CloudSphere vs Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure 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.

Sangfor HCI is an IT infrastructure platform built on converged architecture. It integrates server virtualization, distributed storage, and networking. Sangfor HCI provides a unified management platform that converges compute, storage, networking, and security on a single software stack. This approach delivers a simplified architecture, ease of use, and reliability for business-critical applications.

Hyperconverged infrastructure is a unified system of data storage. HCI combines storage, computing, networking, and management, unlike traditional storage solutions. HCI systems enable you to build your private cloud, expand to a public cloud, or have your own true hybrid cloud. Sangfor HCI presents two product models: The Sangfor HCI server appliance is a hardware version that enables easy deployment. Sangfor HCI software is the digital version combined with a third-party server that enables flexible deployment.

Sangfor HCI supports Windows systems on desktop and is web-based. Its range of use cases cover a wide spectrum of industries, from healthcare to manufacturing. It is applicable for mid- and large-sized businesses. The software is customizable. Users can customize the logo and contact information in the user interface.

Benefits and Features

• Stability: Sangfor HCI delivers high reliability and availability with 0 RPO and 99.99% availability. The infrastructure is fully redundant to ensure business continuity. This means no data is lost in the event of hardware failure.
• Simplified infrastructure: The solution supports visual management, making it easier to use. The single platform provides a central control with access to resources.
• High performance: One unit of HCI can support up to 100,000 IOPS. The solution supports data striping, data locality, SSD caching and AI-based DB optimization. It also supports linear expansion without bottlenecks.
• Hyper-converged infrastructure that enables working with different scenarios. For instance, cloud transformation and data center consolidation. It is fully converged, which means it provides unified management, full resource visualization, and orchestration with SCP. The standardized HCI unit consolidates hardware appliances, a storage network, IP network, and server into a single unit.
• Integration: Sangfor HCI offers deep integration with NFV components. Users can deploy complex SDN networks.
• Pay-as-you-grow model: The pay-per-use model reduces operational expenses and total cost of ownership.

Use Cases

Sangfor HCI can be applied tin various scenarios:

• Enterprise applications: Users can benefit from the reliability and performance of Sangfor HCI for business-critical processes. The system is optimized for enterprise applications to enhance their performance and stability.
• Datacenter consolidation: The unified and software-defined technology simplifies the operational management and the architecture of data centers.
• Cloud transformation: You can add a cloud management platform, transforming Sangfor HCI into a complete cloud computing solution. You can then run your cloud workloads and benefit from the automation features of Sangfor HCI.
• Data protection and recovery: Sangfor HCI offers multiple data protection features, such as continuous data protection (CDP), which ensure the integrity of sensitive and user data. You can protect backup snapshots and take backups. It records virtual machine IO logs at frequent intervals. It offers disaster recovery capabilities that ensure business continuity.

Reviews from Real Users

Gabriele P., Senior Software and Systems Engineer at SAMU.IT, says "It is flexible like a hyper-convergence system. You can add nodes, and you can scale to have better performance and stability. I also like the backup feature, the recovery system, and the web interface GUI to handle everything."

A Junior Solutions Engineer at a tech services company adds that "Sangfor has many solutions, and you can easily manage their machine servers with just one management. They're always striving for greatness, and they continuously update their products. For example, they have now built endpoint security within the firewall. They are continuously improving not only the security but also all other products."