We leverage Supply and Demand Planning for Virtual Infrastructure to assist in proactive management of resources. By having a realistic forecast of available resources over intervals such as 90 days, six months and one year, we are able to make budget allocations earlier and with more precision.
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.
Densify provides our organization with usable recommendations for resizing VM's to optimize its use of resources. It has made the ongoing task of curating hundreds of VM's a much less manual effort.
It has also provided us with impartial and objective justification for resource changes, which is very valuable when working with teams who assume that more is better and faster.
Our team recently had to decide on what approach to take to a hardware refresh of a VMware cluster. We were able to feed several scenarios into Densify and provide a day zero and one year view of what our different options would provide us in terms of capacity. It made the design decisions and discussions regarding purchasing much easier.
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.
Since March 2017.
Our deployment was extremely easy and non-disruptive. The installation of the data collector was simple, and adding each data source was done through a wizard that validated connectivity and authentication before completion.
We have encountered very infrequent issues with connectivity to one VMware cluster to collect performance data. This could possibly be due to an internal issue rather than the product.
We have not encountered any scalability issues. Over the past months, we have ramped up to managing seven on-premise clusters plus two cloud instances, consisting of over 950 guests.
We have received great customer service. The Densify staff have been responsive to both support and feature requests.
The technical support staff have been very helpful. We have received prompt and knowledgeable response to our queries.
We previously used Turbonomic, but found it was over simplified in its filters and viewing current state rather than statistical analysis, and was disruptive when set to automated migration.
We opted for Densify because it makes allowances for brief anomalies and provides recommendations based on sustained shortages or unused resources.
The initial setup was very straightforward for connection to on-premise systems. Connection to cloud resources was somewhat more challenging because it involved manually performing user setup on the cloud provider's console. We had a remote session with Densify when doing this part of the work and setup each cloud instance in about half an hour.
We implemented primarily through an in-house team with the vendor engaged, as needed, to answer questions. The vendor showed a high-level of expertise, not only about their product, but about the platforms being managed.
It is too early to have hard numbers for the ROI. However, in the first few months, we have been able to change VM allocations and avoid the purchase of two VMware hosts, and have avoided the workload of performing the analytics which would have required an increase in head count.
There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs. It provides analytics as a service, which you use to decide what recommendations to act on and how.
We had already evaluated Turbonomic and abandoned it. We looked at other market offerings but did not perform in-house evaluations of them.
Using the reports from Densify will provide us with the "trusted advisor" backing for our own purchase and provisioning decisions.
Though not currently a large user of cloud resources, we are already able to use this to compare the costs of creating new workload at various locations.
