Cisco Intersight vs Cisco UCS Director comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
204
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (2nd), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st)
Cisco Intersight
Ranking in Cloud Management
15th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (26th)
Cisco UCS Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
24th
Average Rating
7.2
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.3%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Intersight is 2.0%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 0.6%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
Unique Categories:
Cloud Migration
2.9%
Virtualization Management Tools
14.6%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
2.8%
No other categories found
 

Featured Reviews

DT
Jan 31, 2024
Helps to optimize costs and automate on-prem changes
Rightsizing and right categorization are part of optimization exercises. Turbonomic provides a single platform to help optimize costs and resource efficiency. It provides good visibility of performance at the resource level. This visibility and analytics have helped bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams such as Applications and Infrastructure. The visibility and analytics from Turbonomic have not helped reduce our mean time to resolution. We only used it for cost savings and not optimization. Turbonomic has not impacted our application performance. You can do it if you integrate it with a tool like Dynatrace but not in itself. Turbonomic can optimize the monitoring of public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and/or Kubernetes. That is where it specializes. With respect to the cloud, their algorithm is pretty good, and their recommendations are relatively trustworthy as compared to other tools. For cloud optimization, it is pretty good. It is also pretty good for balancing on-prem resources. On the on-prem side, we had some automation or scheduling in place. On the cloud side, we did not do any scheduling. On the on-prem side, it would automatically go and make the changes needed, but on the cloud side, we took the recommendations, and we made the changes ourselves. We did not schedule them in the cloud. It is hard to quantify the time saved, but the analysis part is pretty good. We must have saved time and money. Turbonomic helped to optimize costs and automate the changes on-prem. There were savings, but I do not have an exact number because we did it in phases. The first time, there would be more savings, and from the second round, they would slow down because you already reaped the benefit from the first-time recommendations. We did not do all the changes at once, so I do not have the numbers, but typically, any organization would have 20% savings in VMs and disks. Turbonomic does a good job. It depends on how big an organization is, but on average, the tool can cut down the VM cost by 20%.
David Fartouk - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 21, 2024
Helps know whether a solution is deployed correctly, but the automation capabilities are difficult to use
We use the solution for server management across various locations With Intersight, it is pretty simple to manage all the environments. We don't really need to deploy any management solution. Intersight can validate our environment. It tells us if the environment has issues and whether they are…
OB
Apr 13, 2023
Enables centralized management, but the tool is complicated and expensive
I use the solution for data center upgrades The solution is helpful for centralized management. There is a lack of information and clarity. We need to invest a lot of time and effort in gathering information about the entire system, including its network components. The tool should be a lot more…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"On-premises, one advantage I find particularly appealing is the ability to create policies for automatic CPU and memory scaling based on demand."
"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."
"The most important feature to us is an objective measurement of VM headroom per cluster. In addition, the ability to check for the right-sizing of VMs."
"I like the analytics that help us optimize compatibility. Whereas Azure Advisor tells us what we have to do, Turbonomic has automation which actually does those things. That means we don't have to be present to get them done and simplifies our IT engineers' jobs."
"With Turbonomic, we were able to reduce our ESX cluster size and save money on our maintenance and license renewals. It saved us around $75,000 per year but it's a one-time reduction in VMware licensing. We don't renew the support. The ongoing savings is probably $50,000 to $75,000 a year, but there was a one-time of $200,000 plus."
"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."
"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."
"We like that Turbonomic shows application metrics and estimates the impact of taking a suggested action. It provides us a map of resource utilization as part of its recommendation. We evaluate and compare that to what we think would be appropriate from a human perspective to that what Turbonomic is doing, then take the best action going forward."
"Provides an overall view using a single portal."
"What I like most about Cisco Intersight is its manageability."
"The product has good integration."
"The tool helps to manage Cisco servers."
"Our organization uses Cisco Intersight since it helps manage our physical infrastructure."
"Scalable portfolio of services for remote device management, with good cloud integration. It's also easy to set up."
"Intersight can validate our environment."
"We enjoy having an inside view of all the data centers and all the EdgeX nodes within a single portal rather than going into the EdgeX connections one by one."
"The solution is helpful for centralized management."
"UCS director enables us to be more productive and more agile, and also more self-sufficient because we don't have to depend on anybody else."
"Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."
"This is a user-friendly solution that is very good and easy to use."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"An easy and strong configuration, along with its low cost, are some of the features of the solution."
"The product is flexible and compact. It has a lot of features."
"A product that really aids in systems management without complexity."
 

