IBM Turbonomic Reviews

The product is looking at things in the cloud or in Azure and it gives us reports of things that it could possibly do in Azure, however, we mainly use it on-prem for our VMware environment. 

The use case for Turbonomic really began with us trying to reduce a lot of the costs, and a lot of the CPU, and RAM. We had an idea that we could possibly save some money, however, it was theoretical and something that we really couldn't put our hands on or touch. Turbonomic was the solution that really gave us a tangible way of being able to see what we could do and to see those changes made in an efficient manner while also having the reports behind it to back up the changes.

That, and the placement that it does in VMware, where it places machines where it best sees fit on different hosts, is how we use the product. 

We've been able to separate different applications into groups in Turbonomic and see how many resources they take. We can see what resources we need and which resources may need to be increased or decreased in certain places. The grouping and analytics enable me to be able to take everything back to my application owners and say to them "your application or your list of servers did this type of work in our environment." It really gives me an opportunity to be able to show a cost. I can show how many resources we're using and how many need to be used.

It's been a very good solution. The reporting has been very, very valuable as, with a very large environment, it's very hard to get your hands on the environment. Turbonomic does that work for you and really shows you where some of the cost savings can be done. It also helps you with the reporting side. Me being able to see that this machine hasn't been used for a very long time, or seeing that a machine is overused and that it might need more RAM or CPU, et cetera, helps me understand my infrastructure. The cost savings are drastic in the cloud feature in Azure and in AWS. In some of those other areas, I'm able to see what we're using, what we're not using, and how we can change to better fit what we have.

It gives us the ability for applications and teams to see the hardware and how it's being used versus how they've been told it's being used. The reporting really helps with that. It shows which application is really using how many resources or the least amount of resources. Some of the gaps between an infrastructure person like myself and an application are filled. It allows us to come to terms by seeing the raw data.

This aspect is very important. In the past, it was me saying "I don't think that this application is using that many resources" or "I think this needs more resources." I now have concrete evidence as well as reporting and some different analytics that I can show. It gives me the evidence that I would need to show my application owners proof of what I'm talking about.

In terms of the downtime, meantime, and resolution that Turbonomic has been able to show in reports, it has given me an idea of things before things happen. That is important as I would really like to see a machine that needs resources, and get resources to it before we have a problem where we have contention and aspects of that nature. It's been helpful in that regard.

Turbonomic has helped us understand where performance risks exist. Turbonomic looks at my environment and at the servers and even at the different hosts and how they're handling traffic and the number of machines that are on them. I can analyze it and it can show me which server or which host needs resources, CPU, or RAM. Even in Azure, in the cloud, I'm able to see which resources are not being used to full capacity and understand where I could scale down some in order to save cost. 

It is very, very helpful in assessing performance risk by navigating underlying causes and actions. The reason why it's helpful is because if there's a machine that's overrunning the CPU, I can run reports every week to get an idea of machines that would need CPU, RAM, or additional resources. Those resources could be added by Turbonomic - not so much by me - on a scheduled basis. I personally don't have to do it. It actually gives me a little bit of my life back. It helps me to get resources added without me physically having to touch each and every resource myself.

Turbonomic has helped to reduce performance degradation in the same way as it's able to see the resources and see what it needs and add them before a problem occurs. It follows the trends. It sees the trends of what's happening and it's able to add or take away those resources.

For example, we discuss when we need to do certain disaster recovery tests. Over the years, Turbo will be able to see, for example, around this time of year that certain people ramp up certain resources in an environment, and then it will add the resources as required. Another time of year, it will realize these resources are not being used as much, and it takes those resources away. In this way, it saves money and time while letting us know where we are.

We've saved a great deal of time using this product when I consider how I'd have to multiply myself and people like me who would have to add resources to devices or take resources away. We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time.

Those saved hours are across months, not years. I would consider the number of resources that Turbonomic is adding and taking away and the placement (if I had to do it all myself) would end up being hundreds of hours monthly that would be added without the help of Turbonomic. 

It helps us to meet SLAs mainly due to the fact that we're able to keep the servers going and to keep the servers in an environment, to keep them to where (if we need to add resources) we can add them at any given time. It will keep our SLAs where they need to be. If we were to have downtime due to the fact that we had to add resources or take resources away and it was an emergency, then that would prevent us from meeting our SLAs.

We also use it to monitor Azure and to monitor our machines in terms of the resources that are out there and the cost involved. In a lot of cases, it does a better job of giving us cost information than Azure itself does. We're able to see the cost per machine. We're able to see the unattached volume and storage that we are paying for. It gives us a great level of insight. 

Turbonomic gives us the time to be able to focus on innovation and ongoing modernization. Some of the tasks that it does are tasks that I would not necessarily have to do. It's very helpful in that I know that the resources are there where they need to be and it gives me an idea of what changes need to be made or what suggestions it's making. Even if I don't take them, I'm able to get a good idea of some best practices through Turbonomic.

One of the ways that Turbonomic does to help bring new resources to market is that we are now able to see the resources (or at least monitor the resources) before they get out to the general public within our environment. 

We saw immediate value from the product in the test environment. We set it up in a small test environment and we started with just placement and we could tell that the placement was being handled more efficiently than what VMware was doing. There was value for us in placement alone. Then, after we left the placement, we began to look at the resources and there were resources. We immediately began to see a change in the environment.

It has made the application and performance better, mainly due to the fact that we are able to give resources and take resources away based on what the need is.

Our expenses, definitely, have been in a better place based on the savings that we've been able to make in the cloud and on-prem. Turbonomic has been very helpful in that regard. We've been able to see the savings easily based on the reports in Turbonomic. That, and just seeing the machines that are not being used to capacity allows us to set everything up so it runs a bit more efficiently.

The way it handles updates needs to be improved. That would be one of the areas I would focus on.

I wish that the upgrades and updates were more easily accessible. Some of that is based on my environment and how my environment is set up. Due to the fact that we are in such a lockdown environment, I wish that it would be better or easier to perform the updates.

I've used the solution for about three years now.

It's been very stable and we've had no issues with it. We did have an issue with the update, however. Turbo was really, really helpful and just involved right away and we were able to get that problem resolved. That said, in terms of general stability, it has been greatly stable.

We haven't really scaled out with it. We realized we probably needed to scale back in due to the savings that we were able to do thanks to Turbonomic. It is scalable. Our environment is very large and it was able to handle all of it. It can handle scaling your environment out or back in.

We have about eight people on my team. We work in converged infrastructure server engineering. We handle VMware and anything inside of the infrastructure.

It is being used extensively. Our usage would probably stay where it is as the environment is changing a little bit. It will probably hold steady with where we are.

The technical support is excellent. If the problem gets too complex, I've been able to speak to somebody in development for help even if I've had issues with one of the updates.

Positive

We were using VMware beforehand. We switched due to the fact that somebody in the environment had used Turbonomic at a previous engagement or a previous location. We decided just to give it a try and it worked amazingly well.

The initial setup was straightforward. I worked with some engineers and they were really helpful and really kind. They guided me along the path. 

We actually deployed a proof of concept first, over a couple of days. Then we took the proof of concept and applied for a license and then just put it in an environment. The deployment process took a couple of days.

In terms of pricing and licensing, I wasn't involved too much in that portion. In terms of the licensing, I would say it's definitely worth the investment. Even initially, if it seems out of range, the cost savings will make up for it.

We did look at some other options. We had issues with some of the other options and they weren't able to do tasks as efficiently. Turbonomic had a different environment just for testing it out. Another coworker also had used Turbonomic, so we tested it out in the environment.

We looked at VMware, the cost of using some of the VMware products, and how much it costs to do that. I don't remember the names of the other products. I just remember Turbo was high on a couple of our lists and we reached out. Cisco had a relationship with Turbo so they brought them in and we decided to test it out.

I've been using Turbonomic as it moved from different versions for about three years. Right now, we're on the CWOM version of Turbonomic and its version 3.7. We're using it on-prem and we also are using Turbonomic for just cloud reporting.

Turbonomic would be one of the best in terms of application awareness. Just being able to see different applications and see their usage is great. 

I'd advise potential new users to do a proof of concept and try it. It's an excellent product and the level of savings, as well as the reports, will really give them hands-on experience in the environment to get arms wrapped around everything. It's an excellent product that has paid for itself.

For someone looking into Turbonomic that already has a process to optimize their environment and monitoring, it's a good idea to work with somebody in technical support to see if there's something that you could get Turbonomic to help you with. You should evaluate it for savings, test it out and do a proof of concept as well. Turbonomic is hands down one of the best products.

I'd rate it ten out of ten. It does a really excellent job of reporting, handling placement, measuring resources, and increasing or decreasing those resources. Overall the product just sells itself. It has been very helpful in the cloud and on-premise. 

We use Turbonomic for workload placement. We've leveraged it for workload migrations, so if we get a new storage array or a new cluster, and we need to migrate workloads over to it, we can set up a policy and let it just run along as it can. It is especially valuable with storage array migrations, which can be very time-consuming if being done manually.

The biggest thing that we leverage it for is the right-sizing of virtual servers. This is relevant for both hot-add, and during an improvement-maintenance window where resource reclamation of the virtual servers takes place.

Turbonomic provides visibility and analytics into our environment from the application layer all the way down the stack to underlying infrastructure resources. The app dynamics information is a little newer to us but we do have that information there. Utilizing it is a matter of getting the right teams within the consult to understand and essentially automate or utilize the actions that it's suggesting from an application perspective. This capability is something that's important to us as an organization, and this product is helping to show the value of that data.

The visibility and analytics capabilities have helped bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams, which is a never-ending work in progress. Better collaboration between these teams is definitely something that is important to me.

Our mean-time-to-resolution has been improved by the visibility and analytics capabilities that Turbomoic provides, although it is difficult to approximate by how much because it varies on a case-by-case basis. As an example, with the right-sizing feature, a lot of what it's doing is hyper-reactive. I wouldn't call it completely proactive, although it could certainly be in some cases. Essentially, it's providing resources before the app team even knows they need them. As a result, it's preventing a problem from ever happening.

This product helps us to interpret our data alerts and spreadsheets, which is something that's important to us.

With the help of Turbonomic, we are better able to understand where performance risk exists. A lot of it has to do with the automation that we have enabled on the platform. Performance risk isn't necessarily something that we look at every day, waiting for something to start blinking red and then manually addressing it. The real success is turning on automation and having it try to fix the problems as much as it can without human interaction.

