CloudStack vs Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure comparison

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between CloudStack and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cloud Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed CloudStack vs. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure Report (Updated: May 2024).

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure

May 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic

Market share comparison

As of June 2024, in the Cloud Management category, the market share of IBM Turbonomic is 7.2% and it decreased by 7.0% compared to the previous year. The market share of CloudStack is 5.6% and it increased by 37.4% compared to the previous year. The market share of Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is 1.9% and it increased by Infinity% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Unique Categories:

Cloud Migration

12.9%

Virtualization Management Tools

14.6%

No other categories found

HCI

3.2%

Featured Reviews

Nicholas Diesel

Solution Architect DC at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

Feb 5, 2024

An easy-to-use and stable solution for good visibility

Turbonomic provides visibility and analytics into an environment’s performance. The visibility and analytics help bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams, such as Applications and Infrastructure. Having this visibility, specifically for cloud optimization, is extremely important This has helped reduce our mean time to resolution (MTTR). On average there is about a 10% to 20% reduction, but it can be up to 60%. Turbonomic has shortened application response time. It has made them more agile. It's very good for optimizing the monitoring of the public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and/or Kubernetes. There are some health tools. It is extremely good for that. It is good for our clients to have visibility. It helps to have a complete view of what is going on. Their automation has helped engineers focus on innovation and ongoing modernization projects. It has saved us about 30% of our work time. Having visibility for particular solutions helped resolve issues, troubleshoot the management of clusters, and so on. It helped to reallocate resources to other parts of the business. Our clients have seen about 10%-20% of savings from utilizing Turbonomic.

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Marco Sinhoreli

Technical Marketing Manager at ShapeBlue

Nov 6, 2022

Low complexity cloud management with ever-improving Kubernetes integration

We recognize that CloudStack is an easy-to-use cloud management platform and, in my opinion, there have been a lot of improvements in the past few years, particular when it comes to the modern UI and overall ease of management. However, I believe that CloudStack needs to grow their marketing in the commercial side. They don't have a great piece of market share right now. For now, we have two versions per year, one being the LTS (Long Term Support) version, and the other is just for development. It's a very good platform for us at the moment, but one feature I would like to see is CloudStack for edge zones. This would enable us to use it for cloud edge computing, as well as enable search providers to use it to provide cloud service in edge zones, for example.

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Shahzad-Ahmed

Engineer, System Admin at ebm

Jan 3, 2024

Low cost appliance, good UI, only good for on-premises VM infrastructure.

We were look for less expensive virtualization solution that can accommodate our VM workload and provide virtualized storage as well. Our old environment consisted to multiple SAN storage devices. Maintenance such equipment is very costly and requires a separate in network infrastructure. We wanted…

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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 only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance."

"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 like that Turbonomic shows application metrics and estimates the impact of taking a suggested action. It provides us a map of resource utilization as part of its recommendation. We evaluate and compare that to what we think would be appropriate from a human perspective to that what Turbonomic is doing, then take the best action going forward."

"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 system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications."

"The tool provides the ability to look at the consumption utilization over a period of time and determine if we need to change that resource allocation based on the actual workload consumption, as opposed to how IT has configured it. Therefore, we have come to realize that a lot of our workloads are overprovisioned, and we are spending more money in the public cloud than we need to."

"In our organization, optimizing application performance is a continuous process that is beyond human scale. We would not be able to do the number of actions that Turbonomic takes on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It is humanly impossible with the little micro adjustments that it can make. That is a huge differentiator. If you just figure each action could take anywhere very conservatively from five to 10 minutes to act upon, then you multiply that out by thousands of actions every month, it is easily something where you could say, "I am saving a couple of FTEs.""

"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

"CloudStack supports every operating system that supports hypervisors, which makes the product more attractive, compared to vCloud Director or Azure."

"Killer features for me were: support for many hypervisors, ability to match business logic, "everything in one box," available APIs."

"CloudStack’s private gateway networking feature is what enables us to offer utmost security and confidentially to our customers and partners, by enabling them to connect to their virtual data centers via dedicated, encrypted, private fiber lines that never touch the public internet space. Ease of setup and management are certainly important additional benefits for us on the engineering team."

"It has become easy to deploy new devices with no or minimal hardware changes. Now, a user can be ready to use a firewall within a few minutes, as compared to the traditional physical model which involved purchase, shipping, hardware configuration, cabling, power, etc."

"It is very easy to install and manage. It has the all modules in one node, unlike other software (OpenStack). The product allows a customized look and feel, and the ability to add custom workflows."

"CloudStack is simple to stand up and get off the ground in a hurry. Its centralized design allows for easier troubleshooting when compared to OpenStack. Out of the box, it’s very well suited for white labeling and IaaS."

"We like the virtualization capabilities."

"The most valuable feature from my point of view is access to environment via console through separate browser window."

