetes optimization, sustainable IT, and application resource management. By integrating with various cloud platforms, on-premise infrastructures, and containers, IBM Turbonomic provides a holistic view of the environment, ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently.

The solution is designed to support complex IT environments, offering actionable insights and automated actions that help IT teams proactively manage application performance and infrastructure resources. Turbonomic customers report an average 33% reduction in cloud and infrastructure waste without impacting application performance, and return-on-investment of 471% over three years.

IBM Turbonomic manages resources across hybrid and on-premises data centers to ensure efficiency and financial impact awareness. It automates resource allocation, balances memory dynamically, and provides robust performance metrics. Users benefit from its ability to prevent resource starvation and offer cost-saving recommendations through continuous management. Executive Dashboards provide insights for cost justification and resource management, making IT operations simpler with AI-driven automation and actionable recommendations.

What are the most important features of IBM Turbonomic?

Automated Resource Allocation: Dynamically allocates resources for optimal performance.
Dynamic Memory Balancing: Adjusts memory allocation to prevent resource shortages.
Right-Sizing: Sizes VMs accurately for Azure and on-prem environments.
Single Platform Management: Manages resources across hybrid and on-premises data centers.
Proactive Performance Optimization: Continuously optimizes performance to prevent issues.
Kubernetes Support: Enhances container management with robust support.
Cost-Saving Recommendations: Provides actionable tips for reducing expenses.

What benefits should users look for in IBM Turbonomic reviews?

Cost Reduction: Helps minimize expenses through efficient resource management.
Performance Improvement: Enhances application performance by preventing resource starvation.
Detailed Insights: Offers comprehensive analytics to justify costs and resource utilization.
Simplified IT Processes: Uses AI automation to streamline operations.

IBM Turbonomic is implemented across multiple industries, including finance for optimizing peak payroll processing, IT for enhanced virtual server management, and healthcare for reliable performance monitoring. Organizations benefit from its robust automation, ensuring maximum efficiency and cost savings.

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 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.

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.

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

October 2024

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Operations

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Operations and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.

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