Another thing that this solution helps us with is reducing performance degradation. Again, it's on a case-by-case basis and it's difficult to estimate how much it's saved us. In the past, where we were given proactive notification about upcoming work and were able to capture the baseline, and then watch the product handle it using automation, we've seen where it was successful and did show value. However, a lot of those situations may be happening every day or at least every week, and we don't have proactive notifications. This is because we're not day-to-day working with the end-users or business units. It all ties back to the infrastructure that we support.

This product is certainly helping to improve our applications' response time SLAs, although we haven't focused on establishing that baseline and understanding how much things have improved from that perspective. This is a very important aspect for us and if we had a baseline then it would help to show more value because we could relate the improvement back to Turbonomic.

One thing that we are able to assess is savings from an OpEx perspective as a result of right-sizing. We understand how much an administrator would charge back to the company per hour to troubleshoot a particular issue. Every time a right-size action is performed, whether it's giving more resources or turning down more resources, a ballpark estimate of how much time an administrator would spend troubleshooting, and ultimately providing those additional resources, is approximately 30 minutes. Those actions happen a lot, and we're able to estimate and capture the savings from an OpEx perspective by right-sizing in place rather than having an administrator perform those actions each and every time. We have a dashboard to show the value from an OpEx savings perspective with the automation that it's doing. Last year, for example, we had $188K in operational savings due to automation, and we have saved $16K so far this year.

In general, Turbonomic has helped to reduce our CapEx and OpEx. In terms of CapEx, the right-sizing of workloads ultimately gives us an increased capacity for additional workloads or putting the right amount of horsepower towards the workloads that truly need it.

Turbonomic has helped reduce resource congestion and starvation. It's a powerful orchestration tool and it gives us the platform where, if we did want to innovate in a way that we haven't before, we can leverage the platform to help us toward that. This is something that has happened before and it was able to help us to get there. It's another tool in the belt to help support these initiatives.

The right-sizing feature is the most captivating one for us. It helped in taking the emotions out of what people think they need, basing it off of real data, and providing them what they actually need. It's not really a special feature, but the support that we received from that team really helped us in our success. There were definitely some customizations that needed to take place to make it successful.

This is the most aware of our products, in terms of understanding all of the components from the top down. It is integrated with all of the different modules, all the way down to the core infrastructure. All of it is tied together and there are not many tools that can do that.

The reporting needs to be improved. It's important for us to know and be able to look back on what happened and why certain decisions were made, and we want to use a custom report for this.

Between the different versions and releases, it seems that reporting fell by the wayside. It seems like there was more in the past than there is today, which has made it a little bit more of a challenge for us to capture some historical information.

I have been working with Turbonomic for approximately five years.

This is definitely a stable solution. 

We have had some issues with downtime in the past, realizing it might stop running and we weren't made aware. But the stability's been fairly solid. Working closely with our account team, they understand how we use the product, and more often than not, encourage us not to run the latest version. They want to make sure that we're properly testing before we go to the bleeding edge.

There is value-added from the support team, in them knowing our environment, and what might be impacted by the upcoming upgrades.

This is definitely a scalable solution. We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like.

The last big update was to create a containerized environment, which laid the foundation for us to continue to grow with this centralized system. From our perspective, it seems scalable and we haven't run into obstacles that I can't overcome.

We have approximately 12 users.

There have been some transitions with the recent acquisitions that have impacted our account team and some of our technical people. However, we are happy with them.

Out of the different products that we oversee, they're one of the best relationships that we've had. They not only help us through problems but help us on an annual basis to reiterate the value that the product can bring to our organization.

I would rate the support an eight out of ten. There is always room for improvement. Nothing will ever score a ten out of ten, even if it is perfect.

The bottom line is that they're superior at the majority of everything they're doing from a support perspective. Some of the biggest hiccups were that a new version would introduce a new problem. For about a year and a half, we'd go to the next version and this very thing would happen. This left us chasing these problems and they kept coming back up. However, it seems that things have stabilized since then, which was a couple of years ago.

We use other tools as part of our operations, including AppDynamics to help with Application Performance Management.

That said, we have not used any other products that have the same capabilities as Turbonomic.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward.

There were some complexities added from our side in trying to make sure that this platform was most successful with the standardizations that we have in our environment. When Turbonomic would perform actions, in most situations, we're actually calling on it to run in-house developed scripts to perform the additional configurations required from that action. Since that has been taken care of, it's been great.

To clarify, the initial setup is simple but we brought some complexity on ourselves. To deploy it to the level that we're using now, it took between six and eight months. This was really taking our time going through non-production environments first, then production, turning on one thing at a time.

There were also scheduling concerns, such as having our maintenance windows every other month. This didn't give us much opportunity throughout the year to deploy, which is why it took several months for us to get fully implemented. Even today, we're still not using it to its fullest potential.

The product was purchased from reseller CDI and I recommend them.

We deployed it ourselves but received assistance directly from Turbonomic.

With respect to product maintenance, it's a fairly hands-off tool. 

We're trying to hand off some of the routine maintenance windows. A lot of the predefined actions are in there but it's a case of setting the window based on our approved maintenance times for reclamation of resources.

If it's a change that involves policy and configuration then the change will be by a senior engineer or someone a little bit higher, because the change can be disruptive if it's not configured correctly. Otherwise, it's fairly hands-off.

The team even considers it an employee at certain times. For storage migrations, as an example, tasks that we had an administrator dedicated to, such as moving workload after workload, have now been assumed by Turbonomic.

We started to realize value from the solution with our first right-sizing, which was probably between three and six months. At this point, we were able to reclaim resources in our environment that were not utilized.

ROI is not something that I am focused on but in general, I think that we see ROI in several areas. I base this on the improvements that I've seen in regard to application performance.

We've turned down VMware's vRSOps advanced suite, which is similar in its basic functionality. The problem is that they are behind and just not at the point where we see it being a replacement for what we're using today with Turbonomic. At the same time, vRSOps does have advantages.

The basic pro for VMware is that you have one vendor with one solution, which is a nice simplification. The cons are that the vRSOps group and VMware, in general, don't have support anywhere near the level of Turbonomic, and the functionality isn't necessarily there as an orchestration and workload placement tool.

Where vROps shows its value is from an operational monitoring and troubleshooting perspective. We have seen value in that aspect and in fact, this is why we still have it in our organization.

We are not actively managing workloads in the cloud but it is something that we plan to do in the future. We are using Kubernetes on-premises, although we're trying to get more engagement from that team on the product. Importantly, the right-sizing on-premises is setting up our next steps in moving toward the public cloud, and toward that consumption model to the best that we can.

We may utilize Turbonomic in the cloud. The licensing switch that we went through really opened up not only the ability for us to easily scale to other private cloud environments that we have outside of our main one but much more easily scale to the cloud when we're there. I definitely would consider this tool to be a requirement as we start deploying infrastructure out in the cloud, just to help us understand that we're sizing to the best that we can.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to utilize it to its fullest potential. This will include aligning your company's culture. The foundation of the product is putting resources where they're needed, and this is done based on actual data. The politics have to be thrown out the window. As long as that can work in your organization, then this is a great tool that can configure your environment to run optimally.

For someone that is interested in Turbonomic, but already has a process in place for monitoring and optimizing their environment, then this is something that should be evaluated. I can't say that it will replace the existing product but there is more at stake. For us, it's the support and the team that come with the product. This is what surprised me the most and something to look out for.

Overall, Turbonomic has had a positive effect on our application performance. It's helped on many different levels, including toward the resolution of problems. It's even helped flat out prevent problems from happening in the first place.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

My main purpose is to provide an assessment for clients, agencies, or the government to help them understand their workloads and what it would take for us to do a migration of their workloads, before we do it. I generate a report based on the client's existing on-prem workloads, and see how Turbonomic optimizes everything and how things would look once they are migrated to either Azure or AWS. I review that report and all the possible savings if they move their workloads to the cloud.

It's deployed on-premises, but we have been using it for public and private cloud.

It provides visibility and analytics at the underlying infrastructure stack level, in the way I use it. That is key. That's what differentiates between an agency saying, "Go ahead and move our workload because we see the value," or "Just decommission everything and we'll find an alternative to keep our workloads going." Most of my discussions are around trying to get things from on-prem to the cloud, and Turbonomic has been very helpful with that.

The visibility and analytics help bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams. They give us a central point around which we can sit down and discuss the savings and how we would actually move the workloads, based on how workloads are truly running today on-prem. That is very important because we want to show the client savings and help them to optimize their workloads, whether a system is on-prem or in the cloud.

In addition, the visibility and analytics have helped reduce our mean to resolution when it comes to identifying places where we can optimize things and getting that to the customer as soon as possible. Instead of having to search and discover all the infrastructure and calculate things based on usage, I have a single pane of glass with Turbonomic. I can look at the graphs because the data is already there.

The solution gives us a single source of truth for application performance management. That is vital because when we migrate workloads for any client. I've been doing migrations for almost eight years now, moving people from data center to data center, and workloads from data center to data center or to the cloud. One of the key factors in doing that is a single point of truth. If you don't have that, you repeat work. You don't know what's truly correct and the migration could fail.

Turbonomic also gives us the ability to review reports with our clients on a monthly basis. It makes us look good. It shows that we're being proactive and that we're looking ahead to ways we can help our clients optimize and save money. And if we're saving them money, they're happy.

From a performance standpoint, we know before we move workloads that we have optimized the performance for that workload. That means that when we migrate it, it shouldn't be a problem. In all the migrations we've done, performance hasn't been a problem, based on the performance readings we got from the Turbonomic reports.

In addition, it helps us meet our SLAs. When many workloads were running on-prem, we could not track our SLAs as well as we can now, thanks to tracking things with Turbonomic in the cloud.

Overall, from our organization's standpoint, the solution has helped to build our entire migration effort. Our migration team can follow a single path and understand how to present the data to our clients and help them in moving from one point to another. It helps the engineers to focus on issues and it really helps them do their migration prep. The smoother the migration prep, the smoother the actual migration will be.

The feature for optimizing VMs is the most valuable because a number of the agencies have workloads or VMs that are not really being used. Turbonomic enables us to say, "If you combine these, or if you decide to go with a reserve instance, you will save this much." That feature gives you an estimate using, for example, a Microsoft cost model, to show clients how much can be saved.

