CloudSphere vs VxRail comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between CloudSphere and VxRail based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

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Buyer's Guide

Cloud Migration

June 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic

Featured Reviews

reviewer1687299

private cloud team at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Jan 19, 2024

Excels in providing stability, efficient resource optimization, and cost savings at the infrastructure layer, with minimal maintenance requirements

It offers visibility and analytics for monitoring performance across our environment, starting from the application layer and extending down the stack to the underlying infrastructure resources. Specifically, it concentrates on optimizing memory and CPU resources as part of our focus on hardware and environment optimization, without delving into additional aspects. There was a single project where it helped us reduce the size of hundreds of VMs. This represents the only example with which I am familiar. It's important to note that optimizing the monitoring of our private cloud is not the primary function of this tool. It is specifically utilized for optimization purposes. We employ it for tasks such as trending predictions and VM utilization performance. However, for monitoring, we rely on a completely different tool. It has resulted in cost savings, specifically at the infrastructure layer.

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Vibhor Gupta

Migration Customer Solution Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Aug 1, 2022

Great discovery, good support, and generally reliable

The area they need to focus most on is the capability of assessment and the landing zones. It’s lacking right now. Cloud transformation has four to five cases, including planning, discovery, assessment, and the MVC, which is called the minimal viable cloud. That comes with the architecture design or landing zone creation, where we will create resources on the cloud which we are provisioning. If we are moving onto the cloud platform, AWS, or zero GCP, we need an account. We need resources to be able to compute the network. Most organizations have their landing zone process and know how to create the resources account, compute the network layer and the security layer. However, this landing zone creation is not there in CloudSphere as a feature. It cannot create any of the cloud providers' accounts or their network security computing as a part of the orchestration layer. That orchestration layer is missing in this product. It will not discover all the applications, although they also have the catalog. They are constantly announcing their catalog to identify applications based on the service which we are discovering. 50% of the time, the application will discover automatically. However, for the other 50%, we need to find the application based on its running process. That's the automation method that we need to follow and that they call blueprint. We need to create those blueprints and then we need to tag those applications. That is the one process that takes time when we do the discovery. One of the cons of this product is that it will not discover all the applications running. It will not discover SAP or some kinds of applications that are running on those inside the application of the servers as well. When we start the scanning of, for example, 500 servers, it will not handle the scan. We need to differentiate the jobs - for example, one job for 100 servers, a second job for another 100 servers, et cetera. We cannot scan the 1,000 servers together. That causes it to take time. There’s a graph missing. It shows where all the servers have interdependencies; however, when we do actual work, it will not work properly in terms of what we present to the customer.

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reviewer2339115

Ingeniero compare at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Jan 31, 2024

Movement of devices is easy, but the support is a bit unsatisfactory

We are a little unhappy with the last five nodes that we have bought because we have had them for less than one year, but the power supply already burned out, and three network cards from three different nodes had to be changed. With the other seven nodes, we were more or less happy because the only failure they had was the CMOS battery. There were some small issues, but with these last ones, we are a little dissatisfied. Their support team is always very willing to help, but in the end, we are not 100% satisfied. To give you an idea, we have, for example, four support cases open for which we still do not know what the solution is. One of the cases is that we have a cabin through a Unity node, which is also Dell’s, but the other nodes have zero visibility with the cabin. The only solution that we have been told is to eliminate or clean all the network units that are placed there, which is a drastic solution involving the loss of service, so we are a little dissatisfied with that solution. Their support is very receptive. Our customers try to quickly raise the incident, and we try to open the cases quickly as well. To be fair, someone from the support team contacts you quickly, but it takes too long for them to find the solution. For this reason, we are a little dissatisfied. VxRail has the ability to consolidate infrastructure from multiple locations. It is a fundamental part. Especially for geographical redundancy, it is furthermore necessary and mandatory. In terms of VxRail’s ability to simplify our management of VMware, simplifying VMware management is impossible. VxRail consumes a lot of energy. The rack we have has seven nodes and then it has a cabin and more features. In the end, it consumes a lot of energy, but it is normal. They are working 24/7 after all. When it comes to reduction in unplanned production downtime, because we have seven redundant nodes, it is hard to know if VxRail is helping to reduce unplanned production downtime. If we had only one or two nodes, the experience would be different because then the node would have been active 24/7, but this is not the case. Because we have seven nodes, we have everything redundant. At the moment, VxRail has not had any effect on the flexibility of our operations or business. VxRail has also not had any impact on our organization’s sustainability goals because we do not have any sustainability goals.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."

