CloudSphere vs Nutanix Cloud Manager Self-Service comparison

CloudSphere is an intelligent cloud management platform that enables organizations to plan, optimize, secure, and scale their cloud adoption. The platform has three solutions to help organizations manage dynamic, multi-cloud environments, including cloud migration planning, cloud cost management, and cloud security posture management. By using application intelligence (AI), the platform is able to discover and collect all of the data points that collectively define an application across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments. Because the solution is very scalable, it can accommodate companies of all sizes.

The CloudSphere solution is ideal for:

• SMBs
• Enterprises
• Government
• ISVs
• Managed service providers

CloudSphere Product Highlights

• CloudSphere has a unique data science approach to hybrid and multi-cloud cyber asset management that offers the only solution to automate the discovery and creation of a top-down, application-level graphical view of your organization’s cyber assets.

• With its continuous application graphing, CloudSphere can save countless hours and provides the visibility to optimize your IT environment without triggering unforeseen business risks or disrupting other applications.

• The platform’s visualization capabilities accelerate cloud migration, transformation, and modernization initiatives with real-time insights and optimization recommendations.

• CloudSphere’s security posture monitoring minimizes cyber security exposure and reduces risk from misconfigurations.

• Automating compliance monitoring for corporate policies and key industry standards makes reporting extremely easy. The solution’s context-aware policy engine builds on the platform’s continuous visibility capabilities to display real-time compliance status and reports.

CloudSphere Features

CloudSphere has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Access controls/permissions
• Billing
• Provisioning
• Capacity analytics
• Cost management
• Demand monitoring
• Multi-cloud management
• Performance analysis
• Service level agreement (SLA) management
• Workflow approval

CloudSphere Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing CloudSphere. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Reduce migration risk: With CloudSphere, you can migrate complex applications with agentless discovery of application interdependencies while optimizing for both cost and performance.

• Manage your budget more efficiently: CloudSphere generates reports and provides alerts for cloud spend by group, department, project, or individual so you can keep your organization’s budgets on track.

• Access controls: With CloudSphere’s visual maps, identity and access data is displayed to show who has access to key cloud resources.

• Minimize attacks: The solution helps your organization establish better security and minimize cloud attack surface and your exposure window by using customizable risk scoring, remediation recommendations, and integration with 3rd-party reporting tools.

• Ensure compliance: CloudSphere allows you to control cloud security risks and ensure compliance in complex hybrid and multi-cloud deployments with real-time visibility, continuous configuration monitoring, and user controlled auto remediation capabilities.

• Comprehensive end-to-end view of your applications: CloudSphere gives you a comprehensive end-to-end view of your applications, regardless of your apps’ complexity, in order to provide optimization and accuracy throughout the migration process.

• Policy-driven controls for cloud spending: The CloudSphere platform provides policy-driven controls for cloud spending along with visibility so you can properly budget for cloud usage and tie cloud infrastructure spending to business outcomes. The solution enables you to set and track budgets, configure alerts, allows users to take corrective action from trend reports, and helps you optimize cloud spending with continuous resource monitoring and rightsizing suggestions.

Nutanix Calm is a multi-cloud software management platform that allows users to seamlessly choose, distribute, and manage business applications throughout an infrastructure. Integrated into the platform are lifecycle management and application automation. Users have the ability to control all features of the application’s lifecycle and can define applications through simple blueprints that can be created using industry-standard skills. These blueprints are generated through code with a Python-based DSL or through UI.

​Once a blueprint is created, Calm users can easily publish them to end users through the Nutanix Marketplace, which will immediately revamp an intricate provisioning ticket into a straightforward one-click request. Nutanix Calm provides users with improved agility while eliminating human errors, application development and modernization, unified multi-cloud coordination, and automated self-service with centralized control. In addition, the software offers a user-friendly and interactive GUI to assist in managing infrastructures more easily.

Key Benefits of Nutanix Calm

Nutanix Calm is a fully integrated enterprise cloud software helping users build self-service portals which users can provision with their own resources. Its key benefits include:

• Unified governance and management - Nutanix Calm offers unified governance and management across the infrastructure, including hypervisors, clouds, and application types.
  
  
• Automated self-service - For users with Nutanix Marketplace, there is automated self-service, which helps empower different groups within an organization so they can manage their own applications. This also offers developers an alternative to public cloud services.
  
  
• Single language for application modeling - In order to integrate with each team’s tool of choice, the software offers flexibility with its single language for application modeling.
  
  
• Improved agility - Eliminate human errors with improved agility and coordinate throughout containers, VMs, and cloud services to create any application.
  
  
• End-to-end automation - End-to-end automation of applications helps with scaling, managing, and removing IT bottlenecks.

Reviews from Real Users

Nutanix Calm is a software of choice for developers looking for an application that supports automation and lifecycle management, which are both integrated into the platform. Users particularly like the blueprints and templates, as well as the Nutanix Marketplace.

Sudarshan S., a leader of environments and automation at a financial services firm, notes, "The blueprints and templates are very nice and easy to use. They are very valuable because we can configure the entirety of an environment as a template and reuse it multiple times."

Fabian S., an infrastructure consultant at Vopak, writes, "I really like the Nutanix Marketplace a lot. We publish standard workloads there and that, in combination with the Projects, allows for self-service, which is the most powerful feature of Calm."

"The scripting, where you can use libraries, is a valuable feature.... When we create a machine, we use IPAM from Infoblox and we can get an IP address. It's one platform to script and we can then use all the APIs to complete the scripts. It gives us a central management tool from which we can do a lot of things automatically," explains Ilan S, Project Manager at a healthcare company.