Another key aspect that I really like about Turbonomic is the user interface. It gives you a visual representation of where there might be issues. That stands out. When I'm looking at resources for migrating different workloads, if something is shown in red, that identifies a risk. If it's a risk where it's currently running, it's definitely going to be worthwhile to migrate it. It helps us to mitigate that risk before we do the actual migration.

They have a long road map when we ask for certain things that will make the product better. It takes time, but that's understandable because there are other things that are higher on the priority list.

I've been using Turbonomic for a little over two years.

The customer support is definitely a 10 out of 10, and the training gets a 10-plus.

Positive

We wanted the performance assurance because we have seasonal spikes in our volume. One of the use cases was making sure that we could adjust for seasonal spikes in volume. 

Another use case was taking a look at how we increase our density and make a more effective utilization of the assets that we have on the floor. 

The third use case was the planning, being able to adjust for mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, and quickly being able to separate out the infrastructure required to support that workload.

We just upgraded and are using the latest on-prem version. 

We use Turbonomic for our on-prem hosting: servers, storage, and containers. We also use it in Azure. We are trying to use it across multiple hosting environments. The networking team is not really using it. Instead, I am there from a hosting standpoint, where the main focus is on servers and storage, then the linkage to applications with the resources that they are using.

It integrates into our other tools that we have been able to stitch together. When I take a look at an infrastructure cluster, I can see what applications are running on it. I can see down to the transaction level who is actually causing a performance constraint. We can then go back to our application teams to get that issue resolved.

When I start to take a look at a cluster level, I can look to see which application is running in that cluster. Then, we can get down into specific transactions. We can then watch to see how workload is trending and identify where we may need to add more hosts into the environment. With our transactions, we use Turbonomic linked into AppDynamics. When it links in and pulls the application data, it also helps us dig down. So, if I see my utilization trending up, then is it something on the infrastructure side or the application side? Is it something the application team needs to address? Or, is it something my infrastructure team can address? This allows us to make fact-based decisions.

In our organization, optimizing application performance is a continuous process that is beyond human scale. We would not be able to do the number of actions that Turbonomic takes on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It is humanly impossible with the little micro adjustments that it can make. That is a huge differentiator. If you just figure each action could take anywhere very conservatively from five to 10 minutes to act upon, then you multiply that out by thousands of actions every month, it is easily something where you could say, "I am saving a couple of FTEs."

On Windows 2008, whenever we did a large scale OS upgrade, it was kind of taking a look at what resources were allocated to each of the applications and server instances. Then, you basically would replicate that. Being able to use Turbonomic, we have been quickly able to go through and take a look, and say, "Okay, wow. This may have been what was previously allocated to you. We now realize that your utilization doesn't require that level." We are able to actually downsize as we go through and rebuild. This part, the planning aspect, is really good.

One of the things that we completed this year was starting to tag applications so we can pull up more critical applications and take a look at their resources needs. We can have a specific dashboard per critical application.

For performance assurance, I love the dynamic resource allocations. We don't have any nuisance performance issues. 

When you take a look at the utilization of our resources, it is great that this solution works both on-prem and in the cloud. We have been able to identify some quick saves in the cloud, and then on-prem, with their algorithm. So, we have been able to go ahead and increase our density by about 35 percent, which has delayed purchases of hardware.

Turbonomic provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. One of the best features about using their algorithm is it can go through and tell me that I have a specific server instance or virtual image that needs either more CPU or memory added, tell us "These are the ones that aren't using the resources." Then, we can decrease the allocations to those server instances. The nice thing about this is we can schedule which of these activities you want Turbonomic to do automatically for us.

Monitoring and thresholds are very reactive, so somebody would have to be sitting there with eyes on glass, taking action. Whereas, with Turbonomic, we now have our thresholds set, and it automatically takes those actions.

The reporting is good.

It would be nice for them to have a way to do something with physical machines, but I know that is not their strength Thankfully, the majority of our environment is virtual, but it would be nice to see this type of technology across some other platforms. It would be nice to have capacity planning across physical machines.

Between my two companies, I have been using it now for about four or five years.

The stability has been wonderful. We have never had any issues.

The scalability is great. There is no problem with scaling.

There are about a dozen people from engineering, operations, and capacity who login and use the data to make decisions. It is a hands-off type of product. You only need a couple of key people from the different use case areas to use it.

What is really impressive with the Turbonomic team is that after you sign the deal, they don't disappear. In the two and a half years in my current position, Turbonomic has been right there, whether we have an issue, which is very rare, or we are trying to still complete the objectives of the purchase, such as integrating our use cases. The Turbonomic team is very supportive and hands-on with you. I can't say enough about their customer support because it helps drive the value faster. They are always right there working with my team as part of the team.

Turbonomic is a real partner, which is a really good thing. I have been in IT my whole life, decades, and there are way too many vendors that once you make the sale, that's it. You are now at the bottom of their pile because they are chasing the next sale.

Before I came to this company, my previous company was using this tool extensively. At my previous job, I had seen the benefits of the tool. When I came over to this company, it was one of the first things that I started to champion.

I have been with the company for three years, and we have used a tool called VMware DRS. We are a heavy VMware shop, and vROps wasn't anywhere near the level of automation needed. DRS, even though it can do some things automatically, it is all based on data pulled from the night before. We didn't have anything in the environment that could do the real-time automated resource moves, like Turbonomic does.

I think DRS is gone now. The engineering team still uses VMware for a couple of things, simply because that is their preference. vROps is still in the environment, but I would love to get to the point where we can continue showing success with Turbonomic and eventually eliminate vROps.

The initial setup was very straightforward. This is one of the very few tools which we were able to stand up and get it running within weeks. 

It is a very simple product to install, then there are just a couple of configurations to tweak. Then, you are up and running. They literally tell you what you need. It's like, "Here are the requirements: You need X number of virtual images - this level." It has very simple instructions. We probably had it installed in one day, then we had everything reporting within a couple of days. After that, we did the tuning, mapping, and everything else. Within 30 days, we were probably getting useful data out of this tool.

We just worked with Turbonomic. Cisco was our reseller, but they actually provide Turbonomic resources.

We have only two people involved with setup and maintenance. I have one main person with a backup person for him. That is how easy it is to set up and maintain. Our future plans are to migrate to the cloud offering probably later this year. Once we do that, that will free up one person.

The main guy is a Windows Server admin who supports the Turbonomic platform, but this isn't his only job. It is something that just takes up a fraction of his time. Once we go to the cloud offering, then the management of the tool goes back to Turbonomic and we will just be a consumer of the data.

When I first put the proposal on the table, we put in the proposal that we would get our payback within three years. We got our payback in 15 months. For example, we went through and increased our density, then we were able to delay the purchase of close to 200 servers.

We are very excited about the fact that it does integrate with ServiceNow, our service management ticketing system. It will go out there, and when it says, "I need to add CPU/memory," then it creates the change ticket for us. So, we can have an automated ticket created and get the approvals in place, then it is automatically executed and the ticket is closed off. This saves my team hundreds of actions every year.

When the application starts to see performance degradation, those tickets will go to their queue, but then they will get escalated to me. I can tell you that I have received almost no calls about, "My application is running slow." Before Turbonomic, during the busy season, it seemed like almost every day that I was receiving calls. So, there is definitely a huge drop in, "My performance is running slow," where you would then kind of scramble to find out, "Okay, why is it running slow?"

We use Turbonomic to help optimize our cloud operations and it has reduced our cloud costs. We have been able to identify unattached premium storage, paying for storage that we weren't using. We have also been able to identify instances that were assigned a larger template than was actually needed. So, we were able to then downsize them. This ended up saving us a significant amount of money by rightsizing those instances. 

By increasing our level of density, we have been able to delay hardware purchases. So, we have been able to absorb growth without hardware purchases. Without hardware purchases, we also save money on software licensing.

It has allowed us to deploy where our resources spend their time by focusing on other project or high-value activities with the business. There is less firefighting and more project work.

The pricing and licensing are fair. We purchase based on benchmark pricing, which we have been able to get. There are no surprise charges nor hidden fees.

We did have to go through and do a comparison of vROps, DRS, and Turbonomic in order for me to get it on board at the company.

The performance assurance and automatic allocations (the automation that comes with it) really drove our decision to go with Turbonomic. They have a level of automation that the competitors don't.

Turbonomic understands the resource relationships at each of the elements of our environment's layers and the risks to performance for each. That is part of what makes them a key differentiator, especially against something like a vROps. Their algorithm is based on: in the moment, what is being used, and what is needed. It will not make an automated move that may cause another issue. Whereas, VMware DRS would move stuff based on data that it had pulled the night before, which may not be valuable or still valid. At that point, you could move something that needed CPU, but you moved it someplace else where now there is a memory constraint instead of a CPU constraint.

A big deciding factor with Turbonomic was you can set how much trending data that you want to keep, whether it is a 30, 60, 90, 120 days, etc. You can set your trending there, then you can schedule your actions based on utilization over that time frame, e.g., the last 90 days.

We are using it mainly to manage the resource utilization for our virtual environment. We are using it for project planning, like the Windows 2008 upgrade with the infrastructure that needs to be built out for that. We are using it to manage our cloud expenses and the utilization within the cloud, which then drives cost reductions there. In the last few months, we started to do the application tagging so we can start to get down to specific application dashboards. This year, we want to start to drive more of the automation to reclaim unused resources, so I can then go ahead and delay further purchases. Our plan is to continue driving up the density of the environment.

Right now, we have certain tasks that get automatically done today. We are working on the piece which does the scheduling, using the change tickets, because we wanted to ensure there was an audit trail so we had an interface with our ticketing system worked out. So, we are getting ready to do that. Adding resources throughout the business day is no big deal, but we want to make sure we don't remove any resources (during the business day). We want to do this during a maintenance window to ensure that there will be no business impact. It is just being ultraconservative and sensitive to the business's needs. As they get more comfortable, we will continue ratcheting up the level of automation that we use. 

Everything is very specific with Turbonomic. We can take manual action throughout the day, if we see that it is necessary. We can have Turbonomic take certain specific actions automatically, then we can decide which ones we want to actually schedule so we can link them to approve change tickets.

