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Cisco UCS Director vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Cisco UCS Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
22nd
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Turbonomic
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (5th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (11th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 2.0%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 4.1%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic4.1%
Cisco UCS Director2.0%
Other93.9%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

OR
Senior Telecommunications Engineer at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Managing extensive VoIP services becomes efficient and seamless
We use Cisco UCS Director primarily for managing our VoIP service to maintain seamless service delivery. We operate in an enterprise government environment Cisco UCS Director is straightforward to use, which we greatly appreciate. It helps save time by making it quicker to roll out new call…
reviewer1446966 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
The solution reduced our operational expenditures and is able to identify points before we even noticed them
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. When I change the resolution to 1080, I only see half of what I would on my big 4K monitor. It would be annoying to have to scroll to see the flow chart. They have a flow chart that goes top to bottom like a tree. On a lower resolution, it might be nice if that scrolls horizontally because it's long, narrow, and tall. It's only three icons wide, but it's 15 icons tall. I think it would be helpful to have the ability to change that for a smaller screen and customize the widget.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The reason we went with Cisco is that it comes at a very negligible cost as part of the BOQ. Compared to the competition's products, which are incredibly expensive, UCS Director is low-cost."
"The improvement for our organization has really been ease of use; we'd be a mess without the solution."
"As usual, the technical support from Cisco is amazing."
"The solution is helpful for centralized management."
"This is a user-friendly solution that is very good and easy to use."
"Overall, I think that this is a very good product, although nothing is perfect."
"I can manage multiple workloads whether it's on AWS, Azure, or on-premises. They can be managed by using the UCS Director."
"Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."
"Customer Service: Excellent. My rep always stays in touch and keeps us in the loop when changes are coming."
"Helped to “right size” productions server environment. We now can do more with less."
"My experience with Turbonomic has been exceptional, they've offered me a $25 gift card to write a review of their company but I'd gladly write them a review for free."
"Allowing Turbonomic to take over for vCenter DRS has shown a marked decrease in vMotion of virtual machines to keep our cluster resources balanced."
"Customer Service: Excellent! Both pre-service and post-service were world class."
"Customer Service: Excellent. They've always been quick to support any issues/queries we have."
"Automation options for moving and resizing VMs as necessary have been crucial for our environment's performance."
"This solution is rock solid."
 

Cons

"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."
"I would like to see more flexibility when it comes to managing other stacks, like VMware virtualization."
"The product could allow more programmatic opportunities through better development of the API."
"The solution could be improved is including a feature where I could do things programmatically versus having to create workarounds to get what I want to get done."
"We cannot depend on this solution to manage all of the data center's infrastructure."
"The scalability of this solution needs to be improved because as it is now, you cannot scale the storage alone. Rather, you have to scale the storage and the compute together."
"The product's pricing needs to improve."
"The tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."
"Would like some better canned reports allowing for average utilization of VMs in the environment during a defined range of hours."
"Email alerts could be more comprehensive."
"The GUI and policy creation have room for improvement. There should be a better view of some of the numbers that are provided and easier to access. And policy creation should have it easier to identify groups."
"Turbonomic needs to find how to have the appliance OS up to date. Per our security tool, it has missing patches."
"Interface and navigation can be a challenge if you do not spend a lot of time with it."
"They need an updated UI - perhaps HTML5? The dashboard could use a cosmetic update."
"Definitions/descriptions of what each chart means. The line graph looks good, but doesn't mean anything without prior knowledge of what a good UI number is for example."
"The product is administered using a web based interface. This interface was written in Adobe's Flash product which requires the Adobe Flash plugin to be installed on any device accessing it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
"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."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
18%
Marketing Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS Director?
While the pricing might be seen as expensive, it provides value for money due to reliable service and excellent technical support.
What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Director?
It should be more of a cloud-based architecture for Cisco UCS Director, and it should be affordable to small customers as well because the pricing is a major challenge when we talk about Cisco UCS ...
What is your primary use case for Cisco UCS Director?
Mainly in my region and country, large data center customers are using Cisco UCS Director, not the SMB or mid-market customers. More of the on-premise customers are utilizing Cisco UCS Director. Th...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?
It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is set as a percentage of the consumption of some of our customers' services. The ...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting. This helps us get a consolidated view of all customer spending into a single d...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge
IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS Director vs. IBM Turbonomic and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.