Cisco Intersight vs. Spot by NetApp

Cisco Intersight is very well suited for doing firmware upgrades across all of your cisco hardware. So far we have had no problems pushing out new firmware. It's also well suited for hardware management. Cisco TAC has the ability to pull logs for the IMC for themselves, which saves you from having to pull the logs yourself and then uploading them to the case. It may or may not be appropriate for upgrading operating systems. I have not been able to test it.

Incentivized

If you want to control the cost of your cloud infrastructure and adhere to the industry's security best practices, this is the best I've found. If you want to right-size your instances, this can provide a place to start, but there are other tools like https://www.metricly.com/ that might be better suited. For us, this was enough, and we couldn't justify the additional expense of another tool. But it's primary purpose is to control costs.

Incentivized

• Standardising the environment by enforcing use of updating templates.
• Show the difference on a profile between what has changed and what setting was last deployed.
• Perform bulk deploy operation on profiles (like server profiles).
• Policies underpin all settings (e.g. no more defining individual VLANs before being able to use them, or having to clean them up manually when they are no longer in use. You deploy a Domain VLAN policy that states which VLANs are configured on a domain (either standalone) or a domain profile template (if domains profiles are bound to an updating domain profile template).

Incentivized

• Monitor costs and provide alerts when they deviate from normal usage.
• Provide security best practices and alert on misconfigurations.
• Monitor utilisation and recommend more appropriate instance sizes and reserved instance purchases.
• Provide a single pane of glass view for multiple accounts in AWS.

Incentivized

• It would be great to not having to create EVERY profile within a deployment. since some items can be done be default, the defaults should be set and the deployment can be much faster.
• When adding Rack servers, indicating that the CIMC interface should not being connected before powering on the system and they it will be managed by Cisco Intersight can reduce down times. We had to manually reset our CIMC after disconnecting from our OOBM switches.

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• UI can be difficult to navigate. Given the amount of data, it's not surprising, but I often launch the different reports in multiple tabs so I don't get lost.
• Can be expensive. Not in our case, but you probably want to check and make sure you'll see significant cost savings that'll pay for the product as we did.

Incentivized

Been using Cisco Software as a service (SaaS) platform in a production environment for a large medical and health professionals that has critical healthcare and patients care dependency.

Support team is very helpful getting system updated as needed, and vendor support is fantastic. Also get a dedicated Cisco networking engine to review and advise system health and recommendations.

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Usability of Cisco Intersight is highly dependent on the licensing purchased. The default (free) license level provides a lot of value for the minimal amount of effort to implement. The paid license levels provide additional features (detailed inventory, configuration management and deployment, etc.)

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Overall, CloudCheckr covers all our AWS monitoring needs and great integration through SysLog into our SIEM to capture alerts for investigation. The reports are great and allow for an easy daily review. Small improvements could be made to the interface and better filtering in places would be good. Great product and the price is fair.

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So far over the past 4 years we have not experienced any issues with the servers being available.

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Could need some more refinement. It takes some time getting used to where different settings are being defined.

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Every time we need Cisco Intersight support it takes weeks until we get a solution. We have to change the tac 2 to 3 times every time because none of the engineers have any idea about Intersight. Cisco has not trained their engineers. one has the impression that they are often seeing Intersight for the first time.

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Fantastic Support team who are responsive and address question and concerns promptly with a thorough explanation and fast resolution.

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You really need a lab to get hands on but it was useful

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Very smooth process and we did it for 2 data centers

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Our organisation has some experience with Dell OME (the centralised management plane for Dell PowerEdge server, equivalent to Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service and UCS Manager, but not enough to contrast the two or say why one is better than the other.

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We compared with Cloud Conformity and Staxx. They are all great products and have their pros and cons and we just felt for the price that CoudCheckr had everything we needed and seemed a bit more mature in the market. We review our position every year and can see that the other products are closing the gap as well.

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Easy to add new services into it. Having everything policy driven makes it a lot easier to add new hardware into the solution and get setup.

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• It has positively impacted our business by having a validated architecture that is repeating, redeploy able that scales.
• Some of the TAC tickets could have been solved with more detailed KB's. (ie. CIMC is managed by Cisco Intersight and not be our OOBM with rack servers)

Incentivized

• CloudCheckr has allowed us to increase resell margins as an MSP.
• CloudCheckr has made us aware of cost savings opportunities that exceed the price of the platform itself.
• CloudCheckr has given us additional visibility that has allowed us to manage and understand cloud computing costs.

Incentivized