It will show application metrics and estimate the impact of taking a suggested action from infrastructure resource utilization. I don't know if it will get down into the transaction level performance. I think the new release does that, but we haven't tested that piece out. However, this is the planning piece, e.g., if I were to remove the CPU, what would the performance and utilization look like? Or, in the case of some stuff that I was recently looking at, if I were to add the CPU, what does that do to the overall utilization metrics? You can then decide: Do I want to take that action?

The biggest lesson learnt is probably that people are afraid of change. Our biggest hurdle was putting their faith in automation versus we have always done it this way. We have always been oversized so the application teams would make sure that we never run out of resources, but they needed to be open to change. My favorite analogy that I like to use with them is, "I understand it is hard because instead of you telling me, 'I want this many CPU or this much memory.' I'm telling you trust me." It's like the gas gauge in your car. Don't look at the gas gauge when you get in your car. Just trust me that I have put enough gas in the car for you to get where you are going. It's a very difficult mindset for application teams who are used to saying, "Okay, I have eight CPUs over here. Don't touch them." But, Turbonomic actually gives us the data to show them, "You have eight CPUs over here. You'll never get above 40 percent utilization, so you are costing us money." So, it is fact-based decision-making.

My advice is, "Go for it." Don't let other teams hold you back because this is how they have always done it. Trust the Turbonomic team because they are great at being able to implement, and they are ready to move fast. Make sure you get all the right stakeholders, because we have had to deal with everything from:

• Engineering
• How do we do an internal chargeback?
• The application team's perception that I can't run with anything less than this. 

Get ready to be able to put some facts on the table and lean on the Turbonomic team because they are just phenomenal at helping put together business cases and doing the implementation. However, also get ready to tell your people to go for it. Don't be saddled with, "This is how we've always done it," because technology changes. I have seen nothing in my infrastructure career that was as great as this product when it comes to resource utilization.

I would give them a 10 (out of 10). The tool does what it says, and the Turbonomic people don't sell it to you, then disappear. They are always there and a pleasure to work with.

There have been quite a few use cases, even some that were probably unintended. 

1. Reduce our footprint and cost. It handled that perfectly. 
2. Handle our RI purchasing, which is what we are in the process of doing now. 
3. Automating shutdowns and startups so we can turn machines off when they are not being used. We have several machines in this category. We are going to continue to add more to it, once we go through some finalization. We are using it to delete unattached volumes to manage databases.

The unintended use case was that we started looking at what else could we save. We realized that we had a ton of data in Blob Storage for backups. Turbonomic can't see that, but it brought it to light because we wanted to find a way to look at our overall spending. So, we have saved a bunch of money by reducing that footprint. 

It's on-prem, but we are in the process of moving into the cloud.

It helped reshape the organization. We used to have around 46 admins who could create virtual machines in Azure, and it was very difficult to manage them. It became exceedingly expensive, getting to a point where it received attention from the president of the company. Installing Turbonomic gave us sort of a governor over our cloud environment, where people started to really understand that everything you do has a cost. Now, we have like four or five admins. If someone wants a VM, we run a plan based off: available RIs, cheapest costs, and can it go into shut down mode at night? This has helped us create a standard of implementation going forward to prevent us from spending the money in the first place. While I'm sure Turbonomic would say that's their overall goal, we just never really saw it that way. 

I didn't know it was going to change how we submit tickets and work orders for adding service to the environment. That has all changed for the better.

I know when we are moving workloads from on-prem to the cloud, we have not been utilizing the planning in Turbonomic as much as we should. I think that is changing. People who have access to Turbonomic are now realizing, "Here are the specs of my machine. Turbonomic will put it in the cheapest compute resource template that it can find." 

This is starting to change how we even consider building something. We don't ask the end user, "What do you need?" Instead, we say, "What do you want to host?" Then, we look at other virtual machines out there. If we want to host a website, then it will be X number of users per day, month, or year. We look at some of our other marketplaces, then we make a plan to see what Turbonomic recommends, as it takes into account the disk, IOPS, RI, CPU, RAM, etc. This helps us prevent the spend in the first place. The idea where we build then save on the backend, that is what's changing. We are no longer just building blindly, then going to Turbonomic, and saying, "Okay, fix what we built." We are saying, "Turbonomic, tell us what we should build." I would rather do it when we build a machine than have to take a website down and schedule maintenance at two in the morning on Saturday when I am at the bar.

It gives people like me, who are engineers, the ability to launch environments without having to create a bunch of changes down the road. I think that's a wake-up call for a lot of the people at the company. Because we would just build our build, where we were spending $5,000 more than we should, so then we have to put in change tickets and scale all that back. I don't have to do that anymore.

If we see a system or service increasing usage, we can then anticipate building it out bigger to manage traffic and workflow. With version 8, it will almost be like having a tool to manage our machines actively versus just actions.

The Executive Dashboards are probably the best way to showcase what we are spending, what we can save, and how to grease the wheel to make it happen. A lot of times when we say, "Hey, we're spending too much," executives just go, "Yeah, well, it's just the cost of doing business." However, when they see a report where it shows, "You can save $8,000 a month," and it can provide those results. That is really powerful for upper management because they are very non-technical. They just know this thing exists, we have to pay for it, and it's critical to have, but they don't understand the nuts and bolts of it. The Executive Dashboards are probably the most beneficial overall for the business. However, as a techie guy, I don't think that they are the best for me.

Personally, the most valuable feature is the organization of it all, e.g., being able to drill down into any category and feeding the maps. It helps a lot by giving a visual representation of what is dependent on what. With the maps, you can drill into the different sections of the topography and find out what is what.

I like the tool overall from top to bottom. Anything that can save money and preserve productivity is going to get an A-plus in my book. 

Turbonomic provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. For example, if we see a machine that is being overly utilized, then it needs to be increased in space, size, RAM, and processor.

It provides a proactive approach to avoiding performance degradation by scanning the environment every 10 minutes. It looks at 30 days worth of metrics per node. So, if it sees an upward trend on a machine, then I will get an alert that says, "You may want to scale up to accommodate the needs of this machine." However, it's not super fast. For example, it's not as fast as if I set a virtual machine to scale up or out as needed on the fly, but it does give us an overview of being able to see trends that we can plan for.

There are some issues on that point of it providing us with a single platform that manages the full application stack. I think version 8 is going to solve a lot of those issues. Turbonomic version 6 doesn't delete anything. So, if I create a VM, then destroy the VM, Microsoft doesn't delete the disk. You have to go in and manually do that. Turbonomic will let you know that it's there and that it needs to be deleted, but it doesn't actually manually delete the disk. The inherent problem with that is, it will say, "This disc is costing you $200 a month." Then, I go in and delete it. Since this is being done outside of the Turbonomic environment, that savings isn't calculated in the overall savings because it's an action that was taken outside of Turbonomic. I believe with Turbonomic 8, that doesn't happen anymore. 

We are still saving the money, but we can't show it as easily. We have to take a screenshot of, "Hey, you're spending this much on a disk that isn't needed." We then take a screenshot after, and say, "Here is what you're spending your money on," and then do a subtraction to figure it out. So, there are some limitations. 

It is the same with the databases. If a database needs to be scaled up or scaled down, Turbonomic recommends an action. That has to be done manually outside of the Turbonomic environment. Those changes are also not calculated in the savings. So, it doesn't handle the stack 100 percent. However, with version 8 coming out, all of that will change.

I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge.

Resources, like IP addresses, are not being used on test IP addresses. With any of the devices that you would normally see attached to a server resource group, such as IP addresses, network cards, etc., you can say, "Look, public IP addresses cost $15 a month. So if you don't have a whole lot of money and a hundred IP addresses on a public IP sitting there not being used, you're talking $1500 a month YOY." That becomes quite a big chunk of money. I know that Turbonomic is looking at the lowest hanging fruit. That is not something worth developing for only $15 a month saving, but I would love to see Turbonomic sort of manage Azure fully versus just certain components.

One thing that has always been a bit troublesome is that we want to look at lifetime savings. So, we want to say, "Okay, we installed this appliance in October 2018. We want to know how much money we have saved from 2018 until now." The date is in there. It is just not easy to get to. You have to call an API, which dumps JSON data. Then, you have to convert that to comma separated values first. After that, you can open an Excel spreadsheet, which has hundreds of rows and columns. You can find the data that you want and get to it, but it is just not easy. However, I believe there is a fix in version 8 to solve this problem. 

When we switch to version 8, we can't upgrade our appliance, because it's a new instance. What that means is we will lose all our historical data. This is a bummer for us because this company likes to look at lifetime savings. This means I have to keep my old appliance online, even though we're not using it for that data and I can't import that data into the new appliance. That is something that is kind of a big setback for us. I don't know about other companies and how it is being handled, but I know I will need to keep that old appliance online for about three years. It is unfortunate, but I see what Turbonomic did. They gave us so many new bells and whistles that they think probably people aren't going to care because they're so much more savings to be had. However, for our particular environment, people like to see lifetime savings. That sort of puts a damper on things because now I need to go back to the old appliance, pull the reports using an API in a messy way, and then go to the new appliance. I don't even know what I am going to get from that. I don't know if it's going to be the Excel spreadsheet or just a dashboard, then somehow combine the two. While we haven't experienced it yet, when we do upgrade, we'll experience that problem. We know it is coming.

About two years.

Everything is manual. We don't automate anything, only because our environment isn't that big. If we were to set up all the groups as manual, it would actually take more time than just to go in and click go on each of the items after I have submitted a change request. We have about 180 VMs in Azure, not quite big enough to automate.

We broke even after year two. We definitely got our return on investment, but I think there is a lot more to come.

Turbonomic has helped optimize cloud operations and reduced our cloud costs significantly. Overall, we are at about 40 percent savings, and we spend about three million a year just in Azure. It reduces the size of the VMs, putting them into the right template for usage. People don't realize that you don't have to future-proof a virtual machine in Azure. You just need to build it for today. As the business or service grows, you can scale up or out. About 90 percent of all the costs that we've reduced has been from sizing machines appropriately.

The solution has absolutely helped reduce our IT-related CapEx and OpEx. The money that we have saved by minimizing our costs in the cloud allows us to spend more in the cloud versus buying physical hardware. We had at one point three data centers at approximately 18 offices with servers in them (all VMware). We are now down to three offices that have servers and a total of five complete servers. That is all been directly related to our savings in Azure and the ability to continue building without exceeding what we have previously spent. We budget three million a year. If I can shave 30 to 40 percent off of that, then we can build 30 to 40 percent bigger in Azure.