"With Turbonomic, we were able to reduce our ESX cluster size and save money on our maintenance and license renewals. It saved us around $75,000 per year but it's a one-time reduction in VMware licensing. We don't renew the support. The ongoing savings is probably $50,000 to $75,000 a year, but there was a one-time of $200,000 plus."

"The recommendation of the family types is a huge help because it has saved us a lot of money. We use it primarily for that. Another thing that Turbonomic provides us with is a single platform that manages the full application stack and that's something I really like."

"The proactive monitoring of all our open enrollment applications has improved our organization. We have used it to size applications that we are moving to the cloud. Therefore, when we move them out there, we have them appropriately sized. We use it for reporting to current application owners, showing them where they are wasting money. There are easy things to find for an application, e.g., they decommissioned the server, but they never took care of the storage. Without a tool like this, that storage would just sit there forever, with us getting billed for it."

"Before implementing Turbonomic, we had difficulty reaching a consensus about VM placement and sizing. Everybody's opinion was wrong, including mine. The application developers, implementers, and infrastructure team could never decide the appropriate size of a virtual machine. I always made the machines small, and they always made them too big. We were both probably wrong."

"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."

"We have a system where our developers automate machine builds, and that is constantly running out of resources. Turbonomic helps us with that, so I don't have to keep buying hardware. The developers always say, "They don't have enough. They don't have enough. They don't have enough," when they just configured it improperly. Therefore, Turbonomic helps us identify configuration issues on their side so it doesn't cost me money on the other end to buy resources that I don't really need."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"Provides multiple kinds of services for managing the clouds of multiple customers."

"When I started using CloudSphere, it wasn't mature, and it had multiple issues. For example, my team experienced server issues while using the solution, but recently, I noticed how much CloudSphere has improved. There used to be some latency issues with CloudSphere. It even gave error messages in the past when you select an option such as "the web server is not responding", but it has improved a lot, and now I don't get any errors from CloudSphere. What I like best about CloudSphere is that it has a lot of beneficial features, and it has a single pane for managing multi-cloud environments, which I find very helpful, and it's the main benefit you can get from CloudSphere."

"For the customers I work with, it provides flexibility as far as storage is concerned, so it's security and access."

"We do not need to install any appliances or any agents."

"The product is helpful for the management, optimization, and utilization of resources."

"The VxRail is built on two specific platforms that have been in the industry for the last 15 to 20 years: the 1-U socket and the 2-U socket platforms from Dell. They're in their sixteenth generation of those platforms, I believe, so they're very stable."

"You don't have to worry too much about the hardware and you don't have to work on integrating a storage device. We instead have this as an all-in-one solution and everything is available as a box."

"VxRail simplifies IT infrastructure management by providing a single management console for compute, storage, and network. The second advantage is that VxRail offers a continuously validated architecture from the OEM. This means that Dell thoroughly tests all firmware updates before being released or installed on the product, helping to prevent compatibility issues. The third benefit is its ten-year roadmap. Dell consistently announces a roadmap for the product spanning the next decade."

"VxRail's integration with VMware environments is very good. Our VxRail is built on VMware, and the integration is seamless. We haven't faced any challenges. We can migrate VMs between servers in real-time and replicate them to our DR site without any problems."

"A valuable feature of the solution is that it allows everything to be integrated into a single model, comprised of hardware and software."

"I have found the vSAN is highly flexible. The documentation is good and the interface of the solution is responsive and fast. The interface has everything you need to manage the solution, such as the VxRail and VMware integration. You can manage the hardware from within the VMware plasma pan."

"like VxRail because it's fully integrated. The other hyperconverged solutions are also well integrated. They are all highly similar to each other in that regard. But we prefer VxRail for its physical integrations or lifecycle management. It also has vCenter, which integrates the hardware lifecycle management."

"The initial setup was very easy."

More VxRail 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."

"We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps."

"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."

"The way it handles updates needs to be improved."

"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."

"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."

"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 GUI and policy creation have room for improvement. There should be a better view of some of the numbers that are provided and easier to access. And policy creation should have it easier to identify groups."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"The main issue I experienced from CloudSphere was recently resolved, but an area for improvement in the solution is that it lacks the functionality of migrating resources from one public cloud to another. If CloudSphere could provide that functionality, that would be very beneficial to users and companies."

"The solution must have a single management console for the resources and VMs."

"When we start the scanning of, for example, 500 servers, it will not handle the scan. We need to differentiate the jobs - for example, one job for 100 servers, a second job for another 100 servers, et cetera."

"There are quite a number of services that can't be deployed using CloudSphere."

"The next feature I would like to have full disclosure of what's being done with the data."

"The tool needs to improve its price."

"It would be nice if the update process was shortened and that patching would be simpler."

"I would like to see VxRail add duplication features to its hybrid solution."

