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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
24th
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 (3rd), Virtualization Management Tools (3rd), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (10th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (16th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.7%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 4.7%, down from 5.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic4.7%
Cisco UCS Director1.7%
Other93.6%
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 improvement for our organization has really been ease of use; we'd be a mess without the solution."
"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."
"The technical support for this solution is very good, at least in our region."
"An easy and strong configuration, along with its low cost, are some of the features of the solution."
"Better visibility and better control are the main benefits people receive from Cisco UCS Director; the automation and the orchestration part, these three to four points are the key factors to decide on Cisco UCS Director."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Overall, I think that this is a very good product, although nothing is perfect."
"The product is flexible and compact. It has a lot of features."
"It has allowed our IT organization to keep investments in hardware flat for a projected three year period, and we have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."
"This has been a set-it-and-forget-it solution that does a great job but is behind the scenes."
"Customer service has always been exceptional and technical support has been very quick to respond and very knowledgeable."
"Today we have found the forecasting of the environment and optimization the most beneficial."
"Turbonomic has tons of features that we use regularly from reports showing us simple IOPS stats, to showing over/under utilized VMs, and even wasted space on our datastores."
"The system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications."
"The Turbonomics team is always looking for ways to improve their product."
"Turbonomic's realtime environmental monitoring and aggregated dashboard have been instrumental in expansion decision making for our infrastructure."
 

Cons

"It is not easy to add or expand the product."
"We cannot depend on this solution to manage all of the data center's infrastructure."
"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."
"There aren’t any areas of improvement that immediately come to mind."
"Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand."
"The product's pricing needs to improve."
"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."
"The tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."
"Could be more user friendly, but the provided training provided the needed clarity."
"However, the current versions do not split out headroom by component nor do they indicate where the capacity bottleneck lies (e.g. CPU, memory, or storage)."
"Occasionally the server does not load balance properly and needs to be restarted."
"I have found the interface not to be intuitive."
"I'd like to see an improvement in the reporting, from including more canned reports, to being able to more easily customize the existing ones (without needing to write SQL queries)."
"We did see a few issues on a previous version with reporting."
"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
"Planning tools could be easier to use. Depending on your needs, it can be time consuming to get what you want."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of this solution is significant."
"Cisco UCS Director is expensive...I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."
"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."
"The budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."
"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."
"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."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"Contact the Turbonomic sales team, explain your needs and what you're looking to monitor. They will get a pre-sales SE on the phone and together work up a very accurate quote."
"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."
"When we have expanded our licensing, it has always been easy to make an ROI-based decision. So, it's reasonably priced. We would like to have it cheaper, but we get more benefit from it than we pay for it. At the end of the day, that's all you can hope for."
"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."
"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction 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: June 2026.
902,417 professionals have used our research since 2012.