Turbonomic has saved a lot of human resource time and cost involved in monitoring and optimizing our estate by not having physical hardware because we don't have to deal with stale disks or power outages since it is hosted in the cloud. We had servers in 18 offices that required physical contact to replace a disk or troubleshoot a network connection. We had power issues, air conditioning issues, and network issues as well as having an ISP drop and having a backup ISP drop. I don't even know if I can calculate how much we've been able to save by moving most of that to Azure. Now, we still have outages in Azure, but Azure is way more stable than any physical environment we could build by a long shot. 

I know there have been some issues with the billing, when the numbers were first proposed, as to how much we would save. There was a huge miscommunication on our part. Turbonomic was led to believe that we could optimize our AWS footprint, because we didn't know we couldn't. So, we were promised savings of $750,000. Then, when we came to implement Turbonomic, the developers in AWS said, "Absolutely not. You're not putting that in our environment. We can't scale down anything because they coded it."

Our AWS environment is a legacy environment. It has all these old applications, where all the developers who have made it are no longer with the company. Those applications generate a ton of money for us. So, if one breaks, we are really in trouble and they didn't want to have to deal with an environment that was changing and couldn't be supported. That number went from $750,000 to about $450,000. However, that wasn't Turbonomic's fault.

We have monitoring tools out there that can tell us things that Turbonomic can tell us. I think the difference is the ability to just click a button and have it happen versus having to do it manually as well as checking the costs. While we could use a monitoring tool, we wouldn't be able to track our costs, and that's been a big impact to the company because we've saved a lot of money. So, if someone said, "Hey, we've got this monitoring tool, and we want to have you decide between Turbonomic and this monitoring tool." I wouldn't even look at the monitoring tool. I would say, "We are going to stay with Turbonomic."

We are installing the Kubernetes version of Turbonomic now. Then, it will be able to see application issues when they come up. Once we transitioned to Turbonomic version 8, we will be able to see the application side of things, which we were not able to see before.

Application performance wasn't even something we considered until Turbonomic 8 was announced and revealed to us. This will open a whole new door for us in terms of savings that we probably never even considered in the past.

I am pretty impartial to Turbonomic. I have not used anything to optimize cloud previously, but I'm going to base my rating solely on the support that we have received, the engagements that we had, the attention to detail, and the overall feel of the company and the interactions in the software. I would rate it as a 10 (out of 10).

We primarily use it as a cost reduction tool regarding our cloud spending in Azure, as far as performance optimization or awareness. We use Turbonomic to identify opportunities where we can optimize our environments from a cost perspective, leveraging the utilization metrics to validate resources are right-sized correctly to avoid overprovisioning of public cloud workloads. We also use Turbonomic to identify workloads that require additional resources to avoid performance constraints. 

We use the tools to assist in the orchestration of Turbonomic generated decisions so we can incorporate those decisions through automation policies, which allow us to alleviate long man-hours of having someone be available after hours or on a weekend to actually perform an action. The decisions from those actions are scheduled in the majority of cases at a specific date and time. They are executed without having anyone standing by to click a button. Some of those automated orchestrations are performed automatically without us having to even review the decision, based on some constraints that we have configured. So, the tool identifies the resource that has a decision identified to either address a performance issue or takes a cost-saving optimization, then it will automatically implement that decision at the specific times that we may have defined within the business to minimize the impact as much as possible.

There are some cases where we might have to take a quick look at them manually and see if it makes sense to implement that action at a specific date and time. We then place the recommendation into a schedule that orchestrates the automation so we are not tying up essential IT people to take those actions. We take these actions for our public cloud offering within Azure. We don't use it so much for on-prem workloads. We don't have any other public cloud offerings, like AWS or GCP. 

We do have it monitor our on-prem workloads, but we do not really have much of an interest in the on-prem because we're in the process of a lift and shift migration for removing all workloads in the cloud. So, we are not really doing too much on-prem. We do use it for some migration planning and cost optimization to see what the workload would look like once we migrated into the cloud. 

From our on-prem perspective, we use it for some of the migration planning and cost planning. However, most of our implementations with this are for optimization and performance in the public cloud.

It provides application metrics and estimates the impact of taking a suggested action from two aspects: 

1. It shows you what that impact is from the financial aspect of a public cloud offering. So, it will show you if that action will end up costing you more money or saving you money. Then, it also will show you what that action will be like from a performance and resource utilization perspective. It will tell you when you make the change, what that resource utilization consumption will look like from a percentage perspective, if you will be consuming more or fewer resources, and if you're going to have enough resource overhead for performance spikes.
2. It will give you the ability to forecast, but the utilization consumption's going to be in the future term. So, you can kind of gauge whether the action that you're taking now is going to look and work for you in the long term.

In our organization, optimizing application performance is a continuous process that is beyond human scale. We see tremendous value in Turbonomic to help us close that gap as much as possible within our organization. Essentially, Turbonomic will provide us with a recommendation on how to address a workload in real time based on its actual utilization. Then, we have pre-defined time slots where those actions can be implemented with minimal impact on the business because some of the changes may require the rebooting of the server. So, we don't want to reboot the server at 2:00 in the afternoon when everyone is using it, but we might have a dedicated time slot that says, "After 5:00 today or 2:00 in the morning when no one is using it, this server can be rebooted."

We have leveraged Turbonomic to not only ingest the data from the utilization of workloads to come up with performance-based driven decisions. We also have used Turbonomic to help orchestrate and initiate those actions automatically for a very large portion of our organization without us having to even be involved at all. For some more sensitive workloads, we look at them and coordinate with the business whether we will take action at another date and time.

We primarily use it in the public cloud for servers. We also monitor storage and databases within Azure. This is another added benefit that we like about Turbonomic. When we look at a decision, we are looking at how that decision is being driven based from a storage perspective, the IOPS being driven to a specific storage solution within our public cloud offering, its decisions based on specific DTU utilization from a database perspective, or if it is even a percentage of memory or CPU consumption. It takes into account all those various aspects and never puts us in a position where we take a decision or action without accommodating these other pieces and having them negatively impact us.

That level of monitoring is what has given us the confidence to allow Turbonomic to implement actions automatically without having IT oversight micromanage decisions, because it provides that holistic view, takes into account all those aspects, and ensures that a decision that is implemented never puts you into a point of contention or concern. We have the confidence to allow the appliance of the software solution to take actions without little to no IT oversight.

Turbonomic has identified areas within our public cloud where we had storage that was not being used at all. So, it provided us with insight into what that unused storage was so we could delete the unused storage and save on the recurring consumption cost. That was very helpful.

We have identified numerous workloads which have been overprovisioned by an administrator. We were able to essentially right-size workloads to use less resources, which cost us less money in our public cloud offering, e.g., a configuration with less memory or less CPU than what it was originally configured for. That helps us reduce our cloud consumption significantly.

In addition to ensuring that workloads are right-sized correctly, we have been able to save even more with our public cloud consumption by identifying workloads where we could purchase reserved instances, essentially long-term contracts for specific workload sizes. This allows us, on average, to save an additional 33% or more on our server run rates.

Turbonomic provides a proactive approach to avoiding performance degradation. It has allowed us to detect issues before they have actually become issues. Traditionally, in IT, we would not be aware of an issue until someone from the business came to us with an issue, then we would investigate the issue. In some cases, we would spend a couple hours trying to figure out what the issue was, then determine if something needed more resources, like more memory. Since Turbonomic, we have been able to almost immediately identify that our system needs more resources and take the action right then and there. Or, Turbonomic has identified there is an issue and we take an action, then notify the business that an action was taken in order to preemptively avoid a business impact.

Previously, a business impact use case would potentially take us hours. With Turbonomic, whenever we run into a business impact use case now, before we even log into a system to initially troubleshoot it, the first thing we do is go to Turbonomic and see, "What is Turbonomic telling us? What is the workload like now? What has it looked like in the last 24 hours or week? Do we see any trends to help guide us towards identifying where we should go from a troubleshooting perspective?" From that aspect, Turbonomic has definitely helped guide our path to resolution.

The ability to look at a workload from an actual consumption perspective for the resources that it's consuming internally is particularly valuable. For instance, when we have a server in the public cloud, we might provision a certain amount of memory resources to it and CPU, e.g., two processors and 24GB of memory. The tool provides the ability to look at the consumption utilization over a period of time and determine if we need to change that resource allocation based on the actual workload consumption, as opposed to how IT has configured it. Therefore, we have come to realize that a lot of our workloads are overprovisioned, and we are spending more money in the public cloud than we need to. 

This solution allows us to have the data to make business decisions without having a concern on whether we are going to be impacting the business negatively by taking the wrong action. We actually have the analytical data to back decisions. This helps us have discussions with the business on if it's the right decision to make or not. 

Turbonomic has the ability to manage the full application stack. We have not plugged in all aspects of our application stacks, but it does provide that. That's one of the things that we love from Turbonomic is that we're not only ingesting the data into Turbonomic and reviewing the decisions that Turbonomic is providing, but Turbonomic is also essentially providing us a single pane of glass to implement those actions. So, if there is an action that we would like to take, whether it is someone manually clicking a button and taking the action or the action being initiated automatically by Turbonomic, that is all taken from within the appliance. We don't have to go and log in somewhere else or log into our public cloud offering and take that action. It can all be done from a single management pane. We can look at our supply chain for a specific application or workload and see if one specific part of the solution is causing a problem, as opposed to having a bunch of people on the phone with a bridge call and having people looking at different aspects of the solution that they are more intimate with. Turbonomic shows us the ability from a service chain perspective, how things pitch together, and helps us identify that single point or bottleneck causing the impact. We have used it from that perspective.

It provides the ability for us to create customized dashboards and custom reports to help showcase info to key stakeholders. We have leveraged the custom reporting for things, like SAP, that we have running in the public cloud to show how SAP is running, both from a performance aspect as well as from a cost perspective.

