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Densify vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
3rd
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Cloud Analytics (1st)
Densify
Ranking in Cloud Management
32nd
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
9th
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
11th
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (13th), Cloud Analytics (2nd)
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Ranking in Cloud Management
2nd
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
4th
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
3rd
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
87
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (3rd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (5th)
 

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 Densify is 1.2%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 6.4%, up from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

SubashSubbiah - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Amit Kantia - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 1, 2023
Its most valuable feature is the ability to capture attributes in the console, but it is not a stable solution
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. Densify is not a stable tool. Every time…
Declan Fleming - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 9, 2022
We can look at all accounts with one dashboard and save a ton of money by having awareness of how we're spending
Some of the UI is a little clunky. They do listen when I tell them about this, but one thing that drives me insane is that it defaults to a cumulative view of how much you've spent, as opposed to day-to-day. Even when you've selected day-to-day, you have to turn off a cumulative switch. They've done some work on fixing that in the UI, but I don't know why they're thinking that way and why they think people would want to look at it that way. The one thing I wish it had was that it worked more closely and more cleanly with custom data inputs, which I know is a lot to ask. It could probably have a nice warning page for all the things. Not for me, not for the big administrator, but for all my users to whom I give accounts so that they can look at their own things. It would be helpful if they had a landing page that just said, "Hey, you're losing money here. You're possibly losing here or there." It expects you to have a certain amount of knowledge of what you're doing when you first come in. It does have a dashboard, but it's very esoteric. Something just right on top that says "You're bleeding cash right here," and a graphic would be nice. If I want to set up a new account, there's no API. It's all done by hand. It would help us in the deployment of new users if there was a new user API that we could call with a program, as opposed to doing it by hand. We would like to be able to report how busy our machines are so that if a machine has been sitting there idle all week, we should turn it off. Sometimes, it's not just how busy the processor was, it's also about how much RAM was being taken up when that thing was running. Often, it can run low CPU and high RAM, and we still have to keep it running because of that. There is this arcane workaround to get that to work by installing something special on the individual machines one by one. Deploying that way is very arcane. I wish there was a better way of doing that. It seems it works with CloudWatch, at least on AWS, or CloudTrail, to do it, but I don't know for sure. They probably would've done it if it was easy, but it would help a lot if, in the deployment, it also was aware of memory usage, not just CPU usage by default.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The solution has a good optimization feature."
"Turbonomic helps us right-size virtual machines to utilize the available infrastructure components available and suggest where resources should exist. We also use the predictive tool to forecast what will happen when we add additional compute-demanding virtual machines or something to the environment. It shows us how that would impact existing resources. All of that frees up time that would otherwise be spent on manual calculation."
"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 feature for optimizing VMs is the most valuable because a number of the agencies have workloads or VMs that are not really being used. Turbonomic enables us to say, 'If you combine these, or if you decide to go with a reserve instance, you will save this much.'"
"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."
"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."
"The automated memory balancing, where it looks at whether it's being used in the most efficient way and adds or takes away memory, is the best part. If it didn't do that, it would be something that I would have to do. We have too many machines for one person to do that. The automation helps me in that it is done in a really efficient way and a balanced way because of the policies. It really helps."
"I would say that the initial thing is that it provides us with a technological basis to expand capacity management beyond Excel."
"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 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."
"Densify's ability to aggregate multiple on-premise vCenters and multiple cloud accounts, gives it a level of visibility not found in many places."
"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."
"The Densify Control Console, and Environment Status."
"The Control Console provides a very easy to read dashboard of "too little/just right/too much" resources both for current data and on a historical or predictive basis."
"The ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs."
"The scripting, where you can use libraries, is a valuable feature. We don't really make the blueprints, as we have a third-party company that makes them for us. But it enables calling APIs in the blueprints. When we create a machine, we use IPAM from Infoblox and we can get an IP address. It's one platform to script and we can then use all the APIs to complete the scripts. It gives us a central management tool from which we can do a lot of things automatically."
"The tool is easy to use."
"It is a very stable solution."
"The product has helped my company to have a single point of view for managing the infrastructure, our environment, and virtualization."
"We use Calm's one-click self-service feature and it's really transforming the team's efficiency. The teams are used to being reactive, which is typical of what you find in IT organizations and service providers. Customers run into problems and teams react. What we're trying to do is reduce that slope and be more proactive in approach. The one-click ability is enabling us to take some of those activities and put them into operation, versus people manually responding."
"Using X-Play is simple. In three steps you can define things and there is also a wizard to guide you... The wizard is the simplest way to automate and the resulting automation saves us time."
"You can see the health status of the clusters in one view. There is one view of the health of your systems which helps you to have an overview any time you have a problem. You can dig into the tools that Prism Pro has to give you all the options to take on the problem. You can monitor things and manage the cluster really easily."
"The way it aggregates all the accounts and lets me do math across all the accounts, even across multiple vendors or multiple cloud providers, is valuable. The other part is Chargeback. We use that to validate our bills."
 

