Cisco CloudCenter vs NetApp Cloud Insights comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Migration
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
204
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (2nd), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st)
Cisco CloudCenter
Ranking in Cloud Migration
10th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (18th)
NetApp Cloud Insights
Ranking in Cloud Migration
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (27th), Cloud Monitoring Software (22nd)
 

Featured Reviews

KM
Aug 17, 2023
It shows you what you should do, but it can also act on recommendations automatically
Our organization uses cloud-based infrastructure, so everything is metered. You're wasting money if you have a system running but you're not using it. Turbonomic can take that system offline or suspend it. It can also adjust resources so that they're optimal for a particular workload. It gives you visibility and also takes action automatically. Turbonomic offers a single platform for optimizing complex, mixed environments. With APM integration, it can tell you how each application is performing and rationalize the resources to ensure the optimal configuration for performance, so there's no waste. It will make those adjustments for you based on application trends. It covers the complete stack all the way up from your UI down to your core host machine if you're running on a VM or the physical machine if you're running on a device. It tries to ensure consistency and hasn't caused any additional overhead on my applications. The automation features are helpful because engineers no longer need to focus on fixing issues. They can spend their time on innovation and more important things. Right now, a lot of the work is still being done manually. When I get alerts, I send a staff member to make adjustments, but I can't do that in real time. It might take days or weeks to address a ticket. The meter is constantly running while we're waiting to fix that so that money is going down the drain. It's hard to quantify how much time we save using Turbonomic, but it's around 20 percent. I only do analysis and remediation on maybe Tuesday and Thursday. It's not about the time that I waste; it's about the time and cost we can recover. I no longer need to wait until Tuesday. If something happens on the weekend, the tool can fix it on Sunday. It does save time, but the bigger aspect is cost savings. The core expense of our setup is cloud costs, so cloud management is a huge piece of our financial operations. We're constantly looking at cloud spending and ways to make that more efficient.
SP
Jul 24, 2022
Easy-to-deploy and supports Amazon Azure, GCP and vSphere, but improvements are needed in UI
Cisco can improve their product by being agnostic, not just specific to Cisco components but also supportive of other vendors. Improvements are needed in UI and multi-tenancy for this solution. We primarily work with Cisco View. Cisco CloudCenter is their own product and they are working with us to create a hybrid cloud solution. Our custom CMP solution will be sold by Cisco as their own solution. I wouldn't say they are doing much research on CloudCenter, but are exploring different CMPs. Cisco acquired CliQr and since then I haven't seen much development on CloudCenter. The solution does not have YAML abstractions that allow you to consume the overall YAML to create a relevant infrastructure. VMware on AWS needs to be supported because native AWS is not useful in hybrid cloud situations. We have a customer who requires a hybrid cloud, so we went toward vRealize Automation. The solution is primarily for private clouds as they don't support much on public clouds. When we discussed this, they didn't have GCP in their portfolio. I'm assuming they have added it now.
DR
Nov 2, 2023
Offers real-time data visibility, robust security features, and seamless resource inventory management
We use Cloud Secure to monitor and secure our SIS and NFS file systems, particularly for protection against ransomware threats We decided to complement our existing product, Varonis, with NetApp Cloud Insights because Varonis wasn't providing us with real-time information. Cloud Insights, on the…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."
"It became obvious to us that there was a lot more being offered in the product that we could leverage to ensure our VMware environment was running efficiently."
"We like that Turbonomic shows application metrics and estimates the impact of taking a suggested action. It provides us a map of resource utilization as part of its recommendation. We evaluate and compare that to what we think would be appropriate from a human perspective to that what Turbonomic is doing, then take the best action going forward."
"The solution has a good optimization feature."
"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."
"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."
"I like the analytics that help us optimize compatibility. Whereas Azure Advisor tells us what we have to do, Turbonomic has automation which actually does those things. That means we don't have to be present to get them done and simplifies our IT engineers' jobs."
"The automation and orchestration components are definitely the best part, as you can tell it what it can do and when, and just let it be."
"The initial setup is fairly straightforward if you have a basic setup."
"You can scale it easily."
"Cisco CloudCenter's scalability is good."
"Cisco has a lot of published information and documentation that helps users understand the product and its offering very well."
"The initial setup process is straightforward."
"The solution includes a lot of features and is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports."
"The solution is agile and it has APIs for integration."
"Upgrades are very simple as well because they've allowed us to get updates directly in the CloudCenter Suite manager. If you need to do an upgrade to your setup afterward, you just push a button and it rolls out the parts and retires the old ones. It's seamless and very simple compared to what we've done before."
"The solution is easy to deploy."
"It is good for giving an overview of the systems and for tracking long-term trends. It is handy for root cause analysis, e.g. it can eliminate whether storage is the cause of an issue."
"NetApp Cloud Insights helps with login monitoring and troubleshooting. Previously, if we had performance concerns or needed to interface with other groups and their products, a task that should require only one or two people turned into a six-person job."
"All our production clusters are in Cloud Insight. It provides a single pane of glass, giving us visibility into the environment, which allows us to understand if any issues are going on across any of our clusters."
"Among the most valuable features are the queries and reporting that allow us to look at the utilization of resources, at how well the storage is performing, and to report on which resources are being used by which business units. We can track usage across the entire environment, across applications, business units, cost centers, etc."
"The visibility and assistance with security vulnerabilities are valuable."
"One feature we appreciate the most is its ability to take snapshots, which adds an extra layer of security and allows us to protect our data effectively."
"Cloud Secure is definitely the most valuable feature and being able to see file level activity. It gives real-time alerting on possible ransomware attacks and provides file security review. It helps us to see if something abnormal is happening on the system before it's too late."
 