There is an opportunity for improvement with some of Turbonomic's permissions internally for role-based access control. We would like the ability to come up with some customized permissions or scope permissions a bit differently than the product provides. We are trying to get broader use of the product within our teams globally. The only thing that is kind of making it hard for a mass global adoption, "How do we provide access to Turbonomic and give people the ability to do what they need to do without impacting others that might be using Turbonomic?" because we have a shared appliance. I also feel that that scenario that I'm describing is, in a way, somewhat unique to our organization. It might be something that some others may run into. But, predominantly, most organizations that use or adopt Turbonomic probably don't run into the concerns or scenarios that we're trying to overcome in terms of delegating permission access to multiple teams in Turbonomic.

It has been somewhere between two and a half to three years since we started our relationship with them.

The stability is very good. We have not had to open up any support tickets for the product to troubleshoot or recover the appliance. It has been running just fine. We haven't had to redeploy or recover anything with it, surprisingly, in the two and a half years that we have had it. The code updates are pretty easy to perform as well. Ongoing maintenance is really simple, and our account team helps us with the code updates. They get a meeting invite together, then it is less than a whole 10 minutes, but they are there every step of the way.

It is pretty scalable, in terms of any concerns that we would have. Right now, we are using on-prem appliances. However, if we needed to, they have the ability of pouring into a SaaS-based offering, which would help us adopt it faster, in terms of some of our sister companies, because we are not isolated to network access within this particular data center. We could leverage the same licensing from a SaaS perspective, then they wouldn't have to use a VPN to connect to the appliance to use it. 

There are situations from a scalability perspective where we have to take into account things like GDPR. For things where GDPR or data sovereignty come into play, the scalability becomes a bit of a concern because you can only keep the appliance within that specific region. You need separate instances of Turbonomic, but the team has the ability to allow us to tackle that from a licensing perspective. This is a pretty minimal concern. We tackle GDPR or data sovereignty from the perspective that we just apply an instance of Turbonomic within that specific country region.

If we have any questions or concerns, the account team as well as the product support team are always there and very accommodating to help us. With any problems that we have, even if they are not built into the product, we have worked with them to give them feedback on the product and on how we would like it to work. They have worked with us to help import some of that functionality into the product so it is available, not just for us, but for other customers who use the product as well.

Positive

The initial setup was relatively straightforward. It was a pretty easy setup. I wouldn't say it was any more difficult than any other tool that we set up or have used in our environment. It is pretty easy to deploy, then probably just as easy to configure once it was deployed.

It helps us gauge our return on investment for the purchase of Turbonomic, based on the overall actions that we've taken and how much money we have saved by taking those actions over a period of time.

In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000. It has identified a lot more cost saving areas, but we haven't taken advantage of those.

The amount of tickets that we have had come in for performance issues has surmounted to almost nothing in the calendar year. I don't know what we had before, but now in a calendar year, it is less than 10 to 12 tickets a year for a performance issue.

It has definitely provided a huge benefit in the area of man-hours saved. Without the tool, we would be flying blind on that and would probably be spending a lot of man-hours trying to formulate in-house strategies on how to reduce costs. Our company is a very lean company, in terms of headcount for IT resources as well as cloud skillset awareness. Having a tool like Turbonomic has allowed us to adopt and implement strategies like this, like cost saving measures with the public cloud, probably making us exponentially faster than we could have been without them.

When we had hit on how it ingests the workload performance data to help provide performance-driven analysis or recommendations to provide a recommendation for whether a workload should be scaled up or down, one of the things that has been kind of like a side effect to the ingestion of this data and the business decisions coming out of Turbonomic is it has been helping us identify workloads which are really not being used at all. From identifying those workloads that are not being used, we are able to go through our lifecycle management faster and more efficiently than we would have in the past. We have been able to decommission servers, essentially deleting them from our public cloud and completely reducing the operational cost of that workload altogether. So, it is not just ensuring that the VM is right-sized or locking in a commitment, but identifying that the workload is so low to utilize.

We are able to go back to the business and having a discussion with them based on the utilization of that VM over the course of a period of time for the data that we have, then have the justification and communication with the business to say, "Yeah, it doesn't make sense to have this workload in the environment anymore. Let's delete it." or, "Yeah, it's something that isn't used it all. Let's go ahead and delete it." It is allowing us to identify areas to save cost in those areas, but it's also helping us say, "This workload is costing us this much money. Is it really worth spending this much money every month or so for this solution that is running in the public cloud? Is it generating enough revenue for the business to warrant the run rate? Is the solution providing a service to the business that justifies the operational consumption on a monthly basis?" We are able to have these internal discussions within the business based on the data that Turbonomic is providing. This is a side effect of the product because the product is not providing these decisions and implementing them, but the product is providing us the data to have these discussions and net these decisions as an outcome. Then, this ends up saving money in our public cloud offering.

We did try some other solutions as PoCs before we worked with Turbonomic. Unfortunately, I am not aware of who those companies were because that was before I came onboard with the team. The big thing that it always came down to was whether we were going to adopt the entire implementation setup and configuration aspect. For example:

• How much work was it going to take to deploy the appliance? 
• How many man-hours would it take to configure it? 
• What the continuous configuration and management was going to be?
• Was it really saving us time and money in the long run?

Other solutions always fell flat because of how much involvement it would require from IT to deploy and work it, but also because of the ongoing configuration and maintenance of the appliance.

It doesn't pick up the entire supply chain automatically. It requires minimal effort in configuration. We have to show a relationship in a sense that this workload is associated with another workload. However, once that relationship is established, the solution helps us manage our business-critical applications by understanding the underlying supply chain of resources.

Our capital expenses are relatively flat. We are not purchasing any new equipment. We are actually in a consolidation process. Everything is getting moved to the public cloud. From an operational perspective, with our workloads being in the public cloud, it has provided us:

1. The ability to identify what we have running in the public cloud and how much it will actually cost us. 
2. How we can reduce public cloud operational costs, e.g., what actions can we do to help reduce operational expenses in the public cloud? 

It identifies areas where we can delete storage that is not being used. We can address right-sizing workloads that are overprovisioned in the public cloud as well as logging in long-term commitments with workloads in the public cloud and saving on incidents, on average for us, over 33% or higher for our workloads, as opposed to just paying the pay as you go hourly rate with the provider.

Try to look at things, not just from a cost savings perspective, but also from performance avoidance. We looked at: How do we quantify our spend in the public cloud and how do we avoid our spend in the public cloud? But we always forgot that there were workloads out there that do have performance impacts. So, we counted this as a cost savings and cost optimization tool, but it became so much more than that. 

We developed a crawl, walk, run approach. We took some workloads in our public cloud and looked at the business decisions. We took the decisions, then we tested to see what the outcomes were with them. As we went through those actions manually, gained the confidence on how those actions were being made, and what the post impact of that was, that allowed the business to become more confident in the tool. We no longer needed to have meetings to discuss why we were doing what we were doing.

It then became a point of communication. An action would be taken because Turbonomic said it was the right thing to do. Nowadays, it's not even questioned. When I talked to people about trying out Turbonomic and looking at how to adopt it in their workload, I say to look at areas which are current pain points in your environment and see where Turbonomic would fit into that instead of trying to come up with the workloads or use cases to plug into Turbonomic. Instead of trying to figure out what you have or seeing where you could put Turbonomic in your environment, see where your environment fits into Turbonomic. That was the way that we were able to drive adoption much faster and use it, not just as a reporting tool, but also as an orchestration tool as well.

They have some room to grow. I wouldn't give them a perfect 10. I would probably give them an eight and a half or nine (as a whole number).

Currently, we're doing migrations for older versions of Windows, both in the Azure Cloud and on-prem in our VMware vCenters. We use this tool to do comparisons between the current and future workloads and what would they look like, based on the usage. So, it is kind of a rightsizing exercise or rightsizing, either downsizing or upsizing, depending on the requirements. We just put all that information into Turbonomic, and it builds us out a new VM, exactly the size that we need, based on the trending and analysis. Then, you can also put in some factors, saying, "Look, it was Windows 2008, and we're going to windows 2019, or whatever. We're going to grow the database by X amount." This tool helps you do some of the analysis in order for you to get the right size right out-of-the-box. We love that.

I oversee a lot of stuff, so I don't really get an opportunity to go in there to point and click. We have people who do that.

It is doing Azure Cloud and VMware. Turbonomic understands the resource relationships at each of these layers and the risks to performance for each. You can compartmentalize your most critical workloads to make sure that they are getting the required resources so the business can continue to run, especially when we get hit by a lot of work at once. 

The solution provides us with a single platform that manages the full application stack. In our decision to go with this solution, this was critical. We had so many vCenters and physical clusters out there. We had virtual and physical machines all over the place. Turbonomic was the way we were able to centralize all our vCenters and get a good picture of what is going on in the environment. It was all over the place without it, so there was no way that we could centralize and work on getting off of some of the older hardware platforms that we were on and start moving to converged, then eventually hyper-converged. This tool allowed us to take a good look at our environment and decide how we were going to size those workloads into those new areas, off of the old blade chassis and old standalone systems, to the more modern hyper-converged systems.

In our organization, it is optimizing application performance as a continuous process that is beyond human scale. The reason is because there are times of the year that we have these big hits. It is like if you were Verizon and you were to sell all your cell phones during the Christmas time. Well, we have a very similar thing here at our company, where we have a period of time we basically shut the business down. We have to give critical resources to critical applications, giving them the resources that they need in order to function. In order for us to do that, we are able to take critical workloads and put them off into their own area, then determine how much we have to take from the rest of the resources, which we take from the rest of the systems in order to put it into new clusters or systems. That is super critical for us every year.

We use it for management and rightsizing of our platforms, specifically for migration activities, because we're always doing it. The migration has been the biggest thing that I personally use.

There are a number of tools that we use in it. Some of the things that I request are the data dumps. They write some kind of scripts or something inside there where they are actually able to pull for me CSV files. Then, I can go in, take all that information, and build a master gold list for my migration activities. 

Everything that I ask for, I get. I don't know what they are clicking nor do I know what they're doing, but when I request it, I get it. There are all sorts of different ideas and scenarios that I put forth to the developers.

Turbonomic provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. While I'm not in there banging around on the tool all the time, I can tell you that I do very much benefit from it. On Monday, I was getting additional information from the Turbonomic guys.

We use the solution’s automation mode to continuously assure application performance by having the software manage resources in real-time. 