Cons

"The way it handles updates needs to be improved."
"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."
"We're still evaluating the solution, so I don't know enough about what I don't know. They've done a lot over the years. I used Turbonomics six or seven years ago before IBM bought them. They've matured a lot since then."
"The planning and costing areas could be a little bit more detailed. When you have more than 2,000 machines, the reports don't work properly. They need to fix it so that the reports work when you use that many virtual machines."
"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."
"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."
"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."
"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."
"Some parts of the interface are rather complex and require a bit of time to navigate, but this has never stopped us as a Densify advisor is readily available to help with our "how to" queries."
"The solution's stability is the primary concern for me."
"In terms of integration, the tool has great data. However, it's not always meaningful because the true business attributes of how most Fortune 500 companies operate are not maintaining in one tool, they're in a school of many tools."
"A closer integration to the service management processes."
"Initially we talked about some custom reporting, wherein our customer expected certain reports on a few areas, like how the storage is allocated, how the network performance is doing, and how the network utilization is happening for a virtual machine."
"Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented."
"It seems that the mechanism for integration is, it goes so far but I think there could be some standard integration to normal remedy service now etc. I think that should be out of the box."
"Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level."
"There's the split between Prism Central and Prism Element and having to know which interface I need to get into to do certain feature sets or just having to switch between those having all the feature sets available under for some central, area would be my biggest ask. They've been moving towards that more and more."
"While there are multiple clouds supported, we want less friction around the ease of delivery. We want the ability to integrate other clouds, unify the accounts."
"When we tried to migrate an application from the old cluster, we couldn't run it on Nutanix’s native hypervisor."
"If they integrated more with GPT, that would be ideal."
"You can set up DHCP but it's a little bit clunky. I wish they would streamline and centralize the management of DHCP."
"The solution's virtualization could be even better."
"Currently, users can only attach a new ISO to their VMs for a partial reinstall, but a full reinstall feature is unfortunately unavailable."
"We have had our fair share of issues while upgrading early on, but the process now is working flawlessly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"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."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"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."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"Densify has licensing setup so you can collect data without licensing. It gives you the ability to collect on everything, then choose later what you would like to license."
"Setup cost is negligible, as it scales fairly well."
"Cost is always involved, but then I feel that this solution is better than other products that we have."
"There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs."
"The pricing has been reasonable."
"For Ecuador, this is a sensitive issue. It is a small economy, so the issue of budget is very sensitive. You find many small businesses and government clients who do not renew, for example, support or guarantees, which raises the risk level for them. We are always advising them that it is necessary to renew the services or infrastructure."
"Nutanix Cloud Manager is an expensive solution."
"The price is probably right where it should be. It's not vastly expensive, and it's not too cheap. We get very good value for the price with what we're being offered with it."
"The tool is expensive."
"We have the ultimate license, so I don't know what it would cost individually."
"Nutanix has good central management tools where one guy can manage the entire system. Looking at other systems, I need a guy to manage the servers and another guy to manage the cell network and storage. I need a bigger team for other solutions compared to Nutanix where I can use a small team and reduce my operations to manage the cluster. Sometimes what you hear with this solution is, "It is so expensive," but the cost and benefits that Nutanix has inside are really good."
"Its acquisition and support cost is nominal. It is not too high, and it is not too low. It is within the budget, and there are no issues on that part."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
29%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
8%
Computer Software Company
39%
Educational Organization
20%
Financial Services Firm
5%
Manufacturing Company
4%
 

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...
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 Densify?
The solution's tech support is excellent.
What needs improvement with Densify?
Densify is not a stable tool. Every time the support gets investigated, it takes much time to get refreshed.
What is your primary use case for Densify?
We are using Densify to produce reports and to get recommendations that can contribute to the area of our expertise.
Which set of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) features do you find to be the most useful?
For me, the features related to cost savings are the best part of NCM. Of course, the whole product is worth using an...
Are the setup process and further maintenance of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) difficult?
When I came into my current organization, NCM was already set up. According to the team that dealt with it, the produ...
Is Nutanix Cloud Manager’s Intelligent Operations feature effective?
Yes, this is a highly effective feature and the rebranding only made things better as they introduced more improvemen...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
No data available
Nutanix Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations, Nutanix Cloud Manager Self-Service, Nutanix Cloud Management Cost Governance, Nutanix Cloud Manager Security Central
 

Learn More

Video not available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
AIG, Bank of America, Cigna, Citi
JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
Find out what your peers are saying about Densify vs. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.