Cisco Intersight vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) comparison

Cisco Intersight vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

May 2023

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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

IBM Turbonomic

Mindshare comparison

Cloud Management

HCI

Featured Reviews

SubashSubbiah

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

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.

Expands well, offers great features, and gives a great inside view of all our data centers

Hussein Taha

IT Enterprise System Administrator at Nafeza

The major challenge for us and for Cisco Intersight is the upgrade process. Sometimes when we ask for the upgrade, we had to have a discussion internally with the team and with our Cisco tech engineer regarding the latest version. The current version for us was 4.52B and we were exploring the idea of moving to 2C, and they recommended going first to 2E. When we asked why they told us that version was very stable and came highly recommended. I know there is a difference between the long-term upgrade and the feature upgrade. Sometimes you need the new batches to eliminate any vulnerabilities or fix any bugs.

Ability to seamlessly transition with click of a button means we have no downtime

Sudheer Narayanan

Vice President Technology at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Any single server or one-plus-one server is very difficult to manage if there is hardware failure. But with this solution, the transition is seamless because a 10-plus-one redundancy is built into the system. With the click of a button, we can migrate the services to other servers. We have never had any downtime and we are a 24/7 operation. Production has continued, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure also helps us to optimize power utilization and the rack space used in the data center, resulting in overall energy savings. These were immediate advantages because, eight to 10 years back, this was a new technology. We tried it with our less critical operations, and we slowly introduced more production-critical workloads. Also, we were using Active Directory and other SQL databases on individual servers. We were able to consolidate them into a single database. That helps with ease of operations and enables taking backups from a single place. We migrated all our standard database structures and we don't need a cluster mechanism because the cluster or failover mechanism is built into the Nutanix architecture.

More Cisco Intersight pros

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution has a good optimization feature."

"The notifications saying, "This is a corrective action," even though some of them can be automated, are always welcome to see. They summarize your entire infrastructure and how you can better utilize it. That is the biggest feature."

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

"Turbonomic has helped optimize cloud operations and reduced our cloud costs significantly. Overall, we are at about 40 percent savings, and we spend about three million a year just in Azure. It reduces the size of the VMs, putting them into the right template for usage. People don't realize that you don't have to future-proof a virtual machine in Azure. You just need to build it for today. As the business or service grows, you can scale up or out. About 90 percent of all the costs that we've reduced has been from sizing machines appropriately."

"My favorite part of the solution is the automation scheduling. Being able to choose when actions happen, and how they happen..."

"It also brings up a list of machines and if something is under-provisioned and needs more compute power it will tell you, 'This server needs more compute power, and we suggest you raise it up to this level.' It will even automatically do it for you. In Azure, you don't have to actually go into the cloud provider to resize. You can just say, 'Apply these resizes,' and Turbonomic uses some back-end APIs to make the changes for you."

"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."

"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

"What I like most about Cisco Intersight is its manageability."

"The tool helps to manage Cisco servers."

"Intersight can validate our environment."

"I like Intersight because of the integration with HashiCorp, Kubernetes, and each cloud because Intersight is the IO module."

"The product has good integration."

"Our organization uses Cisco Intersight since it helps manage our physical infrastructure."

"Provides an overall view using a single portal."

"Scalable portfolio of services for remote device management, with good cloud integration. It's also easy to set up."

"Nutanix has several unique capabilities to ensure linear scalability."

"Technical support is okay."

"SRM capabilities for replication have been proven reliable and very useful for our organization."

"Nutanix does a superb job with technical support."

"I definitely find the reduced power consumption very valuable. Another aspect I really like, when one compares Citrix to VMware, is the interface where you talk directly to your VM from the present software."

"Some of the most valuable features of Nutanix Acropolis are that it's free from Nutanix and it's very stable."

"Karbon is a must-have as it drastically simplifies the deployment of Kubernetes."

"Being able to upgrade our entire cluster with the click of a button during business hours with zero downtime has made managing our infrastructure so easy."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pros

Cons

"If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers... Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase."

"They could add a few more reports. They could also be a bit more granular. While they have reports, sometimes it is hard to figure out what you are looking for just by looking at the date."

"The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like."

"It can be more agnostic in terms of the solutions that it provides. It can include some other cost-saving methods for the public cloud and SaaS applications as well."

"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."

"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."

"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."

"The reporting needs to be improved. It's important for us to know and be able to look back on what happened and why certain decisions were made, and we want to use a custom report for this."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"Cisco Intersight needs some improvement in terms of stability. Hybrid cloud management and proper hyperscaler tie-up are other areas for improvement."

