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Successful migrations to cloud require proper planning and analysis to determine the right applications to move, the right cloud provider, the best pricing model and much more. Whether you're considering public cloud, private or hybrid, CloudScape has you covered.
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud Architect at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees | 3.5 | I used RISC Networks for on-premise application discovery to assess cloud migration. It effectively detects stack dependencies and provides analytics. My main issue is its inability to instrument code for deep application inspection. |
| Architect at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees | 4.5 | We used this for AWS migration analysis, gaining valuable visibility into application integrations. However, initial setup was slow, requiring skilled resources, and its high cost is a long-term concern. I recommend exploring alternatives despite its benefits. |
We had some applications which were on-premise and wanted to assess them before deciding to move them to the cloud. RISC Networks falls into the area of application discoveries, so that is what we used it for.
We have been using for an engagement for the last three months.
When we go to a customer's environment, there may be a lot of servers, and we have absolutely no clue what is there on those servers. All we know is there are some applications, but we don't know what state they are in. So, we need to know about the compute, storage, networking, infrastructure, etc., and RISC Networks helps us to assess this and come up with some sort of data. They also run some sort of analytics on top, which gives recommendations. That is where it helps.
The valuable feature of RISC Networks would be detecting application stack dependencies. If there are applications spread across front servers, it has a way of writing the data.
They are a bit weaker in areas where we have run to external REST services. This part is provided in our code. Applications, like AppDynamics and Dynatrace are much better because they instrument their code. If they could add this feature, the product would be better.
The major issue that I had with this product is that it is not instrumenting. Hence, I can't do a very deep level application inspection.
The stability is nice. I have had no issues with it.
We don't put stress on it. It is like an agent which runs in the background. Thus, there is nothing more that we need to do.
We installed it on a few machines, and it did work well. We haven't tried it on a huge scale.
Our customer had around 50 servers.
They did do a demo for us in the beginning and provided us a type of a sandbox for the demo. This was more of a sales demo, so it was good from that perspective, but it was not a deep dive technical demo.
Technical support was prompt the time that we contacted them. It took a couple days for them to respond to us.
The deployment is not difficult on the AWS environment. There is a bit of a learning curve as with any product, but it is not super complex. They have pretty good tutorials and review demos.
This product would provide better ROI for larger environments.
The licensing was bought by the customer.
We considered AWS Application Discovery Service. We also talked to ATA devices.
We went with RISC Networks because we had a license of them. In addition, AWS Application Discovery Service only does a VMware or Hyper-V evaluation. This was a physical service, which they don't support.
This product came directly from the customer. ATA devices were not very independent products because they were bought out by Cisco. It was considered that there might be a bit of a bias because of that.
Our on-premise version is a hybrid. It has a cloud part that it relies on and uses AWS Cloud software as part of it.
If they have a use case which involved large scale migration of applications onto the cloud, I would recommend to first check if Amazon Services work for you, because they are free. They don't work in a number of scenarios, in which case, you should use this third-party. This is where I would recommend using RISC Networks.
The primary use case is migrating the existing work load. Therefore, we use it to analyze our application portfolio for migrating us to AWS.
It identified integrations between applications that we didn't know about. It saved us a lot of hassle from that perspective, because we knew about them upfront. As opposed to migrating the applications, then finding out the integrated applications either had to be rolled back or would need some extra work.
It seemed to take a relatively long time to implement, which surprised me. I thought it would be quicker.
The initial deployment and installation does require skilled resources. I was hoping it would be easier to do, and that some of our own team could do it, but we had to engage some professional services team members to do it for us. We would have liked to have done the initial deployment and installation in-house.
While it worked well for our use case, I get the impression that it doesn't support every workload. If people are using other platforms, they might not integrate as well into this solution.
Sometimes it can be a bit slow, but overall, it works pretty well.
It is easy to scale.
I haven't used the technical support.
The integration and configuration through the AWS environment was a bit difficult.
We are using the paid version of the product, which we purchased on the AWS Marketplace. We just put it on the local CIOs credit card. That was the easiest way for us to do it, and we wanted to get it up and running quickly. So, we put it down as a regular working operating expense.
It is expensive, but we can justify it. It would definitely be an expensive option in night time to run it continually. We decided to make a purchase just to help us with this migration. However, in the long-term, I don't know if we'll use it because of the cost.
The product was recommended by AWS, so we went with it and didn't do much of a pre-evaluation. We decided to try it and see how it worked out.
I would recommend to others to look around at other options as well to do a comparison. That is something we obviously didn't do.
We are very happy with it.
It integrates well with a lot of Microsoft and Oracle applications along with Microsoft and Linux workloads. It is also running on some IBM workloads as well.
