(EOL) Cisco CloudCenter vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect

It is well suited for large corporate entities, whether they are in manufacturing, sales, engineering, healthcare, supply or shipping. It is easy to understand and operate once it has been initially configured. Expansion of the system is likewise easy to do once expertise has been acquired. The only difficulty with this or any cloud scenario is ensuring where the data is located and managing that securely.

Incentivized

F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect Would be incredibly useful when having to juggle multiple cloud providers. Also XC would be fantastic for standardization and consistency of the whole networking stack. It may be less useful for incredibly specialized cases where very specific traffic manipulation is needed. Any use-cases with heavy APM usage would have to be carefully considered as those features didn’t make it into XC yet.

Incentivized

• We are able to automate deployment which has been a strength to the geographical distribution of the enterprise.
• We have been able to work with a wider variety of developer tools and haven't had to customize to fit CloudCenter.
• It is easier for us to allocate space and allow users to take advantage of the system directly with a minimum of overhead.

Incentivized

• Centralized Hybrid ingress for our cloud workloads
• Centralized ingress for our existing on-prem BIG-IP devices
• Application visibility to address end-to-end visibility into the end-user experience

Incentivized

• The software and systems don't present a problem to us but the continued interaction with mid-level support teams and vendors can slow down implementation or correction of difficulties we experience.
• The continued overhead associated with peripheral training on systems we have purchased can cause delays.
• Language barriers sometimes show up but this, again, is due to remote middle agents that are themselves contractors of or sales agents of the main agency. It slows down communication and can introduce business difficulties.

Incentivized

• The support model needs a quite a bit of work. I personally have experienced an outage on the platform. due to mis-configureation Although the outage was due to engineer error it took over 2 hours before we were able to speak to an engineer
• Proxy v2 protocol to allow our organization to capture and view the source IP address

Incentivized

Overall, F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect is responsive and has many features. There is minor clunkiness in how certain scroll bars are layered. This may cause some adverse experience when trying to manage this product through a zoomed browser. Page loading and refresh timers were all very much responsive. There is a good amount of feedback from the interface as well.

Incentivized

We found that the cost advantages were greater by going with Cisco because of our present contracts and the materials and equipment we already had on hand. The reliability of the system, for us, outweighed any cost advantages we might have been realized by going with another provider. Certainly the service and support for the entire system is much better when handled by a single vendor with a good track record.

Incentivized

Aviatrix operates like a slightly different version of XC. Mostly it relies on routing, where cloud connect takes a whole stack into consideration. Not sure if XC can fully replace Aviatrix, but after a couple of implementations, it may become apparent. There are similar routing features in both. XC has more overall features.

Incentivized

• We have had a positive return on investment by adopting Cisco CloudCenter as the system is more mature than competitors. We have saved a lot by working with them rather than continuing to act as a defacto test location for other systems.
• We have been able to reduce the number of staff necessary to operate the system and turn them over to more profitable work.
• One negative impact we have seen is that it is difficult to map where the data is located at any specific instance.

Incentivized

• Is a niche segment and it provides a rich set of features that supports our use case

Incentivized