Cisco UCS Director vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

Cisco and IBM are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Cisco is ranked #21 with an average rating of 8.0, while IBM is ranked #5 with an average rating of 9.0. Cisco holds a 1.8% mindshare in CM, compared to IBM’s 4.1% mindshare. Additionally, 73% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Cisco UCS Director

Read 15 Cisco UCS Director reviews

753 Views
723 Comparison Views

73% willing to recommend

IBM Turbonomic

Read 205 IBM Turbonomic reviews

6,006 Views
3,183 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Cisco UCS Director

IBM Turbonomic

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

IBM Turbonomic and Cisco UCS Director compete in enterprise IT management solutions. IBM Turbonomic appears to have the upper hand with enhanced automation and analytics, praised for providing valuable insights and optimizing environment performance, while Cisco UCS Director is primarily focused on centralized Cisco infrastructure management.

Features: IBM Turbonomic includes smart analytics, workload placement, and VM rightsizing which boosts capacity planning and reporting capabilities. It is noted for VM optimization and resource balancing. Cisco UCS Director provides centralized management for Cisco infrastructures but lacks customization features in reporting and automation.

Room for Improvement: IBM Turbonomic's interface and dashboard customization need refinement, as users find reporting not very user-friendly. Cisco UCS Director faces challenges in user experience, needs better configuration flexibility, and improved assistance in code customization.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Turbonomic is recognized for ease of deployment in various environments, including hybrid clouds, with strong customer service. Conversely, Cisco UCS Director is predominantly on-premises and considered complex, complicating initial deployment, while its support is generally positive but not as celebrated as Turbonomic.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Turbonomic is seen as affordable with a competitive per-socket model, offering quick ROI through automation features that cut hardware costs. Cisco UCS Director is notably more expensive, with pricing perceived as restrictive outside fully Cisco settings.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS Director vs. IBM Turbonomic Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. IBM Turbonomic

December 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 879,259 peers since 2012

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

21st

Average Rating

7.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

IBM Turbonomic

Ranking in Cloud Management

5th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

205

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Migration (6th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.8%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 4.1%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM Turbonomic	4.1%
Cisco UCS Director	1.8%
Other	94.1%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

ErnieRumfield

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…

Read full review

Dan Ambrose

Infrastructure Engineer 4 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Helps visibility, bridges the data gap, and frees up time

We use IBM Turbonomic in a hybrid cloud environment. Although it supports multi-cloud capabilities, we currently operate in a single-cloud setting. Turbonomic offers visibility into our environment's performance, spanning across applications, underlying infrastructure, and protection resources. The visibility and analytics help to bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams such as applications and infrastructure. This is important for awareness collaboration, cost saving, and helping to design and improve our application. Enhanced visibility and data analytics have contributed to a significant reduction in our mean time to resolve. Tools like Turbonomic provide crucial visualization and insights, empowering us to make data-driven decisions instead of relying on assumptions as we did before. This newfound transparency translates to a massive improvement, going from complete darkness to having a clear 100 percent view of the situation. Although our applications are not optimized for the cloud we have seen some improvement in response time. IBM Turbonomic empowers us to achieve more with fewer people thanks to automation. Previously, customers frequently contacted us requesting resource increases to resolve issues. Now, we have a tool that allows us to objectively assess their needs, leading to a deeper understanding of our applications. This solution also generates significant cost savings in the cloud and optimizes hardware utilization within our data centers. Its AI algorithm intelligently allocates servers on hosts, maximizing efficiency without compromising performance. By fine-tuning resource allocation without causing performance bottlenecks, Turbonomic extends the lifespan of existing hardware, postponing the need for new purchases. This effectively stretches our capital expenditure budget. We started to see the benefits of IBM Turbonomic within the first 60 days. IBM is a fantastic partner. Their tech support has been outstanding, and the product itself is excellent - a very solid offering. By automating resource management with Turbonomic, our engineers are freed up to focus on more strategic initiatives like innovation and ongoing organizational projects. Previously, manually adding resources was a time-consuming process that interrupted workflows. Now, automation handles scaling efficiently, saving us thousands of man-hours and significant costs. It has illuminated the need for SetOps. It has highlighted areas of overspending, and the actions we've taken have demonstrated significant cost savings. IBM Turbonomic has positively impacted our overall application performance. IBM Turbonomic has helped reduce both CAPEX and OPEX. It has also significantly reduced cloud build times.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the fabric sharing."

