VMware Aria Cost vs. NetApp Spot

​As more organizations move their workloads to the public cloud, managing costs can become a significant challenge. I am seeing more and more customers moving to the hybrid-cloud or multi-cloud models. This brings its own challenges and costs is a top concern. I've been working with a customer to compare these two options and thought I would share my thoughts and understanding of these two popular cost optimization solutions: VMware Aria Cost and NetApp Spot. I will explore the benefits of each solution and help you determine which one might be better suited to your needs.

What is VMware Aria Cost (Powered by CloudHealth)?

​VMware Aria Cost is a cloud cost management solution that helps organizations monitor and optimize their cloud spend. The solution provides a comprehensive view of cloud costs across multiple clouds and accounts, assisting organizations in identifying and reducing unnecessary spending. This is very powerful in that you can tie in one or multiple public clouds to gain visibility. 

VMware Aria Cost helps organizations to:

• Monitor cloud costs: The solution provides real-time visibility into cloud spending, enabling organizations to monitor costs and usage across multiple clouds and accounts.
• Optimize spending: VMware Aria Cost helps organizations to identify and eliminate wasted spending, optimize resource utilization, and reduce costs.
• Manage budgets: The solution provides budget tracking and alerts to help organizations stay within budget constraints.

VMware Aria Key Capabilities

• Resource & Organization Management: VMware Aria Cost FlexOrgs helps align cloud data with business needs, providing greater control over user access, sharing, and delegation across different levels of an organization. The platform can be fine-tuned by dynamically allocating assets to business groups, known as VMware Aria Cost Perspectives, and provides tools to analyze and oversee cloud environments based on various categories, such as project, application, and cost center, to encourage accountability for costs and usage.
• Reporting & Dashboards: VMware Aria Cost FlexReports allows for custom filtering and refinement of reports to analyze datasets relevant to business objectives. Custom dashboards can be created across clouds, and detailed reports can be built from scratch to perform granular analysis on cost, usage, and asset data using various dimensions.
• Budget Management & Forecasting: VMware Aria allows users to set up budgets that can be used to compare expected costs to actual spend throughout the year. Multiple budgets can be created and customized according to the company's fiscal year. VMware Aria also offers forecasting capabilities that use historical data to predict future values within a given time frame, and can alert stakeholders when costs are forecasted to exceed budget.

• Costs Allocation & Chargeback: With VMware Aria, you can create cost reallocation rules to assign indirect costs based on the proportion of direct costs within your Perspective groups. You can also add custom line items to the bill to manipulate costs directly, and insert charges or credits with a one-time or recurring frequency to perform chargeback or showback in a more effective manner.
• Resource Utilization: VMware Aria allows users to terminate idle and unused resources to reduce wasteful spending. It provides customizable thresholds and actionable recommendations for rightsizing IaaS and PaaS services in multi-cloud environments. Additionally, users can compare actual performance data with provisioned capacity to identify assets that can be downsized or terminated.
• Commitment-Based Discount Management: VMware Aria Cost offers features to help users take advantage of cloud provider commitment discounts, reducing operational costs. The platform simplifies the management of Reservations and Savings Plans through purchasing, optimization, and amortization capabilities, minimizing the need for manual intervention. Additionally, discounts can be managed throughout their lifecycle, maximizing potential savings.
• Anomaly Detection: VMware Aria Cost Anomaly Detection helps users identify unexpected changes in spend by region, account, and service. It analyzes historical trends and adjusts to expected workload patterns, allowing for easy identification of anomalies. Users can provide feedback to train the algorithm to fit their business needs.
• Container Cost Reporting and Distribution: VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth provides visibility into container resource utilization and cost and usage trends. Users can view cluster costs by application, team, cost center, and more. The platform supports Kubernetes collection of resource data independent of cloud and enables container-based cost distribution.
• Governance & Automation: VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth's dynamic policy engine monitors the environment, identifies opportunities to reduce spend, and enables automated actions for changes such as starting, stopping, resizing, or terminating infrastructure. The platform sends alerts and executes changes at the user-defined frequency.
• Migration Planning: VMware Aria Cost Migration Assessment helps users plan a migration from their data center to the public cloud of their choice by understanding the total cost of ownership, comparing costs of different regions and optimizing reservations.

Benefits of VMware Aria Cost

• Comprehensive view: VMware Aria Cost provides a comprehensive view of cloud costs. Across multiple clouds and accounts, helping organizations to identify and reduce unnecessary spending.
• Customizable dashboards: The solution provides customizable dashboards, enabling organizations to create a view tailored to their needs.
• Multi-cloud support: VMware Aria Cost supports multiple clouds, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

What is NetApp Spot?

​NetApp Spot is a cloud optimization and cost management solution that helps organizations to automate and optimize their cloud infrastructure. The solution leverages machine learning to identify and eliminate unused resources, optimize workloads, and reduce cloud costs. This again, is a cross cloud solution which is powerful to help you gain insights into those environments.

NetApp Spot helps organizations to:

• Optimize resources: The solution automatically optimizes cloud resources based on workload demands, ensuring that organizations use only what they need.
• Reduce costs: NetApp Spot helps organizations to reduce cloud costs by identifying and eliminating unused resources, optimizing workloads, and leveraging spot instances.
• Improve performance: The solution ensures that workloads run efficiently, reducing latency and improving performance.

NetApp Spot Key Capabilities

• Cost optimization: NetApp Spot can help organizations optimize their cloud costs by providing insights into resource utilization and identifying areas where costs can be reduced.
• Resource management: The platform provides centralized visibility and management of cloud resources across multiple cloud providers, making it easier to manage and optimize cloud resources.
• Automated scaling: NetApp Spot can automate the scaling of cloud resources based on workload demand, ensuring that applications have the resources they need to run smoothly.
• Predictive analytics: The platform uses predictive analytics to forecast cloud usage and costs, helping organizations plan and budget more effectively.
• Governance and compliance: NetApp Spot provides tools for monitoring and enforcing compliance with industry regulations and internal policies.
• Security: The platform includes built-in security features to help protect against data breaches and other security threats.
• Multi-cloud support: NetApp Spot supports multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, allowing organizations to optimize their cloud resources across different environments.
• Integration: The platform can integrate with other cloud management tools, such as Kubernetes and Terraform, making incorporating cloud optimization into existing workflows easier.

Benefits of NetApp Spot

• Machine learning optimization: NetApp Spot leverages machine learning to optimize cloud resources automatically, ensuring that organizations use only what they need.
• Cost savings: The solution helps organizations to reduce cloud costs by identifying and eliminating unused resources, optimizing workloads, and leveraging spot instances.
• Improved performance: NetApp Spot ensures that workloads run efficiently, reducing latency and improving performance.

Which is better?

Choosing between VMware Aria Cost and NetApp Spot depends on your organization's needs. VMware Aria Cost may be the better choice if your organization needs a comprehensive view of cloud costs across multiple clouds and accounts. If your organization is looking to automate and optimize cloud infrastructure using machine learning, NetApp Spot may be the better choice.

VMware Aria Cost and NetApp Spot provide robust cloud optimization and cost management solutions. The choice between the two depends on your organization's specific needs and budget. By selecting the right solution, you can optimize cloud spending, improve performance, and reduce costs, helping your organization to achieve its cloud goals.

Resources

• NetApp Spot Cost
• NetApp Spot Resource Center
• VMware Aria Cost Resources
• VMware Cloud Management

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