"The solution is okay to scale vertically but a bit difficult to expend horizontally. For example, increasing RAM."

"You have to buy a new server if you want to scale up."

"If we could have some out of the box ideas in integration, I think that would be a great feature."

"We spend around six months waiting for a confirmation and firmware upgrade to confirm this step."

"Its price needs to be improved. It is very expensive. NSX should be licensed together. It will make the network virtualization layer more usable. It would be better if they come together in a bundle, not separately."

More VxRail cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."

"I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools."

"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."

"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."

"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."

"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"The product is very expensive."

"It depends on how that model will be used. It might be anywhere between $4 and $15 per license per month. It’s less expensive than other options."

"VxRail is quite expensive and could be cheaper. I would say that the main difference between VxRail and the competition is cost. There may be some differences in features, but I would say that it's mainly the costs."

"The price is a little bit on the higher side but the system and management are so quick and easy that it's worth it for the customer."

"Fees vary by license type."

"The price is good."

"Compare the VxRail product to Nutanix. Nutanix has more features, but its pricing is higher."

"We were expecting Dell EMC to bring us something that would work very quickly and easily, but also be at a reasonable price point, and they did."

"VxRail is expensive because it's based on VMware and V-SAN. The price is not the cheapest. The technical support is expensive, but it is a good service."

"The licensing costs can vary depending on the number of processors and specific requirements, which may result in considerable expenses."

More VxRail pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Comms Service Provider

University

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

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What do you like most about CloudSphere?

The product is helpful for the management, optimization, and utilization of resources.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for CloudSphere?

I use the solution for our hyper-converged infrastructure within the organization for hospital management. We also ac...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering CloudSphere?

We have a FortiGate license. The product is very good. The technical support is also very good. If the solution provi...

See all answers

How does HPE Nimble Storage compare to VxRail?

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Vs. VxRail One of the best things about the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is the three, two, one, z...

See all answers

What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?

While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an e...

See all answers

What are the major differences between VxRail and Dell EMC PowerFlex?

VxRail vs. Dell EMC PowerFlex VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not bein...

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Comparisons

VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 20% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 12% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 10% of the time

VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 8% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 7% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

SkyKick Cloud Manager vs CloudSphere

Compared 52% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs CloudSphere

Compared 48% of the time

More CloudSphere Competitors

Dell PowerFlex vs VxRail

Compared 25% of the time

VMware vSAN vs VxRail

Compared 24% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VxRail

Compared 18% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs VxRail

Compared 7% of the time

HPE Hyper Converged vs VxRail

Compared 5% of the time

More VxRail Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

June 2024

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

CloudSphere

June 2024

Download CloudSphere product report

Buyer's Guide

VxRail

May 2024

Download VxRail product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

HyperCloud

VCE VxRail

Learn More

Video not available

IBM

CloudSphere

Dell Technologies

Interactive Demo

IBM

Demo not available

CloudSphere

Demo not available

Dell Technologies

Overview

IBM Turbonomic is a performance and cost optimization platform for public, private, and hybrid clouds used by customers to assure application performance while eliminating inefficiencies by dynamically resourcing applications through automated actions. Common use cases include cloud cost optimization, cloud migration planning, data center modernization, FinOps acceleration, Kubernetes optimization, sustainable IT, and application resource management. 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. Ready to take a closer look? Explore the interactive demo or start your free 30-day trial today!

CloudSphere is an intelligent cloud management platform that enables organizations to plan, optimize, secure, and scale their cloud adoption. The platform has three solutions to help organizations manage dynamic, multi-cloud environments, including cloud migration planning, cloud cost management, and cloud security posture management. By using application intelligence (AI), the platform is able to discover and collect all of the data points that collectively define an application across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments. Because the solution is very scalable, it can accommodate companies of all sizes.

The CloudSphere solution is ideal for:

SMBs
Enterprises
Government
ISVs
Managed service providers

CloudSphere Product Highlights

CloudSphere has a unique data science approach to hybrid and multi-cloud cyber asset management that offers the only solution to automate the discovery and creation of a top-down, application-level graphical view of your organization’s cyber assets.

With its continuous application graphing, CloudSphere can save countless hours and provides the visibility to optimize your IT environment without triggering unforeseen business risks or disrupting other applications.

The platform’s visualization capabilities accelerate cloud migration, transformation, and modernization initiatives with real-time insights and optimization recommendations.

CloudSphere’s security posture monitoring minimizes cyber security exposure and reduces risk from misconfigurations.

Automating compliance monitoring for corporate policies and key industry standards makes reporting extremely easy. The solution’s context-aware policy engine builds on the platform’s continuous visibility capabilities to display real-time compliance status and reports.