Cons

"There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit. It does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes. It goes out there and just kind of goes crazy. There needs to be something that kind of throttles things back a little bit. I have personally seen where we've been working on things, then pulled servers out of the VMware cluster and found that Turbonomic was still trying to ship resources to and from that node. So, there has to be some kind of throttling or ability for it to not be so buggy in that area. Because we've pulled nodes out of a cluster into maintenance mode, then brought it back up, and it tried to put workloads on that outside of a cluster. There may be something that is available for this, but it seems very kludgy to me."
"Before IBM bought it, the support was fantastic. After IBM bought it, the support became very disappointing."
"They have a long road map when we ask for certain things that will make the product better. It takes time, but that's understandable because there are other things that are higher on the priority list."
"I do not like Turbonomic's new licensing model. The previous model was pretty straightforward, whereas the new model incorporates what most of the vendors are doing now with cores and utilization. Our pricing under the new model will go up quite a bit. Before, it was pretty straightforward, easy to understand, and reasonable."
"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."
"The deployment process is a little tricky. It wasn't hard for me because I have pretty in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes, and their software runs on Kubernetes. To deploy it or upgrade it, you have to be able to follow steps and use the Kubernetes command line, or you'll need someone to come in and do it for you."
"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."
"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."
"I'm not a big fan of CloudCenter. I don't have anything against it, however, the on-premise version has been so hard to upgrade and maintain."
"Improvements are needed in UI and multi-tenancy for this solution."
"The tool should improve its security on the XDR part."
"They can add some of those features to make the platform more usable for different backgrounds and developer skills."
"They should provide an entire cloud offering, from architecture to network security features."
"You don't get all the solution's benefits if you have older switches."
"The improvement I would like to see is not one thing particular to CloudCenter. I'd say it's more of a message that the system is still using a lot of the different products and if they would all just fit better together, they all could be faster together."
"The solution needs to be more simple."
"The visualization needs some improvement because there are occasional delays while the system queries information."
"Their pricing model needs improvement."
"Cloud Insights could offer more detail when we drill down into the Azure environment."
"In a perfect world we would have something built, right out-of-the-box, that can identify what we call "noise," and reduce the amount of data. You're presented with so much data when you first start the data collectors. For example, it brings back a lot of change rates that happen just because of standard computing, like profile changes and that sort of thing. Being able to identify things like that and categorize them and strip it down—and it probably can do that, I just haven't gotten there yet—would be very beneficial."
"When I did need support because I was having problems with the solution, the first or the second line just didn't understand it. They were providing this only on a software as a service basis. So, they were asking all the wrong questions."
"The support is not very quick."
"The first level of NetApp's technical support could be improved."
"Ease of reporting is one thing that they're trying to tackle. If you have a specific set of data you want from Cloud Insights, you can ask NetApp to help you build the reports from the ground up. The dashboards are intuitive, but finding the report you want is sometimes a challenge. If you don't have the report already loaded, pulling it in and letting it build its data can be cumbersome."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
