CloudBolt Software vs. Kaminario K2 (discontinued)

I think it's great for giving any/all users the ability to deploy servers for whatever they want. It's also great for scaling up/down large quantities of servers. It also has some pretty good plugins and "orchestration actions" that you can write for yourself. I don't think it would be best suited if you want to set and forget it. It needs some TLC, and the interface and initial setup [are] not the most user-friendly. So if you're planning on using it for some complex tasks, make sure you have someone dedicated to it, at least for the initial setup. And make sure you have monitoring on it.

Incentivized

K2 works well in our mixed-use virtual environment. I would not hesitate to place any workload on K2, it has always performed well. We use fiber-channel connectivity as it replaced our large legacy storage array, replacing one rack of spinning disks with 4U of flash.

Incentivized

• Reporting
• Flexibility in OS
• Support for different virtualization platforms

Incentivized

• Great performance
• Great support
• Super-simple to use

Incentivized

• Support could be improved on a >tier 1 level
• Logging could be more descriptive/specific
• Stability of the actual server

Incentivized

• Not well known, so third-party support is lacking
• Data reduction is good, but not as good as expected (actual 2.7:1)

Incentivized

We honestly haven't looked into much. We've been using CloudBolt [Software] for a long, long time. I think we briefly looked into Morpheus but figured it was too much effort to lift everything, communicate it, etc. We selected CloudBolt [Software] because, at the time (and still do), they served our very specific case. We also liked the ability to customize certain aspects of the deployments - that enabled our "power users" to really tweak things just right for their departmental tasks.

Incentivized

We performed a bake-off with K2 and one other vendor and they performed identically. K2 pricing was aggressive, performance was great, and it offered the features that we needed at a price that we could afford

Incentivized

• We have invested countless man hours to troubleshooting and being support's QA.
• Most of our teams have saved an invaluable amount of time by being able to automate their deployments.
• After the initial time you spend [understanding] all the nuances, the configuring of groups, permissions, etc., does make administering it easier.

Incentivized

• Installing K2 reduced runtime of one of our batch processes, freeing up one employee for other tasks.
• Less time managing storage.

Incentivized