Densify Reviews

The features and capabilities which we are using right now that are driving the most value are the analytics within the public cloud. If we go out and optimize workloads internally, we get greater density, more use out of our assets, but there's not a real financial savings in terms of green dollars, maybe cost deferrals, and things of that nature.

If I know a VM is running hot or has too many resources, I do not necessarily know if this is production or nonproduction, or if it supports a critical revenue generating application vs a sunset application that has little business value, etc. Integrating ITSM/EA applications with Densify data is extremely powerful and provides true business context. As this is communicated to leadership, we stop talking in terms of a VM or cluster and now about the risk/opportunity of the business service.

For the public cloud, it's green dollars from day one. If we can go out and if we're paying, as an example, a $100 a month to Amazon and we're able to right size or modernize the workload and we're able to save $50 a month, that's true $50 of savings back to us.

In terms of reducing risk, the way the product works is that it pulls in utilization data and then based on the analytics coming out of product, will give us recommendations. We'll then review those recommendations, validate them, and we vet them internally. We then work with application owners. If there are risks in the environment, meaning that the incidence does not have enough resources, we're going to see performance issues from an application perspective. That is going to impact our overall workflow as our end users are going out there and using tools and application internally.

One example would be going out there and reducing overall risk in performance issues. Another example would be, as I mentioned before, if we over provision or over allocate resources to instances where what we're getting is the performance we require, however, we're overpaying for those resources. It's no different then, if you or I go out to Verizon or AT&T and ask for 10,000 minutes a month and we only use 300. The tool will come back and tell us that we can operate with 1,000 minutes as an example, save 90% on the contractual rate and not run into any issues. That's where we're really using that product today.

Densify's ability to aggregate multiple on-premise vCenters and multiple cloud accounts, gives it a level of visibility not found in many places. Outside the obvious capacity recommendations and optimizations, the filtering and views provided by this aggregation have been invaluable.

Because of the placement optimizations, our organization has seen fewer incidents of poor performance due to resource contention.

We are using Densify to produce reports and to get recommendations that can contribute to the area of our expertise.

The solution’s most valuable feature is the ability to capture attributes in the console. It is generally not available in other tools.

I think it's going to form quite a key element within a number of areas for deployment, deployment release, change management, and for managing our test environments. I have a lot of ideas how we can incorporate the technology with integration to our other systems to leverage what we have and what they deliver.

I would say that the initial thing is that it provides us with a technological basis to expand capacity management beyond Excel. It provides the basis that we can springboard off to achieve areas we could only hope for before.

The features which are most important:

• The ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs.
• The features to identify risk or bottle necks in my environment that help me avoid operational incidents.
• Lastly, the feature to do the personnel management and resource planning for my forecast and outlook of the incoming workload.

The first benefit (of improving density) helps with my operational budget; it has given me the ability to reduce my capital expense for supporting existing workloads as well as future workloads.

The benefit to identity risk really helps avoid potential problems which could eventually result in outage or service degradation inside of applications.

Control Console and Reservation Console.

The Control Console is an incredible way to give a quick view of current capacity utilization allowing technical people to drill down quickly and allowing business/management people to get a quick overview of the environment.

The Reservation Console is excellent for new incoming demand to determine placement. These two features seem as though they will have continual functionality into the foreseeable future and can improve processes while saving substantial time.

This product has provided us with a more comprehensive solution that is now replacing nearly all other tools which were previously used in the different platforms and environments within the account. Allowing for homogeneous processes and functionality, streamlining the overall work conducted. Previously, people would have to understand multiple tools to be able to cross platforms, which is no longer the case.

The Densify Control Console, and Environment Status.

Our team used to spend days to gather data via MS Excel to prepare reports. The Densify Control Console has the recommendations ready on the fly, based on the policies set in the background.

Our team members are now spending more productive time on other priorities and are handling much more effective tasks. Our customer has a direct interface to Densify and can access the console whenever they have any queries about the capacity while dealing with performance issues.

There a lot of good features. One would be the automatic rebalancing of the environment. That was one feature which helped. With that, we could improve our efficiency of our VMware infrastructure.

The second thing is analyzing the workload factors of each and every virtual machine, and then build on the analyzing workload patents. Densify helped us to improve the performance of the software by changing the configuration, like a bump-up or a bump-down of the infrastructure. This, again, helps improve customer satisfaction, if the VM is poorly configured, from a CPU memory or a storage point of view.

And it also helped if this particular working machine is oversized and is not utilizing the resources which are allocated to it. We could bump down the configuration, and thereby improve our efficiency and the capacity management of our environment, so those were the key things.

Plus, the overall recording mechanism is a positive.

Then, when we started with this product, we were in a project deployment model, or rather we were ramping up the infrastructure. We were migrating products from the current workload to the new workload. And one of the features that helped us was to understand the capacity based on the incoming workload. So, we were able to model the incoming workload into the infrastructure and identify how the environment would look after the new workload was added into. So Densify was able to help us with modeling and resource planning.

It simply helps me analyze my infrastructure relatively easily. The data that we get from it is very phenomenal. It also gives us the ability to look at the future modeling of our environment, which helps in terms of planning the capacity, planning. If our workload is going down, we can reduce our infrastructure baseline. If the workload is increasing, we can increase the baseline, and it helps us define that. Also, it helps us optimize the overall infrastructure.

Densify works basically on the VMware infrastructure optimization and we have the VMware infrastructure in place. Our motive was to perform at capacity management, as well as the optimization of our infrastructure. So, in that sense, Densify helped us to properly identify bottlenecks and improve the overall performance and optimization of our environment.