More CloudStack pros

"It is a smart solution for virtualization"

"Sangfor has many solutions, and you can easily manage their machine servers with just one management. They're always striving for greatness, and they continuously update their products. For example, they have now built endpoint security within the firewall. They are continuously improving not only the security but also all other products."

"The most valuable feature is the three nodes and the free hypervisor."

"The manageability feature is the most important aspect of the solution."

"It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten... Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"It is flexible like a hyper-convergence system. You can add nodes, and you can scale to have better performance and stability. I also like the backup feature, the recovery system, and the web interface GUI to handle everything."

"The initial setup isn't hard."

"Very user-friendly and simple."

More Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure pros

Cons

"I would like Turbonomic to add more services, especially in the cloud area. I have already told them this. They can add Azure NetApp Files. They can add Azure Blob storage. They have already added Azure App service, but they can do more."

"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."

"I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge."

"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."

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

"While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training."

"There is an opportunity for improvement with some of Turbonomic's permissions internally for role-based access control. We would like the ability to come up with some customized permissions or scope permissions a bit differently than the product provides."

"Recovering resources when they're not needed is not as optimized as it could be."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"The area of improvement could be the regionalization aspect. For example, managing multiple regions or HubStack deployments together was not thought out thoroughly in the versions I used. We faced issues around managing the global infrastructure and had to develop around it."

"We did encounter issues with stability, and the main issue was secondary storage. When it is not available, XenServers and hypervisors are affected. And CS doesn’t do anything to reboot, or fix. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn’t, considering their approach – CS just orchestrates everything else on the hypervisor and storage level."

"My teammates have complained about the upgrade. The source code had massive files that had to be merged with our own development to upgrade to the latest version of CloudStack. It was quite painful for them. CloudStack could add some cost management tools to give me some control over the costs associated with the number of users of my services."

"The user can't upload SSH keys from the UI. We have to use the API for this, and it is not always convenient."

"VPN P2S is cutting all connections except the CloudStack environment for the user when he is connected. I would like to have VPN like Cisco's AnyConnect."

"The area of Apache CloudStack that could stand the most improvement is the functionality/features around the virtual routers. They can be somewhat cumbersome to deal with at times and are the least stable piece of the product."

"Lack of support for third-party software vendors such as Veeam and Zerto creates limitations on comprehensive offerings which would include backup and disaster recovery."

"It would be a good to have more specific error messages within administration processes (e.g. problem with creating new instance)."

More CloudStack cons

"The migration process could be easier."

"The interface could be a little bit better."

"We have had issues while integrating VMware with Sangfor HCI. The tool should be also faster in terms of customization."

"Sangfor HCI could be improved with certification and the right ecosystem for ISVs like Oracle and SAP."

"The solution could improve by including backup capabilities."

"Sangfor does not support a SAS configuration, which is something that we would like."

"The processing speed and cost should be improved."

"One question that has come up frequently in the last week is whether or not the renewal cost for Sangfor's HCI solution is too high."

More Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."

"When we have expanded our licensing, it has always been easy to make an ROI-based decision. So, it's reasonably priced. We would like to have it cheaper, but we get more benefit from it than we pay for it. At the end of the day, that's all you can hope for."

"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."

"I consider the pricing to be high."

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

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

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"The solution is open-source and free."

"There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services."

"The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase."

"It is a 100% open-source solution needing just an Apache license. Also, there are no hidden fees to be paid."

"Give an effort to planning. If possible, contract a specialized consultant company for the initial setup and knowledge transfer."

"CloudStack is an open source solution, so you don't need to pay anything for it. When our company develops something specially for CloudStack, it is donated to the Apache Software Foundation and provided to anyone that wants to use it."

"As far as I know, CS is still free of charge. If you want to pay some money, Citrix Cloud Platform is based on CS, I think. As for hypervisors – everything as usual, you need to pay for VMware and vCenter. As for XenServer, recently they changed the free feature list, so you may need to pay some money to get useful features like XenMotion."

"CloudStack is an open-source product."

"I would say its pricing is between cheap and reasonable and would rate it as three out of five."

"The tool’s pricing is better when compared to VMware or Nutanix. The product’s licensing is on a yearly basis."

"The solution is very cheap."

"The solution is affordable."

"Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is a reasonably priced product."

"It is in the middle range as compared to other hyper-converged infrastructure solutions. There is a three-year warranty on the hardware. The license also includes other features. Sangfor has included Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and a built-in firewall with the license. Other top brands, such as VxRail and VMware, require a separate license for such features."

"The solution has a good initial cost but a high renewal cost."

"The solution is on-premise which does not have a subscription. However, there is a need to purchase support. The solution is on a perpetual license model. There is not any extra cost other than the standard licensing fees."

More Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure 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

24%

Educational Organization

10%

University

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about CloudStack?

The initial implementation process was quite good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudStack?

CloudStack is an open-source product. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten. It provides good value.

See all answers

What needs improvement with CloudStack?