There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit. It does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes. It goes out there and just kind of goes crazy. There needs to be something that kind of throttles things back a little bit. I have personally seen where we've been working on things, then pulled servers out of the VMware cluster and found that Turbonomic was still trying to ship resources to and from that node. So, there has to be some kind of throttling or ability for it to not be so buggy in that area. Because we've pulled nodes out of a cluster into maintenance mode, then brought it back up, and it tried to put workloads on that outside of a cluster. There may be something that is available for this, but it seems very kludgy to me.

I would like an easier to use interface for somebody like me, who just goes in there and needs to run simple things. Maybe that exists, but I don't know about it. Also, maybe I should be a bit more trained on it instead of depending on someone else to do it on my behalf.

There are some things that probably could be made a little easier. I know that there is a lot of terminology in the application. Sometimes applications come up with their own weird terminology for things, and it seems to me that is what Turbonomic did. 

Three years.

I have never had a problem with it. The product is a little over anxious at times.

When we did the rollout in that phased approach, it was not difficult at all to roll in new technologies. They converged and hyper-converged into Turbonomic. So, it's definitely scalable. It moved right into the company pretty easily.

There are quite a few people using it, mostly for operations type of work. There are probably 25 users from operations, support, the performance team, and performance planning.

I have worked personally with Turbonomic, one of their guys, on some of this stuff. I haven't talked to him in a while, but he helped us develop a lot. The support for Turbonomic is incredible. 

Their technical support is excellent. By far, they are probably the best. It's probably why I am sitting here talking today, because I have to give these guys top props. I think the employee enthusiasm about this product is absolutely top-notch. It would probably be a great place to work.

I've worked with the Tier 1 support and their consultants. We had a consultant here for a year who was absolutely a top-notch fellow. He just became part of the team. He wanted to learn how we were doing things and tool the application to do what we needed it to do, which he did. He also left great instructions. A lot of his legacy is still there and being used today. 

We were using a combination of vROps and VMware. We were also using BMC TrueSight, which we still use today. There are a couple of others out there, because the network team uses a few things. There is all sorts of stuff that I think they were kind of hog-tying together to make them work.

Some of these solutions are ingrained in our processes and have been around literally forever. So, there isn't the staff or the resources right now to rewrite a lot of these things. Currently, we do kind of a side-by-side comparison, and I believe some folks have written some ways to integrate the new data from Turbonomic into the old way of doing things. That's just a culture change at the company. It's just a big place that has been around for a long time, which works slowly.

This solution was brought to us by one of our AVPs. She had worked at HPE, and we didn't know about it. She said, "Let's look at this," because apparently she used it at HPE. We looked at it, and said, "Ah, this is great." Then, we went with it.

Turbonomic is more customizable with a lot more features. 

Even though you can turn on automation in VMware, it's not very good. It's kludgy and has a tendency to break things, where the autobalance of workload management that Turbonomic does within VMware is much better than the VMware tools which are designed for this. That may change, because VMware seems to be doing great with this. However, for right now, Turbonomic is the only way to go. 

TrueSight is just straight up what you see is what you get.

I went to the training when they first rolled it out, but I wasn't involved in the setup.

They did the setup in sections. So, they started off with the lower environments and some of the clusters out there that really needed a lot of attention, mostly blade servers and such. So, it was a gradual rollout. I think the entire rollout was somewhere in the area of a year to a year and a half. However, to get it fully running, where we could use this solution to our benefit, that was at least six months.

We use scheduling in real-time for implementing the solution’s actions as well as manual execution, which is when we schedule for a later date to change activities. We have had to enable or disable certain things. It seems to do that just fine.

We used Turbonomic for everything to do with the setup. On our side, it required about five FTEs, who were engineering and operations personnel. There were folks who were creating the design and where it would be rolled out. That design was passed down to the operations folks who were actually implementing everything. So, it was done in phases.

We only have two engineers doing maintenance, a primary and a backup, and this is like their extracurricular activity.

The ROI would be in the return of hardware, specifically for a lot of the older hardware where we start to go into the converged systems. That is where we are seeing our ROI. We are getting rid of that old, junky hardware, starting to integrate and align things into one specific way of managing all our workloads, but not on old hardware. If anything, the ROI is end of life hardware elimination.

Also, we see ROI in extended support agreements (ESA) for old software. Migration activities seem to be where Turbonomic has really benefited us the most. It's one click and done. We have new machines ready to go with Turbonomic, which are properly sized instead of somebody sitting there with a spreadsheet and guessing. So, my return on investment would certainly be on currency, from a software and hardware perspective.

Turbonomic provides a proactive approach to avoiding performance degradation. Our capacity and performance team use this solution as part of other tools that they utilize.

The solution provides application-driven prioritization, with its AppDynamics integration, to show us how top business applications and transactions are performing. If Turbonomic comes back and tells us, "Hey, this application needs more resources. Or, you're coming up onto a period where it will need more resources. Start planning now." We have certainly used it for that and will continue to use it for that. We have actually used it for troubleshooting a couple of times, saving us 25 percent when it comes to performance-based issues.

We have seen a 25 percent reduction in tickets opened for application issues.

Turbonomic has definitely helped to save human resource time and cost involved in monitoring and optimizing our estate. It has automated a lot of things. We have saved 30 to 35 percent in human resource time and cost, which is pretty substantial. We don't have a big workforce here, so we have to use all the automation we can get.

We did an architectural review. We had to look at other options, but I don't know exactly what those were.

Some of the tools which already exist are not that great. They really need to up their game if they're going to keep up with something like Turbonomic.

If you have a big shop, and it's scattered all over the place, then definitely take a look at this tool. Make sure you take a look at this tool because there is probably fit for purpose licensing for any size organization. It's a great automation process.

Turbonomic shows application metrics and estimates the impact of taking a suggested action based on its input from AppDynamics. So, we plug it into AppDynamics, then AppDynamics and Turbonomic seem to work together for that. 

It knows what business-critical applications we have, but I don't think it manages anything specifically within the application itself. It is mostly just resource-driven.

As money starts to get tight and budgets start to get really scrutinized, I think people are going to have to start looking at using Turbonomic to help optimize cloud operations to reduce cloud costs.

We are going to continue to use it going forward. I just don't know at what level. There are a lot of changes being made to the infrastructure, so it's going to depend on the tools and things that become available, like VCF as well as all the products that they have built-in through vROps, enhanced vROps, and things that already come with the software.

I would rate it an eight (out of 10). Personally, there is a lot that it does that a regular person like me does not have the time to sit down and dig into it. We expect things to be a little bit more automated. That is why I gave it an eight. I would give it a 10 (out of 10) if I got in there and it's like, look, click, click, and click. However, I don't know if there is that kind of a comfort level here yet to just let this thing go and have its day with the place.

We pretty much use it only for load balancing between hosts.

We're a payroll company and Turbonomic is really important for us from about November until March, each year, because our end-of-year processing increases our load by six to seven times. That's especially true in November and December when companies are running their last payrolls. If we're going to be losing any customers, they definitely have to finalize everything all at one shot. In addition, companies that pay out bonuses at the end of the year also have to be running all these extra payrolls. There are a slew of reasons for extra payrolls at that time of year. They may need to do some cleanup if they messed up something and didn't do so all year long. At that point, they have to do it before December 31st. And after December 31st is the beginning of tax preparation, so our systems are very heavily utilized.

It does a great job year-round, but we're in a situation where we have plenty of resources during most of the year, but at year-end, depending on how busy it gets, it can overwhelm the systems if you're not careful, depending on where a VM sits, on which host.

We have parts of our payroll engine that run pretty hot, depending on what's happening. Those pieces of the payroll engine and the SQL servers tend to overrun a server pretty quickly, if you're not careful. But Turbonomic always does a great job of making sure that that is not happening.

Our company is growing like a monster. Even during COVID we've been growing, where a lot of companies, unfortunately, are not. Because we've gained a lot of new customers during COVID, because other payroll companies have gone under or because our pricing model is good, the result has been a lot more load on our systems. And even though we've had much more load, Turbonomic has done a great job of keeping everything balanced. We're able to completely utilize our systems before having to introduce more hardware.

Its whole job is to manage our business-critical applications by understanding the underlying supply chain of resources. In my opinion, applications are applications. When your application is running, it's reserving a piece of memory, it's utilizing the CPU, and it's utilizing the network interface. There is a certain limit to the hardware that's available to it. Applications need watching. If we were to use the pieces where it digs down inside the application, it would probably even do better, but we're not using those pieces yet. In the end, no matter what the application is doing, it's using resources, either on a regular basis or on a random basis, and Turbonomic looks for patterns and spikes and how long these patterns last. It looks at the risk of a spike only happening for 30 seconds versus 30 minutes. It makes decisions to move other things off or move off the application in question. It does a great job keeping that balance.

We hardly do any manual execution. Maintenance windows are when it's probably most important to us. For example, when we're upgrading or doing a repair on an ESX host, we're really taxing the other servers because those CPUs and all the I/O capability on that host are lost. That's when it's even more important for Turbononic to keep the rest of the system healthy enough and to keep the system going without showing any degradation. It helps us while we're doing maintenance.

It provides a proactive approach to avoiding performance degradation, absolutely. It always looks at history and looks for patterns. In a lot of cases, it knows that there's a scheduled task or that, on average, a customer is always like hopping on around three o'clock. After a week or two of seeing the exact same things happening—although that timeframe really depends on how big your organization is, the bigger your organization, the longer it takes to understand the full dynamic—it really understood all the patterns and all the schedules. In the past, we'd see systems starting to get a little hotter and then a little hotter still. With Turbonomic, that issue would just go away by shuffling stuff around. After a week or two we wouldn't see that thing getting warm anymore. When that application or server got hot, it never put that host into any kind of jeopardy anymore, not even a little bit where we thought, "Hey, we should look at that."

We have definitely seen a reduction in tickets open for application performance issues. In some cases we get tickets for performance problems because the developer wrote crappy code and wants to blame us in infrastructure. But I can show them, "Look, we're not overloaded." They look at some of the logs we provide them that show that the servers are operating at full capacity and usually they find that there's some kind of weird issue with a database query that they wrote. The solution has definitely reduced tickets for application performance problems a little bit, but it has mostly decreased troubleshooting time.

