Cisco CloudCenter (formerly CliQr CloudCenter) was an application-defined cloud management platform for deploying and administration of applications across datacenters, private, and public cloud resources. It has been discontinued by Cisco, and is no longer available for sale.
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Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control is a cloud management offering.
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.
I wish I had an option to give it a 9.5 :) OEM Cloud Control is very well suited if you have a system with multiple implementations of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. If you are willing to pay for the huge license cost which is typical with Oracle, then you will love to use OEM Cloud Control to monitor your entire ERP solution including web servers, applications, network, storage, and physical servers. It is not worth the buck if your's is a small implementation. Your DBA's should be able to work without depending on OEM Cloud Control.
Oracle Enterprise Manager is a "one stop shop" for all of our management needs. This is helpful because it minimizes the management of the management software itself. There are less upgrades and connectivity issues to handle. And there are "plug-ins" for additional products we use like Blue Medora's one for PostgreSQL.
Managing administrative jobs can be burdensome in a shop with dozens of servers and databases. OEM Cloud Control makes it easy since you can view all the jobs for all servers in one place. It is easy to filter on jobs with problems or the like so that you can quickly look at the logs and fix the issues.
Tuning PL/SQL is much easier using OEM Cloud Control. Most DBAs are familiar with trace files and TKPROF, but not having to do those things at a command line smooths the process out. The graphical interface makes it easier to show developers exactly what the issues are. This makes for less finger-pointing and quicker resolution of performance problems.
Proactive management is easier using OEM Cloud Control. Before having the gui, I had a collection of scripts that I would have to install on each database server, then set up cron jobs to run them. When Oracle was upgraded, those scripts might have to be updated on each and every server. OEM Cloud Control has those things built in. You can choose exactly which metrics are important to you. And you can keep performance graphs up all day on a second monitor to let you instantly see when something might cause a problem.
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.
Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control can do a better job in actively managing (as opposed to monitoring) non-Oracle IT components including non-Oracle database, middleware, and storage.
The UI is less responsive and sometimes slow and the user experience could certainly be improved.
There is also an issue with positioning as other Oracle products sometimes come with their own versions of management console so it is hard to justify paying for Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control separately or as a new attachment.
I wanted to give it a 10 but the heavily loaded solution makes it slow to load and refresh pages. Even bouncing the OEM Cloud Control takes around 10 mins which is quite long.
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.
Since OEM Cloud Control comes free with Enterprise Edition, we have mostly worked on OEM Cloud Control. I did have my fair share of experience with DBArtisan. It's good and lighter than OEM Cloud Control. It sort of removes your need to even go to SQLPLUS command line most of the time. But it is way behind OEM Cloud Control in terms of features.
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.