CloudSphere Features

CloudSphere has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Access controls/permissions
Billing
Provisioning
Capacity analytics
Cost management
Demand monitoring
Multi-cloud management
Performance analysis
Service level agreement (SLA) management
Workflow approval

CloudSphere Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing CloudSphere. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Reduce migration risk: With CloudSphere, you can migrate complex applications with agentless discovery of application interdependencies while optimizing for both cost and performance.

Manage your budget more efficiently: CloudSphere generates reports and provides alerts for cloud spend by group, department, project, or individual so you can keep your organization’s budgets on track.

Access controls: With CloudSphere’s visual maps, identity and access data is displayed to show who has access to key cloud resources.

Minimize attacks: The solution helps your organization establish better security and minimize cloud attack surface and your exposure window by using customizable risk scoring, remediation recommendations, and integration with 3rd-party reporting tools.

Ensure compliance: CloudSphere allows you to control cloud security risks and ensure compliance in complex hybrid and multi-cloud deployments with real-time visibility, continuous configuration monitoring, and user controlled auto remediation capabilities.

Comprehensive end-to-end view of your applications: CloudSphere gives you a comprehensive end-to-end view of your applications, regardless of your apps’ complexity, in order to provide optimization and accuracy throughout the migration process.

Policy-driven controls for cloud spending: The CloudSphere platform provides policy-driven controls for cloud spending along with visibility so you can properly budget for cloud usage and tie cloud infrastructure spending to business outcomes. The solution enables you to set and track budgets, configure alerts, allows users to take corrective action from trend reports, and helps you optimize cloud spending with continuous resource monitoring and rightsizing suggestions.

VxRail is a hyper-converged appliance based on VMware virtual SAN Software and is jointly engineered and built with VMware, for VMware, to enhance Vmware. VxRail software-defined architecture simplifies compute, storage, virtualization, and management. It will safeguard performance, reliability, and flexibility across your organization with a broad range of workloads and applications from business-critical to next-gen. With VxRail, you are covered.

VxRail is a single turn-key appliance that is a validated, fully integrated, pre-configured, pre-tested solution and offers non-disruptive scaling. Every node includes compute storage and IO. All-flash configurations can contain between 12-28 cores per node. The storage capacity options run from 7.6 TB to 19TB with either 256 GB or 512GB of memory. Hybrid appliances may have 6-20 cores per node, 3.6 TB to 10 TB of storage capacity, and 24GB to 256 GB of memory.

VxRail offers high availability fail-over, an active/active stretch cluster, and VSan Kernal integration. VxRail is a power-edged server with APIs built on automation. There are over 15 million different combinations of hardware available with VxRail. VxRail provides a simple, cost-effective solution that solves a large range of use cases. Additionally, you also get a mixed workloads automated system that is backed with fully automated system updates, and complete end-to-end lifecycle management all in a single two-rack appliance.

VxRail is a value-added suitable solution for distributed small to mid-sized enterprises, remote offices, private clouds, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). You choose the deployment option that best suits your organizational needs, from appliance to integrated rack offerings, with or without networking, and it will be delivered to you, ready to deploy out-of-box.

If you know VMware, you know VxRail.

VxRail Features and Benefits

Seamlessly accelerate deployment to a hybrid cloud
Fast data center modernization
Create developer-ready Kubernetes platforms

Powerful performance and reliability
Improve and simplify operational efficiency
Excellent integration
Save time
Reduce costs

Reviews from Real Users

VxRail is an all-in-one solution: "You don't have to worry too much about the hardware and you don't have to work on integrating a storage device. We instead have this as an all-in-one solution and everything is available as a box."

VxRail is remarkable: “The cover points feature in VxRail is remarkable. It's unique. It has an intervention failover system as well as an automatic failover system, reaching clusters existing in VxRail…”

VxRail is a powerful performer: “...VxRail delivers a very high number of IOPS for a hybrid configuration or an all-flash configuration. The processors that are available in the Xeon family are very powerful. They are multi-core with typically 2 gigahertz, 2.4 gigahertz, or higher frequency, so the performance is very much appreciated.”

Sample Customers

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

Affymetrix, Bell Helicopter, Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe, Porterville Unified School District, Interact for Health, VirtueCom, Warren Memorial Hospital, Front Porch, RMH Group, Meyers Nave, Intraworks, Information Technology, ETTE, Clackamas Community College

World Wide Technology Inc, Renault Sport Formula One Team, 8x8 Inc, Brownes, Canadian Pacific, Canopy, Denton, EDF, Unilin, Xerox

Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp, Zerto, Nasuni and others in Cloud Migration. Updated: June 2024.

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