Cisco Intersight and Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) are key players in cloud infrastructure management. Cisco Intersight appears to have an edge due to its strong integration capabilities with both Cisco and third-party tools, resulting in comprehensive data center management.
Features: Cisco Intersight offers strong integrations, workflow automation, and comprehensive management of multiple data centers. It provides predictive analysis and remote management, excelling in hybrid and cloud environments. NCM focuses on ease of use with single-pane management, automation capabilities, self-service, capacity planning, and the X-Play automation feature, making it ideal for cost optimization and hybrid cloud environments.
Room for Improvement: Cisco Intersight needs to enhance automation, hybrid cloud management, and ease of integration with various third-party tools. Users also suggest simplifying its setup process. NCM requires improvements in licensing clarity, better third-party integrations, and more comprehensive documentation, as well as addressing feature parity with competitors and providing flexible automation.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco Intersight supports deployment across public, hybrid, and on-premises environments, with generally positive feedback on its customer support, although experiences can vary. NCM is mainly deployed on-premises and in private clouds but also supports hybrid setups. It receives high praise for customer support due to the professional and prompt issue resolution provided by its support staff.
Pricing and ROI: Cisco Intersight is competitively priced but may seem expensive upfront compared to AWS and Azure, impacting smaller enterprises. Despite the cost, it offers significant ROI by reducing overtime and streamlining management. NCM is perceived as costly but justified through ease of management and comprehensive features, offering strong ROI through operational complexity reduction and flexible licensing options.
It simplifies the onboarding of new hardware, reducing time spent on manual installations and configurations.
Anything that reduces bandwidth and reduces the brain work that our teams have to do to maintain systems across all environments is time-saving and cost-saving.
Quantifying to a 425% three-year return on investment, a 21% higher developer productivity, and 88% less planned downtime.
The biggest return on investment for me when using this product is the fast deployment and the rapid integration and migration without impacting our operations during the migration.
For complex issues, it's challenging to get the right engineer quickly unless you have a specific contract like CX.
Cisco provides better support than anyone else.
Cisco technical support is helpful.
There is a feature that allows you to escalate the call.
The handoff with support and the knowledge of the support engineer is significantly better than experience with other vendors.
Even when a node goes down, it doesn't impact our infrastructure because it gets load-balanced between the available nodes.
I rate its scalability a ten out of ten due to its capability to manage multiple domains and automate service requests.
Cisco Intersight is scalable enough for our needs, allowing management in a multi-environment setup and working remotely while deploying servers.
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) scales well.
The key aspects include mix-match hardware and hyper-converged infrastructure, combining compute, storage, and network in a single platform.
With that, you can do it without any downtime or affecting your current setup.
Some steps are not included in the official documentation, which can create challenges.
It is always accessible online, secure, and allows access from any location, following strict authentication standards.
We've never had any downtime related to the Nutanix product itself.
I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.
The stability and reliability of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) have been excellent.
There is a significant issue regarding migration from UCS Manager into Intersight without formatting the Fabric Interconnects (FI), which is problematic in a production environment.
It would be great to have a chat session mode AI so that when I am on standby and encountering issues, I could engage with it, much like ChatGPT.
When registering our devices and servers using tokens, auto-detection could make it easier by automatically identifying resources and adding them to the platform.
It supports different hardware types without vendor lock-in, which is an advantage over Azure Stack HCI, which may only work with specific vendors such as HP or Dell.
Our primary reason for choosing Nutanix was for mission-critical applications and Kubernetes.
Quick resolution of disconnection issues and errors in plugins is crucial.
The pricing is fair and reasonable, particularly for enterprises.
Cisco Intersight's license cost is very high compared to AWS and Azure solutions, which have lower initiation costs.
The pricing mechanism sounds fair.
It's not cheap, but there are savings and return on investment when coming from a non-Nutanix shop.
In comparison, Nutanix's pricing is significantly higher than that of other setups.
While VMware costs depend on ESXi hypervisor pricing, the AHV hypervisor for Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is free.
This solution has provided time savings and required fewer people to operate this tool, rather than direct cost savings.
It provides visibility into other products and storage, and is beneficial for environments where Cisco and other vendors coexist, allowing full visibility of the entire infrastructure.
It also provides predictive analysis, predicting data leaks and making it easy to scale up servers remotely without requiring physical interference.
It's easy to control resources and govern the resources, and it frees up support to focus on other things without having to help developers.
I would approximate the cost savings to be in the 20% to 25% range since we can optimize our resources and avoid the need to purchase more hardware or reuse resources in the infrastructure from one implementation.
The importance of faster outcomes for their environment is significant; for example, when I delivered the Disaster Recovery solution, we included automation for auto-configuration of VMs and resizing of VMs, which replaced many tasks that were previously done manually.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) | 3.1% |
| Cisco Intersight | 1.7% |
| Other | 95.2% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 5 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 4 |
| Large Enterprise | 7 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 27 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 25 |
| Large Enterprise | 74 |
Cisco Intersight is Cisco’s systems management platform that delivers intuitive computing through cloud-powered intelligence. This platform offers a more intelligent level of management that enables IT organizations to analyze, simplify, and automate their environments in ways that were not possible with prior generations of tools. This capability empowers organizations to achieve significant savings in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and to deliver applications faster, so they can support new business initiates. The advantages of the model-based management of the Cisco UCS platform plus Cisco Intersight are extended to Cisco UCS servers and Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco HyperFlex Edge systems. Cisco HyperFlex Edge is optimized for remote sites, branch offices, and edge environments.
Nutanix Cloud Manager streamlines hybrid cloud management by offering centralized control, automation, and workload optimization across platforms. It improves operational efficiency while reducing IT management complexity.
Nutanix Cloud Manager is designed for comprehensive hybrid cloud governance, providing tools for virtualization, resource allocation, and compliance. Its features include one-click upgrades, dynamic dashboards, and the seamless automation of tasks through X-Play. Users can efficiently manage virtual machines, ensure secure storage, and enhance productivity with predictive monitoring. Self-service capabilities allow users to reserve resources easily, while central management via Prism Pro and automated reports enhance oversight and decision-making. Challenges include UI simplicity, pricing transparency, and licensing efficiency, with users seeking improvements in VM organization, blueprint customization, and collaborative support for hybrid environments.
What important features define Nutanix Cloud Manager?Nutanix Cloud Manager finds utility in industries requiring robust hybrid cloud strategies like finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. It excels in centralizing management for secure and compliant operations, optimizing workloads, and providing scalable solutions for resource allocation and compliance monitoring, thus enhancing cloud operations in diverse markets.
We monitor all Cloud Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