"This is a user-friendly solution that is very good and easy to use."

"Cisco's knowledge base is extensive."

"Cisco UCS Director is straightforward to use, which we greatly appreciate."

"Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."

"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"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."

"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."

More Cisco UCS Director pros

"The automated memory balancing, where it looks at whether it's being used in the most efficient way and adds or takes away memory, is the best part. If it didn't do that, it would be something that I would have to do. We have too many machines for one person to do that. The automation helps me in that it is done in a really efficient way and a balanced way because of the policies. It really helps."

"The recommendation of the family types is a huge help because it has saved us a lot of money. We use it primarily for that. Another thing that Turbonomic provides us with is a single platform that manages the full application stack and that's something I really like."

"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."

"The most valuable features are the cluster utilization reports and the resource capacity planning. We can simulate how much capacity we can add to the current resources. The individual DM reports and VM-facing recommendations report are also helpful."

"The biggest value I'm getting out of VMTurbo right now is the complete hands-off management of equalizing the usage in my data center."

"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."

"On-premises, one advantage I find particularly appealing is the ability to create policies for automatic CPU and memory scaling based on demand."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

Cons

"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."

"The product's pricing needs to improve."

"It is not easy to add or expand the product."

"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 aren’t any areas of improvement that immediately come to mind."

"I would like to see more integration with other solutions."

"The areas where this product can be improved are the integrations and the UI. These features are not as friendly compared to VMware products."

"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."

More Cisco UCS Director cons

"It can be more agnostic in terms of the solutions that it provides. It can include some other cost-saving methods for the public cloud and SaaS applications as well."

"While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The implementation could be enhanced."

"Recovering resources when they're not needed is not as optimized as it could be."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of this solution is significant."

"The budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."

"I would rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten."

"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."

"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."

"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."

"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."

"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."

"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."

"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."

"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."

"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."

"It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

879,259 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

18%

Computer Software Company

15%

Comms Service Provider

11%

University

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	11

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	41
Midsize Enterprise	57
Large Enterprise	147

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.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

The implementation could be enhanced.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

VMware Aria Automation vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 27% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 26% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 12% of the time

OpenNebula vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 10% of the time

More Cisco UCS Director Competitors

VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 10% of the time

Spot vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 5% of the time

Morpheus vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 4% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director

December 2025

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

December 2025

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Also Known As

No data available

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Cisco

IBM

Overview

Cisco UCS Director enables automated delivery of physical and virtual data center resources, empowering data centers to move at the speed of business.

Cisco

IBM Turbonomic offers automation, planning, and right-sizing recommendations to streamline resource management, improve efficiencies, and optimize costs across virtualized environments and cloud platforms.

IBM Turbonomic is valued for its capability to optimize resource allocation and monitor virtual environments efficiently. It facilitates automated decision-making in VM sizing, load balancing, and cost optimization for both on-premises and cloud deployments. Users can leverage insights for workload placement, ensure peak performance assurance, and effectively right-size across VMware and Azure. The ongoing transition to HTML5 aims to improve visual and navigational ease, while expanded reporting features are anticipated. Opportunities for improved training, documentation, and integrations enhance platform usability and functionality.

What Are the Key Features?

Automation: Streamlines resource allocation and VM management.
Planning Tools: Supports capacity management and growth projections.
Right-Sizing: Optimizes VM configurations for efficient resource use.
Customizable Dashboards: Provides quick insights into environment health.
Reporting Capabilities: Offers valuable data for informed decision-making.
Cloud Integration: Ensures cost-effective resource utilization.

What Benefits Should Be Looked For?

Performance Enhancement: Improves application performance efficiency.
Cost Reduction: Minimizes operational expenses through optimizations.
Infrastructure Efficiency: Maximizes use of IT infrastructure resources.

In finance, IBM Turbonomic aids in maintaining platform efficiency during market fluctuations. Healthcare organizations leverage its capability for resource optimization during high-demand periods to enhance patient care support. Retailers use it for planning in peak seasons, ensuring resources align with fluctuating demand to maintain performance continuity.

IBM

Sample Customers

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. IBM Turbonomic

December 2025

Free Report: Cisco UCS Director vs. IBM Turbonomic

Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS Director vs. IBM Turbonomic and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

879,259 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Cisco UCS Director vs. IBM Turbonomic report.

See our list of best Cloud Management vendors.

We monitor all Cloud Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.