"I know there have been some issues with the billing, when the numbers were first proposed, as to how much we would save. There was a huge miscommunication on our part. Turbonomic was led to believe that we could optimize our AWS footprint, because we didn't know we couldn't. So, we were promised savings of $750,000. Then, when we came to implement Turbonomic, the developers in AWS said, "Absolutely not. You're not putting that in our environment. We can't scale down anything because they coded it." Our AWS environment is a legacy environment. It has all these old applications, where all the developers who have made it are no longer with the company. Those applications generate a ton of money for us. So, if one breaks, we are really in trouble and they didn't want to have to deal with an environment that was changing and couldn't be supported. That number went from $750,000 to about $450,000. However, that wasn't Turbonomic's fault."
"The pricing and licensing are fair. We purchase based on benchmark pricing, which we have been able to get. There are no surprise charges nor hidden fees."
"We felt the pricing was very fair for the product. It is in no way prohibitive for larger deployments, unlike other similar product on the market."
"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."
"The tool's pricing is balanced with the market."
"The solution is extremely expensive and has additional fees for things like monitoring."
"The tool's pricing is expensive."
"We are billed based on management units, so we can purchase units based on six months, twelve months, twenty-four months, or thirty-six months upfront or pay as you go depending on our requirements."
"The licensing is complex. The calculation depends on what you're ingesting. A terabyte of one product is not a terabyte of another product. Virtual machines don't equate so easily. It's all about the end-use managed units and having an easy place to reference how far those units go."
"Be aware of the capacity licensing and understand how that works, because it is based on capacity. Getting an understanding of that is the biggest thing."
"The solution's pricing is based on the device you purchase and includes support services."
"The licensing model could be improved. We love that you can use it for free for looking at NetApp products. You only need licenses to look at non-NetApp products, but as soon as you do that, you start utilizing licenses that actually would have been free in the public. So, there is a bit of an anomaly in the licensing model."
"The solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
35%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?
I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company be...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
I would like Turbonomic to add more services, especially in the cloud area. I have already told them this. They can a...
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
I mostly provide it to my clients. There are multiple reasons why they would use it depending on the client's needs a...
What do you like most about Cisco CloudCenter?
The initial setup process is straightforward.
What needs improvement with Cisco CloudCenter?
They should provide an entire cloud offering, from architecture to network security features.
What is your primary use case for Cisco CloudCenter?
We use the product for demonstration, device provisioning, and data management.
What do you like most about NetApp Cloud Insights?
NetApp Cloud Insights helps with login monitoring and troubleshooting. Previously, if we had performance concerns or ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp Cloud Insights?
The licensing is complex. The calculation depends on what you're ingesting. A terabyte of one product is not a teraby...
What needs improvement with NetApp Cloud Insights?
Ease of reporting is one thing that they're trying to tackle. If you have a specific set of data you want from Cloud ...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
CliQr, CliQr CloudCenter
No data available
 

Learn More

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Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
NTT, Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), CollabNet, Pratt & Miller, PZFlex
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Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco CloudCenter vs. NetApp Cloud Insights and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
787,061 professionals have used our research since 2012.