The product had some limitations. So, I decided to write my own stack from scratch. The product does not have an easi...

See all answers

What do you like most about Sangfor HCI?

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten... Scalability-wise, I rate the solutio...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sangfor HCI?

Sangfor has multiple options. They have both optics and capex models. You have to buy annual support. We went for per...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Sangfor HCI?

Sangfor has to expand its service network to other countries. They have very good services in the Gulf but don't have...

See all answers

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

OpenNebula vs CloudStack

Compared 67% of the time

vCloud Director vs CloudStack

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs CloudStack

Compared 6% of the time

Cloudify vs CloudStack

Compared 4% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs CloudStack

Compared 3% of the time

More CloudStack Competitors

VMware vSAN vs Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure

Compared 38% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure

Compared 12% of the time

VxRail vs Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure

Compared 11% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure

Compared 6% of the time

vCloud Director vs Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure

Compared 4% of the time

More Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

June 2024

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack

June 2024

Download CloudStack product report

Buyer's Guide

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure

May 2024

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure report

Download Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

Vmops, Cloud.com

No data available

Learn More

Video not available

IBM

Apache

Sangfor

Interactive Demo

IBM

Demo not available

Apache

Demo not available

Sangfor

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!

Apache CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform.

Sangfor HCI is an IT infrastructure platform built on converged architecture. It integrates server virtualization, distributed storage, and networking. Sangfor HCI provides a unified management platform that converges compute, storage, networking, and security on a single software stack. This approach delivers a simplified architecture, ease of use, and reliability for business-critical applications.

Hyperconverged infrastructure is a unified system of data storage. HCI combines storage, computing, networking, and management, unlike traditional storage solutions. HCI systems enable you to build your private cloud, expand to a public cloud, or have your own true hybrid cloud. Sangfor HCI presents two product models: The Sangfor HCI server appliance is a hardware version that enables easy deployment. Sangfor HCI software is the digital version combined with a third-party server that enables flexible deployment.

Sangfor HCI supports Windows systems on desktop and is web-based. Its range of use cases cover a wide spectrum of industries, from healthcare to manufacturing. It is applicable for mid- and large-sized businesses. The software is customizable. Users can customize the logo and contact information in the user interface.

Benefits and Features

Stability: Sangfor HCI delivers high reliability and availability with 0 RPO and 99.99% availability. The infrastructure is fully redundant to ensure business continuity. This means no data is lost in the event of hardware failure.
Simplified infrastructure: The solution supports visual management, making it easier to use. The single platform provides a central control with access to resources.
High performance: One unit of HCI can support up to 100,000 IOPS. The solution supports data striping, data locality, SSD caching and AI-based DB optimization. It also supports linear expansion without bottlenecks.
Hyper-converged infrastructure that enables working with different scenarios. For instance, cloud transformation and data center consolidation. It is fully converged, which means it provides unified management, full resource visualization, and orchestration with SCP. The standardized HCI unit consolidates hardware appliances, a storage network, IP network, and server into a single unit.
Integration: Sangfor HCI offers deep integration with NFV components. Users can deploy complex SDN networks.
Pay-as-you-grow model: The pay-per-use model reduces operational expenses and total cost of ownership.

Use Cases

Sangfor HCI can be applied tin various scenarios:

Enterprise applications: Users can benefit from the reliability and performance of Sangfor HCI for business-critical processes. The system is optimized for enterprise applications to enhance their performance and stability.
Datacenter consolidation: The unified and software-defined technology simplifies the operational management and the architecture of data centers.
Cloud transformation: You can add a cloud management platform, transforming Sangfor HCI into a complete cloud computing solution. You can then run your cloud workloads and benefit from the automation features of Sangfor HCI.
Data protection and recovery: Sangfor HCI offers multiple data protection features, such as continuous data protection (CDP), which ensure the integrity of sensitive and user data. You can protect backup snapshots and take backups. It records virtual machine IO logs at frequent intervals. It offers disaster recovery capabilities that ensure business continuity.

Reviews from Real Users

Gabriele P., Senior Software and Systems Engineer at SAMU.IT, says "It is flexible like a hyper-convergence system. You can add nodes, and you can scale to have better performance and stability. I also like the backup feature, the recovery system, and the web interface GUI to handle everything."

A Junior Solutions Engineer at a tech services company adds that "Sangfor has many solutions, and you can easily manage their machine servers with just one management. They're always striving for greatness, and they continuously update their products. For example, they have now built endpoint security within the firewall. They are continuously improving not only the security but also all other products."

Sample Customers

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

GreenQloud, Exoscale, TomTom, ASG, PC Extreme, ISWest, Grid'5000

TOSHIBA TEC Singapore, J&T Express Indonesia, Crowne Plaza Vietnam, Hermina Hospital Indonesia

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure

May 2024

Free Report: CloudStack vs. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure

Find out what your peers are saying about CloudStack vs. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.

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