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Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) vs. IBM Turbonomic

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco ACI

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/ACisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is network virtualization technology.N/A

    IBM Turbonomic

    Score8.5 out of 10
    Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
    IBM Turbonomic, now part of the Concert platform, is a performance and cost optimization platform for public, private, and hybrid clouds used by cloud, infrastructure operations, and architecture to assure application performance while eliminating inefficiencies by dynamically resourcing applications through automated actions. One of the key features of IBM Turbonomic is its ability to continuously adjust…N/A
    Pricing
    Cisco ACIIBM Turbonomic
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    IBM® Turbonomic On-Prem
    Varies - Request a Quote
    per month IBM Turbonomic On-prem optimizes data center resources in real time, ensuring app performance at the lowest cost by aligning infrastructure supply with dynamic application demand.
    IBM® Turbonomic Cloud Standard
    Varies - Request a Quote
    per month For customers with more than USD 1.6 million in annual cloud spend or 50 Managed Virtual Servers (MVS) or greater
    IBM® Turbonomic Hybrid Standard
    Varies - Request a Quote
    per month Advanced hybrid cloud optimization capabilities for customers with 200 managed virtual servers (MVS) or more
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco ACIIBM Turbonomic
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
    Additional Details—Volume discounting available.
    More Pricing Information
    Features
    Cisco ACIIBM Turbonomic
    Cloud Management
    Comparison of Cloud Management features of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) and IBM Turbonomic
    Feature
    Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
    -
    Ratings
    IBM Turbonomic
    8.0
    24 Ratings
    9% below category average
    Cloud Management Security00 Ratings7.818 Ratings
    Automation and Orchestration00 Ratings8.725 Ratings
    Cost Management00 Ratings7.926 Ratings
    Cloud Management Performance Monitoring00 Ratings8.426 Ratings
    Governance and Compliance00 Ratings7.624 Ratings
    Resource Management00 Ratings9.325 Ratings
    Systems Integration00 Ratings6.725 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco ACIIBM Turbonomic
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Rackspace Fabric
    Score6.3 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    Cisco Intersight
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    Cisco Intersight
    Score8.9 out of 10
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    User Ratings
    Cisco ACIIBM Turbonomic
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.5
    (131 ratings)
    8.6
    (156 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.7
    (10 ratings)
    9.0
    (24 ratings)
    Usability
    5.1
    (8 ratings)
    7.7
    (21 ratings)
    Availability
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (3 ratings)
    Performance
    9.1
    (9 ratings)
    8.0
    (6 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.5
    (11 ratings)
    8.0
    (25 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    8.2
    (3 ratings)
    Online Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (3 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    6.0
    (5 ratings)
    9.7
    (18 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (3 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.3
    (5 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (9 ratings)
    7.3
    (4 ratings)
    Professional Services
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    5.5
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (3 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (3 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco ACIIBM Turbonomic
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    The ACI solution is perfectly fit for a large or multi-site data center environment. It permits simplifying deployment, management, automation, and security. ACI is especially valuable when strong scalability, automation, security, and segmentation are required. However, ACI is less suitable for a small environment due to its complexity and high cost.
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    IBM
    Datacenter Consolidation and Hardware Optimization: This scenario is relevant to you as a hardware manager. It applies when you have physical servers (like Power or System z) and want to maximize virtual machine density. Why it works: IBM Turbonomic analyzes the peak usage times of each VM. If VM "A" is active during the day and VM "B" at night, it places them on the same physical host. Ideal scenario: Data migration projects or when you're told, "[...], there's no budget for more servers this year, make everything fit on what we have." Consolidación de Datacenters y Optimización de Hardware,Este escenario te toca de cerca como encargado de Hardware. Cuando tienes servidores físicos (como los Power o System z) y quieres maximizar la densidad de máquinas virtuales.Por qué funciona: IBM Turbonomic analiza las horas pico de cada VM. Si la VM "A" es activa de día y la VM "B" de noche, las coloca en el mismo host físico.Escenario ideal: Proyectos de migración de datos o cuando te dicen: "[...], no hay presupuesto para más servidores este año, haz que quepa todo en lo que tenemos". This review was originally written in Spanish and has been translated into English using a third-party translation tool. While we strive for accuracy, some nuances or meanings may not be perfectly captured.
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    Pros
    Cisco
    • Cisco ACI, The object model is very complicated. It's something difficult to understand and also because there is a user interface, there's a web user interface, but it's not optimal to use it because if you want to deploy a large amount of VLAN or a large amount of tenants, it's quite difficult to do it or it's quite challenging. Maybe if you want to configure a large amount of ports using the web interface, it's not appropriate because it takes a lot of time. It also provides APIs to do that, but as I say, the object model is very difficult to understand and there is very little documentation about automation of the ACI and maybe there is but it's not so easy to find.
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    IBM
    • Presentation is nice. Its easy to understand what your looking at and the data that is being presented to you.
    • Properly identify resource utilization and recommendations for action on how VMs can be improved and resources can be better utilized.
    • It was also able to tell us the same information and analysis for cloud resources. I was not expecting that.
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    Cons
    Cisco
    • I think something I've just went to a session with hyper fabric and the ideas that hyper fabric has. Keep it really simple because Cisco ACI is a complex system and adopt some of the ideas behind hyper fabric, bring it to ACI that will be really beneficial. So as I said, automation is a great thing, but it's still, you need to have the background and the really complex stuff that happens behind the scenes to leverage the value of that solution. And by adding more simplicity to it, I think that will be a great thing. And also integrating with other applications in terms of the automation.
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    IBM
    • It would be nice if the UI included a break-down of features that are both licensed as well as un-licensed. That way, you could not only see what you have, but what you don't.
    • The right-sizing recommendations are great, but very little info is given about why the recommendation is being made. More info would not only increase understanding, but would also help drive decision-making.