"An area for improvement in Cisco Intersight is automation. It needs more automation capabilities. Apart from enhanced automation, I want Cisco Intersight to integrate with third-party monitoring tools in its next release."

"The usability must be better."

"More products should be made compatible with iWORK, including more software and hardware."

"The unique problem with Cisco Intersight is that it's not supporting some players."

"When new features are added, the service becomes full of bugs."

"The solution needs some enhancement in order to build the cluster in two nodes."

"The product could be easy to use."

More Cisco Intersight cons

"There is a feature that exists used for disaster recovery, but it requires an extra license. It should be included with the regular normal standard license."

"The product needs improvement in the areas of SAN attachment for high capacity and high I/O profile workloads."

"The solution has more features than required"

"I'd like it to be more API-based."

"We'd like to have more resource management."

"There is room to enhance the micro-segmentation."

"It's lacking in some features but overcompensating in others."

"As of now, Acropolis and VMware cannot talk to each other. Until we have some kind of interface, it would be much better for Nutanix if they built an interface which can talk. Otherwise, if I have a VMware stack and I already have a Nutanix stack, I create containers, I create clusters on VMware, I create clusters on Nutanix. All of these clusters cannot talk to each other. Then it has to be then subverted as a parallel execution. What happens then is that I have to work in two different environments within my data center. Practically, they are two different data centers but physically and logically, they are one. If they cannot talk to each other that creates a lot of issues. That is something which Nutanix has to develop because for Nutanix it is very simple. For example, Oracle is using a function called GoldenGate. They have a feature called GoldenGate which allows them to talk to various different environments which must really help."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Contact the Turbonomic sales team, explain your needs and what you're looking to monitor. They will get a pre-sales SE on the phone and together work up a very accurate quote."

"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."

"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."

"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."

"It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year."

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

"If you're a super-small business, it may be a little bit pricey for you... But in large, enterprise companies where money is, maybe, less of an issue, Turbonomic is not that expensive. I can't imagine why any big company would not buy it, for what it does."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"You can get a free license for monitoring but need to purchase a license if you need extra control."

"Cisco Intersight is not cheap, but it's not the most expensive product either."

"Cisco Intersight has competitive pricing. On a scale of one to five, my rating for its pricing is four."

"The product is cost-effective."

"It's just the standard licensing cost. There are no additional fees."

"It is slightly more expensive compared to a standard, on-prem, bare-metal configuration. There is about a 30 percent overhead there."

"If a customer has been using VMware, the difference in pricing is lower. However, if they are looking to use the VMware, the price can be much higher depending on the license."

"The pricing is very competitive when compared with other vendors. As long as Nutanix goes forward with the same price and same type of offering, it will definitely have a large number of customers adopting the same solution very soon."

"Nutanix Acropolis AOS price includes no additional costs for features."

"The pricing is quite good in comparison with HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Scale, and even traditional architecture."

"The licensing costs are a bit expensive but when you compare the features, it's reasonable."

"I know Nutanix and VxRail have similar prices and licenses. Nutanix is a go-ahead if AHV is used as hypervisor because it is already embedded in the price."

"Cost-wise, it is very good. It is like the hypervisor cost is not there. We only need to pay for the system and AOS licenses."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

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Managing Consultant with 51-200 employees

Aug 30, 2015

Nutanix vs. VMware EVO:RAIL vs. FlexPod

Originally posted at www.storagegaga.com/dont-get-too-drunk-on-hyper-converged/ I hate the fact that I am bursting the big bubble brewing about Hyper Convergence (HC). I urge all to look past the hot air and hype frenzy that are going on, because in the end, the HC platforms have to be aligned…

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

40%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Educational Organization

35%

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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

What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

The implementation could be enhanced.

What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?

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

What do you like most about Cisco Intersight?

Intersight can validate our environment.

What needs improvement with Cisco Intersight?

More products should be made compatible with iWORK, including more software and hardware. There is also a need to inc...

What is your primary use case for Cisco Intersight?

The most common use case was the HyperFlex deployment in the past. However, with HyperFlex being discontinued, I now ...

What is the biggest difference between Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSphere?

We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interfa...

How do I choose between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and Nutanix Acropolis AOS?

Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from ...

Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?

We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interfa...

VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Comparisons

Compared 19% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 13% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 9% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 7% of the time

VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

Cisco UCS Manager vs Cisco Intersight

Compared 45% of the time

HPE OneView vs Cisco Intersight

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs Cisco Intersight

Compared 7% of the time

Dell CloudIQ vs Cisco Intersight

Compared 6% of the time

Cisco UCS Director vs Cisco Intersight

Compared 4% of the time

More Cisco Intersight Competitors

VxRail vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 9% of the time

VMware vSphere vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 8% of the time

Hyper-V vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 7% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 7% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 6% of the time

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Competitors

Product Reports

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

IBM Turbonomic

January 2025

Download Cisco Intersight product report

Cisco Intersight

January 2025

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

December 2024

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) report

Download Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

Intersight

Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis

Learn More

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IBM

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Cisco

Nutanix

Interactive Demo

IBM

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Cisco

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Nutanix

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.

Cisco Intersight is Cisco’s systems management platform that delivers intuitive computing through cloud-powered intelligence. This platform offers a more intelligent level of management that enables IT organizations to analyze, simplify, and automate their environments in ways that were not possible with prior generations of tools. This capability empowers organizations to achieve significant savings in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and to deliver applications faster, so they can support new business initiates. The advantages of the model-based management of the Cisco UCS platform plus Cisco Intersight are extended to Cisco UCS servers and Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco HyperFlex Edge systems. Cisco HyperFlex Edge is optimized for remote sites, branch offices, and edge environments.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is a top-ranking HCI software, cloud management tool, and Software Defined Storage (SDS) tool that is marketed as the foundation for users' hybrid clouds. It offers a powerful and secure hyperconverged infrastructure to deliver all data and applications at any scale and on any cloud. The solution offers a complete software stack that allows users to unify their hybrid cloud infrastructure.

NCI’s services include computer, storage and network, hypervisors and containers, and deployment in public or in private clouds. The product also comes with built-in resilience, disaster recovery capabilities, self-healing, and high-security capacities. It provides further deployment flexibility through several software and hardware options and platforms. NCI includes a full set of enterprise capabilities. It can also be deployed on a wide range of servers from popular manufacturers.

The capabilities of the product are categorized into three main groups:

AOS storage
Flexible and open compute
Automated and secure networking

Outside of these categories, NCI also offers other capabilities:

Integrated disaster recovery
Full-stack lifecycle management
VMware with Nutanix
Intelligent operations

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Features

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers its customers various features and tools in each of the previously mentioned categories. The available features for users currently include:

High-performance: This set of features utilizes hardware advances such as NVMe and RDMA to accelerate users' most demanding applications with consistent performance. The tools in this feature category work alongside data locality to ensure successful results.
Foolproof resiliency: These Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure features protect data and keep it available by facilitating advanced distributed consistency algorithms. Users can utilize these features to protect their data from issues like bit rot, hardware failures, and even entire site failure.
Flexibility: This set of features allows storage to be sized for the needs of each organization and expanded promptly and easily so that the organization and its data can grow. The features offer flexibility to users in terms of applying storage policies logically on a pre-workload basis, instead of being tied to hardware.
Hypervisor choice: Users can choose from the leading hypervisors - Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESXi. They can also leverage the built-in hypervisor AHV that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides.
Integrated virtualization: These features offer simplified automation and AHV streamlined operations. The services in this category are optimized for high performance and reliability.
Kubernetes: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to build and deploy cloud-native applications on intelligent distributed infrastructure. Apps can be integrated with cloud-compatible storage and both building and deployment can be achieved within the same platform.
Microsegmentation: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to prevent malware spread and reduce attack surfaces by leveraging machine learning (ML).
Virtual networking: This set of features allows users to easily implement multi-tenancy in their environment or stretch networks across clouds.
Centralized network management: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides organizations with a way to manage networking configurations centrally. Users can utilize it across their human-computer interaction (HCI) environment with simple virtual switch management.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Benefits

The product offers various benefits to users who utilize its capacities. Some of these include:

NCI reduces technology sprawl and frees up technical resources to allow organizations to focus on other activities, potentially reducing costs for the business.
The product allows customers to deploy, scale, and bridge to the public cloud to be able to react in evolving business environments.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure improves data availability while simultaneously protecting it against several kinds of failures and attacks.
The solution offers high-performance, resilient distributed storage for all workloads.
Working alongside Nutanix Cloud Platform, NCI offers simple management of data from one console.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure works by the zero trust philosophy, protecting users' apps and data through specially designed security protocols.

Reviews from Real Users

According to Gerhard J., an IT manager at Q4 Fuel, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides serious reliability and stability across the entire system makes for ROI.

A solutions architect at a computer software company describes NCI as a stable, straightforward to set up, and scalable solution.

Sample Customers

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

EXMAR, RapidScale

St. Lukes Health System, the City of Seattle, Yahoo! Japan, Sligro, Empire Life, Hyundai AUS, and many others.