It's helped us to always meet our SLAs. In previous companies I've worked at, the company was either so cheap, or the boss didn't understand how the infrastructure works, that we got to the point where we were over utilizing our hardware. That's where Turbonomic really makes a difference because without it you can be way over-committing what you have versus what you need. You always have servers that are sitting there idle, so it's best if you can balance the ones that run hot with the ones that run idle and shuffle around use of them based on what you're utilizing. If you don't have Turbonomic, then whatever boxes happen to be on there could be in overdrive to the point where you start ballooning and paging. That can cause a denial of service because you don't have enough resources to handle the workload. It's really great to try to maximize every inch of your infrastructure, to make sure you're utilizing everything to its fullest capacity.

Whoever is on call loves Turbonomic because if we didn't have it we'd be getting alerted much more often. That's especially true at three o'clock in the morning when some backup or something that's not even important is running and the pager will go off because it hits some threshold for too long. Turbonomic sees, "Okay, this server does this at this time and it's going to use a lot more resources than anybody else," and it just shuffles everything away.

I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance. Most of the time it tends to be our SQL servers. 

When I first started at this company, only the boss knew about Turbonomic, and he had totally forgotten to even mention to me that they had it. They weren't using any other software like that. I was always curious and I kept asking all the other guys about how the system always stays so balanced and that we never seem to have a host that runs really hot, under any circumstances. Finally, in my first review, I asked him, "What are you guys doing there in the background that you haven't told me about, that keeps the system so balanced?" And he said, "Oh yeah, we're using Turbonomic." For whatever reason, they didn't have a DNS entry for it. The guy who put it in, he always just connected to it by IP, and he totally forgot about it because it just works. You don't have to go in there and do a lot to it unless there is a problem, and we never have a problem.

Also, since we're only using it for the infrastructure part, it's not telling us anything about the application. It just tells us about the server that is running the application. But if the application is getting bogged down because you're starting to see disk I/O problems, it does a fabulous job of recommending. "Hey, let's move this here or do that there." In every case that I can ever remember, it has always done a great job.

It doesn't really require any maintenance. Just set it up and let it do its job.

On the infrastructure side, they've been doing it long enough. But until I get a better use case for the cloud, the only thing I can think of is that I'd like to see it work with SevOne, when you're doing true monitoring, so that the software packages work together. 

It would be good for Turbonomic, on their side, to integrate with other companies like AppDynamics or SolarWinds or other monitoring software. I feel that the actual monitoring of applications, mixed in with their abilities, would help. That would be the case wherever Turbonomic lacks the ability to monitor an application or in cases where applications are so customized that it's not going to be able to handle them. There is monitoring that you can do with scripting that you may not be able to do with Turbonomic. So if they were able to integrate better with third-party monitoring software—and obviously they can't do them all, but there are a few major companies that everybody uses—and find a way to hook into those a little bit more, the two could work together better.

We were actually a customer of theirs even before it was Turbonomic, back when it was VMTurbo. It's been at least 10 years.

I've never ever had it crash or go down.

Turbonomic is one of the best software solutions ever written. You just set it up and you only go in there when you're having a problem. The truth is that we don't have that many problems anymore. The only time we had a problem was shortly after I first started, because none of the guys even paid attention to it because it always did its job. We ended up having to change our vCenter server. We moved from a physical box to an appliance and when we did that, the vCenter had to have a new name. Because none of the guys, other than my boss, were around when Turbonomic was set up, they didn't log into it because it always did its job. They totally forgot about it. And for something like two weeks we were seeing some goofiness where boxes were getting hot. I messaged, "Hey, did you put that change in Turbonomic?" and he replied, "Did I put what in what?" Other than that, we just don't have to go in there. It works so well that we just don't do anything to it.

We have it set up to throw out some alerts if things get too haywire, but it didn't even get to that point. We like to be very proactive in keeping our systems very low in resources. Had we let the problem go on a little bit longer, it probably would have thrown out an alert, but the problem was that we didn't have the vCenter in there.

At the first shop I worked at where we got Turbonomic, we had over 60 hosts and it did a magnificent job. In my current company we're only monitoring 15 or 20. I can't see it having a problem. The more servers you have, the more return you get on it.

In terms of increasing our usage, we're always pushing the developers to do stuff with it. The problem for us is that we're owned by a parent company and IT infrastructure works for and reports to the parent company. But the IT development software group reports to the actual company. They're under a totally different chain of command, so we can't really dictate anything that they do. All we can do is make recommendations, but their director has his own plans. We try to show them the benefits, but it's a lot of work to sit down and configure it, which is not worth it if they're not going to use it. And we have enough other projects that we have to work on, so we have to pick our battles.

Their tech support is awesome. We've never had any problems with them. But to be honest with you, we haven't really had to call them in 10 years, except for one time when I called them because I couldn't find our license key. It was not about supporting the software, per se.

We were trying to use VMware's version of it, but it's a pile of junk. It doesn't work. It just sees that something is busy and moves it somewhere where it's slower. Turbonomic is better because it trends and it looks at history. If it knows that something is only going to run hot for 30 seconds, but it's going to take 45 seconds to move everything around, then it's not worth moving. You don't get that out of VMware's product. It just saw, "Okay, so it's hot, start moving." But the problem is that when you start doing the move, you're also now utilizing even more resources, and you could save on those when the move is going to take longer than the actual task that's causing the spike. Turbonomic sees that and it doesn't necessarily move stuff just for the sake of moving it. It knows that this is something that happens every day at this time and we're just going to ride it out.

We were actually one of their first customers, when they were still ironing out all the wrinkles of their algorithm. My boss and I were both looking at it and seeing how it was shuffling stuff around non-stop. It couldn't even gather data at a point. It was already moving it somewhere else. We called in, took some notes, and they produced a new version. We did what felt like beta-testing even though it had been a production piece for a while. But they were very responsive and produced patches really quickly. The company was a really good company. They were really friendly, and they're always trying to deliver what they promise.

If you can't set this thing up then you shouldn't be in IT. We're only using it from the infrastructure side. You log into it, you set your passwords, import your vCenter into it, put in the credentials, and tell it what vCenters you want it to monitor. And it just starts gathering data.

We did our setup many years ago and, back then, we had a guy there walking us through it because they were a brand-new company. They really gave us the white-glove treatment. I think we may have spent two hours on it, but most of that was talking. If you buckle down and just shut up and do it, it would probably take 15 or 20 minutes. It only takes one person to implement it.

We have six guys who use Turbonomic now. Some are higher-level guys and we have our entry-level guys, but everybody has access to it and looks at it if they need to.

I don't know what we would have bought if we didn't have it, so it's hard to say how much we have saved. We may have bought more hardware thinking we needed more hardware when we didn't. We just needed to shuffle stuff around. So it's hard to say what we would have done if we didn't have it, and if we didn't have that reporting telling us, "Hey, this is where the problem is".

If you're a super-small business, it may be a little bit pricey for you. The problem with small businesses is that the owners are super-cheap and they don't want to spend anything unless they absolutely have to. It's really hard to explain this solution to people with that mentality. But you can run more servers on less physical hardware because it will keep things balanced based on your usage patterns. 

But in large, enterprise companies where money is, maybe, less of an issue, Turbonomic is not that expensive. I can't imagine why any big company would not buy it, for what it does.

If you didn't have it and you went out and bought a whole new server, you're talking about spending something like $7,000 with Microsoft for a decent license, and then you're talking about a VMware license as well, which I would venture is in the $5,000 to $7000 range. And memory is so expensive all the time. And another server is going to cost, say, $10,000 to $15,000. If you do that twice over a couple of years, Turbonomic will have paid for itself. And that's not to mention the fact that it's also made things so much better for you because it has kept the system stable. I don't think Turbonomic is expensive, in that sense.

I put in a lot of expense and time in the very beginning, because I was trying to learn it. But if you're smart, you'll look back and see how well it's managing your systems now and you'll feel like a fool that you went out and bought all that new hardware in the past, because you probably could have gotten away without it. If you're truly maximizing your systems, the way that Turbonomic does, you can get away with less hardware with the same infrastructure because it's maximizing the hardware better. And that keeps your licensing costs down.

We did a lot of research, especially at that time, and there aren't really a whole lot of other software solutions out there, at least nothing that's comparable to Turbonomic. There are other companies that do something similar, but they don't have anywhere near the level of complexity or the type of algorithms that Turbonomic is using to keep the system stable. 

I don't remember what we evaluated at the time, other than VMware, because everybody works with Vmware, but the other solutions we had looked at were not even in the realm of Turbonomic, so we didn't evaluate them for more than a day.

If you're looking into Turbonomic, just do it. You will not regret it.

The biggest thing that I've learned is that you don't realize how much your hardware can do until it's truly balanced. Some people operate foolishly and they just won't step up because they're being cheap. Other people want to be ultra-conservative because they don't ever want to have a problem, but using software like this, you realize that there is a balance. If you trust the software, you get to utilize your hardware better while still feeling like you have those reserves available without putting yourself at risk by being foolish.

It provides a single platform that can manage the full application stacks, but we're not using that aspect. Our developers are not interested in using it yet. We're in the process of looking for a new monitoring software as well, and I'm pushing heavily for them to look at SevOne but we've had some unfortunate experiences with the people at SevOne. If we go down that route and start using SevOne, my boss is going to lean on them much more heavily to start integrating with Turbonomic.

It only handles virtualization right now, for us. It's probably going to start handling cloud soon, because we're just starting to migrate things there. We have some things in the cloud, but we're looking at moving quite a few other servers up to Azure. The solution understands the resource relationships perfectly, on-prem. From what I have seen so far of the cloud piece, it seems to understand that, mostly, although the cloud is still fairly new compared to on-prem infrastructure. I have no doubt that they're going to make huge strides and make that part even better. I don't know that it's as good in the cloud as it is on-prem. We have used it a little bit in some testing, but we haven't run it in production for any long periods of time. But we're really hoping it reduces our cloud cost at some point, because those cloud vendors really take advantage of every ounce of I/O that you use.

Honestly, on a scale of one to 10, I would give Turbonomic a 12. It's way better than a lot of software. Other solutions look really shiny—and if you're like a fish and all you care about is like looking at something shiny, that's one thing—but when those products are delivered, they don't do half of what they say they're going to do. They'll say, "Oh, that's in the next release," or "Oh, we're working on that". Turbonomic was very upfront about what their software did. Yes, they had a few bugs, but they were also just opening at the time. We expected that in the beginning because it was a brand-new company. But what they told you it would do, it did, and it did it well, too. Nowadays, that's hard to find.