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    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    Provided with the intensive fault isolation for the CISCO ACI, we are glad that we have this Data Center Solution in place and we will continue to renew as long as the future needed requirements are meet and more helpful features will be enabled in the future with the integration of security
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    IBM
    We are certainly happy with Turbonomic as a whole and have invested quite a bit of time and effort into learning the ins and outs of the product. We have our reporting setup the way we want it and have gained definite value from these features. I will say though that many products nowadays are offering more native monitoring, reporting, and alerting features which may eventually steer us away from this product
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    Usability
    Cisco
    You'll need a lot of training and hands on experience to get the most out of the product. There are a lot of very useful features in the ACI product. Often times there are a lot of ways to get to a solution for chalanges in the field. The solutions might be different eacht time. Knowing which one to implement is somtimes a challenge.
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    IBM
    Excellent approach to larger VM organizational management. They have an very clean integrated dashboard that allows us to see everything in our environment and what that is doing in real-time. It works on multiple hyper-visors really well and integrates capacity planning on my local site as well as my cloud locations.
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    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    It allways works. If there are problems with links going down by accident (say someone accidentally unpatches something they shouldn't have), we rarely miss more then one packet over the link. Also, using VPCs we are able to upgrade the software on the switches without the attached EPs ever noticing.
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    IBM
    VMTurbo has not caused any outages by not doing what we expect it to do.
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    Performance
    Cisco
    Day to day operations on Cisco ACI do not require much human intervention, the platform ticks over without any major faults. Being able to rapidly replicate the communication between two groups of machines across multiple sub networks speeds up new application delivery, and the integration into vmWare allows multiple teams within IT to work together to problem solve rapidly.
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    IBM
    It allocates resources among applications by showing more on the cost breakdown by cloud service, with metrics on cloud provider information like Azure Management, Identity, Networking, Storage with costs per day, and total services costs. This then could facilitate and show the corresponding actions thereafter upon scaling.
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    Support Rating
    Cisco
    Cisco provides users and partners with a multitude of data for you to consume. I think that the stuff in the public domain goes a long way to assisting you find any answers you may need, plus insights and information from areas such as DevNet provide you with access to more than just the traditional release notes and the like
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    IBM
    When I contact support I get a quick response and they are able to solve my problem quickly. I also get a sense that they want to make sure that we are getting value from the product and walk me through whatever steps are needed to accomplish my goals.
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    In-Person Training
    Cisco
    The Cisco ACI training provided by Cisco was in depth, covered all of our requirements, and allowed us to implement and maintain the platform without issues.
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    IBM
    Alex (from VMTurbo) has worked with the product for years and helped develop the product. He was very knowledgeable and was able to provide our support team with details knowledge on how to get our deployment configured correctly as well as help with another VMTurbo POC within another customers environment.
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    Online Training
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    IBM
    After buying VMTurbo Operations Manager, I was invited to an online user training event. I felt this training was effective and dug just deep enough to be informative yet still keep my attention. Additionally, the webinar was free.
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    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    Being involved in the implmentation gives you more overview on how things are supposed to be working and communicating, you can easily performce troubleshooting and understanding the troubleshooting scenario
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    IBM
    The implementation was very simple. Just upload an OVA file and power on the VM. Once it comes up enter some networking information and you can then access the web interface. From there, just begin configuring the system for your environment by adding you license and the various virtual environments and storage through the inventory tab
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    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    Actually we start our learning in networking career with Cisco. So it is very useful or easier to learn this product. And honestly speaking, I didn't work in any other data center solution other than Cisco. So I cannot compare what it gives us more than other popular stuff. But this is very nice product like from Cisco.
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    IBM
    As the organization had experience of years in using IBM products, we had the confidence that they will provide us with great support. And we needed a reliable solution as a financial institute to ensure continuous operations. Even though the price was very high, we made the correct decision to go ahead with IBM Turbonomic as the feedback from existing users in the region was very positive. We needed a solution which was capable of handling our automation requirements. All these were green in IBM Turbonomic.
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    Scalability
    Cisco
    Cisco ACI scales well and is suited in scenarios such as multi-cloud or large data centre implementations. It is not suited to smaller deployments as the efficiencies that it provides are not fully realised. It is well suited in large environments that contain both virtual and bare-metal machines allowing a great deal of flexibility. It is also perfect to support multi-tenancy platforms.
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    IBM
    It’s very scalable.
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    Professional Services
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    IBM
    Professional services were always there to guide us in our transformation to the cloud. They understood our business model and then were able to provide guidance on what we needed from the tool.
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    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • We've definitely spent quite a bit of time relearning how to do things in ACI, but I think the investment has been well worth while considering that we can now deploy tenants and leaves from the ground up in a matter of seconds.
    • We can if we choose to upgrade an entire datacenters worth of switches in a single night. (We've chosen to break it up for availability requirements, but if you didn't require 99.999% uptime like us you may be able to do it)
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    IBM
    • Application performance has been a big one. With Turbonomic keeping everything running at top performance, it can make changes when extra resources are need, quicker than somebody being notified and then making the necessary changes.
    • Turbonomic has been a great cost savings for us on multiple occasions. We use it every time we are improving servers.
    • With the planning feature we get the best performance form new hardware purchases
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    ScreenShots

