IBM Networking Services for Software Defined Networks vs. Microsoft System Center

As service providers in Information technology, IBM Networking Services for Software Defined Networks has been of priceless value in management of virtual networks. It is crucial to improve our flexibility in administration of networks regardless of the usage bandwidth whether around the company or on our clients' networks. If you are looking to improve agility and configuration of your networks, then IBM would be the best SDN for that.

Incentivized

For companies with more than 10 Windows devices and needing to standardize the OS, AV, access, share resources, and install software. SCCM is the way to go. This software is unnecessary if the business is all remote users and not in an office-type setting. There are cloud offerings or none to accomplish what a business needs.

Incentivized

• Network evaluation
• Network performance

Incentivized

• Allows the grouping of devices by user.
• Allows controlling updates being deployed to user devices.
• Allows for the repurposing of machines by being able to load new or updated software on machines that already are in the system.
• Allows us the ability to wipe a machine clean and restore it back to the configuration that was assigned the machine.

Incentivized

• It should have a standard API for inter plane connections.
• Centralized controller is ineffective.

• The product could improve in the area of having better mechanisms in place with how the SCEP client is deployed/installed from the server on the management side. We have run into this firsthand with the client not installing on an endpoint, and then having to take the time to investigate why it was not installing.
• A second improvement that can be made is to keep trying to improve the products detection rate for finding malware/viruses. The case can be made that there are some products out there that do a better job at this and have a higher detection rate.

Incentivized

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager is tightly integrated to Microsoft Windows servers os monitoring with great product support.

Incentivized

It is not user-friendly for the most part. With IT infrastructure, sometimes it cannot handle excess requests. Every few months, you will need an upgrade in terms of server resources to keep up with incoming alerts and requests. This does not happen all of the time, but it does happen when there are too many requests.

Incentivized

There is a fair amount of documentation out there to help you when you have questions or run into issues with this product as well as tutorials on some of the more common tasks. Between the documentation and the overall ease of use we haven't had to deal with direct Microsoft support for this product.

Incentivized

Easy to install with intuitive interactive interface during the installation process a and integration to MS SQL was smooth

Incentivized

IBM is a company that has a lot of experience in networking services, in addition to having a better integration with other products of the same brand, for this reason we use IBM Networking Services

Incentivized

We previously used a mix of FOG and Clonezilla to image machines. The biggest issues with these products is that changing one piece of the image required you to rebuild the entire image itself. These pieces of software also did not allow you to manage applications and Windows Updates, causing IT to have to constantly touch machines after they were imaged and update or manage them with a much more hands on approach.

Incentivized

• Loosening from the hardware constraints in network provisioning.
• We are top performing in Network modernization.

Incentivized

• It has allowed the enterprise to standardize on a single platform for monitoring.
• Easier troubleshooting of issues with Microsoft platforms.
• Greater visibility of issues across platforms when applications are hosted in a mixed environment.
• Additional costs for monitoring systems that are not directly supported with additional packs (iSeries, Linux on Power).

Incentivized