Cons

"The issue for us with the automation is we are considering starting to do the hot adds, but there are some problems with Windows Server 2019 and hot adds. It is a little buggy. So, if we turn that on with a cluster that has a lot of Windows 2019 Servers, then we would see a blue screen along with a lot of applications as well. Depending on what you are adding, cores or memory, it doesn't necessarily even take advantage of that at that moment. A reboot may be required, and we can't do that until later. So, that decreases the benefit of the real-time. For us, there is a lot of risk with real-time."
"There is room for improvement [with] upgrades. We have deployed the newer version, version 8 of Turbonomic. The problem is that there is no way to upgrade between major Turbonomic versions. You can upgrade minor versions without a problem, but when you go from version 6 to version 7, or version 7 to version 8, you basically have to deploy it new and let it start gathering data again. That is a problem because all of the data, all of the savings calculations that had been done on the old version, are gone. There's no way to keep track of your lifetime savings across versions."
"The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens."
"I do not like Turbonomic's new licensing model. The previous model was pretty straightforward, whereas the new model incorporates what most of the vendors are doing now with cores and utilization. Our pricing under the new model will go up quite a bit. Before, it was pretty straightforward, easy to understand, and reasonable."
"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 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."
"I would like Turbonomic to add more services, especially in the cloud area. I have already told them this. They can add Azure NetApp Files. They can add Azure Blob storage. They have already added Azure App service, but they can do more."
"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."
"It's a very complex solution."
"Cisco Intersight needs some improvement in terms of stability. Hybrid cloud management and proper hyperscaler tie-up are other areas for improvement."
"The usability must be better."
"The unique problem with Cisco Intersight is that it's not supporting some players."
"The product could be easy to use."
"When new features are added, the service becomes full of bugs."
"The solution needs some enhancement in order to build the cluster in two nodes."
"The product's setup should be easier."
"The product could allow more programmatic opportunities through better development of the API."
"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."
"The areas where this product can be improved are the integrations and the UI. These features are not as friendly compared to VMware products."
"The product's pricing needs to improve."
"Normally, UCS Director is used primarily for orchestration, but when we look at a non-Cisco data infrastructure components, the UCS Director needs a bit more improvement in terms of integration with third-party systems and with existing older systems."
"There are a lot of bugs in the solution. This is an area in the solution that can be improved."
"The tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."
"Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"The product is fairly priced right now. Given its capabilities, it is excellently priced. We think that the product will become self-funding because we will be able to maximize our resources, which will help us from a capacity perspective. That should save us money in the long run."
"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."
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
"We felt the pricing was very fair for the product. It is in no way prohibitive for larger deployments, unlike other similar product on the market."
"I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools."
"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."
"It's just the standard licensing cost. There are no additional fees."
"Cisco Intersight has competitive pricing. On a scale of one to five, my rating for its pricing is four."
"Cisco Intersight is not cheap, but it's not the most expensive product either."
"You can get a free license for monitoring but need to purchase a license if you need extra control."
"The product is cost-effective."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing around five to six out of ten."
"I rate Cisco UCS Director's price a three out of ten. Cisco UCS Director is not an affordable product. With Cisco UCS Director, there is a need to pay an overall price, which consists of the product, software, and support."
"The cost of this solution is significant."
"Cisco UCS Director is expensive...I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."
"I would rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten."
"The budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
44%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
5%
Computer Software Company
34%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Government
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?
I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company be...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
I would like Turbonomic to add more services, especially in the cloud area. I have already told them this. They can a...
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
I mostly provide it to my clients. There are multiple reasons why they would use it depending on the client's needs a...
What do you like most about Cisco Intersight?
Intersight can validate our environment.
What needs improvement with Cisco Intersight?
We used the solution's automation capabilities, but it wasn’t easy. It was part of why we took some time to deploy th...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Intersight?
We use the solution for server management across various locations.
What do you like most about Cisco UCS Director?
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS Director?
I rate Cisco UCS Director's price a three out of ten. Cisco UCS Director is not an affordable product. With Cisco UCS...
What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Director?
Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand. If Cis...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
Intersight
No data available
 

Learn More

Video not available
Video not available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
EXMAR, RapidScale
Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Intersight vs. Cisco UCS Director and other solutions. Updated: July 2024.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.