    IBM Turbonomic Screenshots

    Screenshot of IBM Turbonomic Action Center, where it shows the list of optimization actions across the global environment—on-prem and cloud—that should be taken to minimize cost while assuring performance.Screenshot of IBM Turbonomic Application, a view that shows the global environment across private and public infrastructure from the context of individual application components. Users can optimize one application at a time by viewing each app's pending actions. The Supply Chain at left shows all of the entities across applications and their interdependencies.Screenshot of The IBM Turbonomic Cloud Executive Dashboard, an out of the box dashboard that allow users to rapidly communicate value to executives. This view shows the cloud cost savings opportunities realized and not yet realized over any time period.Screenshot of The IBM Turbonomic On-prem Executive Dashboard, an out of the box dashboard that allow users to rapidly communicate value to executives. This view shows the savings opportunities realized and not yet realized over any time period.Screenshot of an IBM Turbonomic Cloud view, where the public cloud environment(s) and all of the pending actions required to bring them into an efficient, performant state. The Supply Chain at left shows all of the entities in the public cloud(s) and their interdependencies.Screenshot of The IBM Turbonomic On-Prem view that shows the user's private data center environment(s) and all of the pending actions required to bring them into an efficient, performant state. The Supply Chain at left shows all of the entities in data center(s) and the interdependencies between them.