Cisco UCS Director vs Spot comparison

Cisco and Spot are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Cisco is ranked #22 with an average rating of 7.8, while Spot is ranked #31 with an average rating of 7.0. Cisco holds a 1.2% mindshare in CM, compared to Spot’s 0.8% mindshare. Additionally, 71% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Spot users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 8, 2025

Cisco UCS Director and Spot are IT infrastructure management and cost optimization products. Spot appears to have an advantage due to cost efficiency and dynamic features.

Features: Cisco UCS Director offers complex virtual environment management and robust orchestration capabilities. Its asset management tools are also noteworthy. Spot focuses on cloud cost optimization and dynamic resource scaling, enhancing resource utilization.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco UCS Director has a traditional deployment model requiring extensive initial configuration but provides strong support. Spot integrates seamlessly with cloud environments, offering a straightforward setup by leveraging its cloud-native design.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco UCS Director involves higher upfront setup costs with an ROI seen through streamlined operations. Spot offers more immediate savings with a pay-as-you-go model, leading to quick ROI by reducing cloud expenses.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS Director vs. Spot Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. Spot

April 2025

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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

IBM Turbonomic

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 5.6%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.2%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spot is 0.8%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Alex Darby

Director, Infrastructure, Wintel Engineering at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Saves time during workload migration, facilitates sizing of virtual servers, and the support team is helpful

The right-sizing feature is the most captivating one for us. It helped in taking the emotions out of what people think they need, basing it off of real data, and providing them what they actually need. It's not really a special feature, but the support that we received from that team really helped us in our success. There were definitely some customizations that needed to take place to make it successful. This is the most aware of our products, in terms of understanding all of the components from the top down. It is integrated with all of the different modules, all the way down to the core infrastructure. All of it is tied together and there are not many tools that can do that.

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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…

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Manpreet_Singh

Senior Principal Infrastructure Engineer at Mphasis

Used to manage Kubernetes infrastructure, but it doesn't have support from OCI

Spot Ocean is deployed on the cloud in our organization. I would recommend the solution to other users. You need to have an experience with Kubernetes, or else this product is of no use. It is not difficult to learn to use Spot Ocean. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Turbonomic helps us right-size virtual machines to utilize the available infrastructure components available and suggest where resources should exist. We also use the predictive tool to forecast what will happen when we add additional compute-demanding virtual machines or something to the environment. It shows us how that would impact existing resources. All of that frees up time that would otherwise be spent on manual calculation."

"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."

"The notifications saying, "This is a corrective action," even though some of them can be automated, are always welcome to see. They summarize your entire infrastructure and how you can better utilize it. That is the biggest feature."

"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."

"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."

"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."

"The automation and orchestration components are definitely the best part, as you can tell it what it can do and when, and just let it be."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."

"The product is flexible and compact. It has a lot of features."

"An easy and strong configuration, along with its low cost, are some of the features of the solution."

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

"I can manage multiple workloads whether it's on AWS, Azure, or on-premises. They can be managed by using the UCS Director."

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

"A product that really aids in systems management without complexity."

"Cisco's knowledge base is extensive."

More Cisco UCS Director pros

"The solution helps us to manage and scale automatically whenever there is a limit to the increase in the application workflow."

"The solution offers both block access and file access, making it a nice solution for customers."

Cons

"The way it handles updates needs to be improved."

"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."

"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 planning and costing areas could be a little bit more detailed. When you have more than 2,000 machines, the reports don't work properly. They need to fix it so that the reports work when you use that many virtual machines."

"Additional interfaces would be helpful."

"Since the introduction of a HTML 5 based interface, our main - but minor - criticism of a less than intuitive operation managers' GUI would be the area of improvement."

"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."

"Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI."

More IBM Turbonomic 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."

"The product's pricing needs to improve."

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

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

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

"There are a lot of bugs in the solution. This is an area in the solution that can be improved."

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

"Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand."

More Cisco UCS Director cons

"There are no particular areas for improvement I can identify."

"The solution doesn't have support from OCI, and it should start working to onboard OCI."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you're a super-small business, it may be a little bit pricey for you... But in large, enterprise companies where money is, maybe, less of an issue, Turbonomic is not that expensive. I can't imagine why any big company would not buy it, for what it does."

"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."

"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."

"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not 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."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

"The cost of this solution is significant."

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

34%

Financial Services Firm

19%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

25%

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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...

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco UCS Director?

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

See all answers

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 techn...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Director?

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

See all answers

What do you like most about Spot Ocean?

The solution helps us to manage and scale automatically whenever there is a limit to the increase in the application ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Spot Ocean?

There are no particular areas for improvement I can identify.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Spot Ocean?

Spot by NetApp is primarily used for backup and also for Fiservware.

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 17% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 11% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 8% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 7% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

Cisco Intersight vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 54% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 30% of the time

OpenNebula vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 16% of the time

More Cisco UCS Director Competitors

ProsperOps vs Spot

Compared 20% of the time

Flexera Cloud Cost Management vs Spot

Compared 15% of the time

Apache Spark vs Spot

Compared 13% of the time

Cloudability vs Spot

Compared 12% of the time

nOps vs Spot

Compared 12% of the time

More Spot Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

May 2025

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director

May 2025

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Analytics

April 2025

Download Spot product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

No data available

Spot Ocean, Spot Elastigroup, Spot Eco

Interactive Demo

IBM

Demo not available

Cisco

Demo not available

Spot

Overview

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

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

Cisco

Spot provides dynamic workload management for cloud environments, offering cost optimization and enhanced performance. It stands out with its unique approach to managing resources efficiently.

Spot is designed to enhance cloud resource utilization and cost-effectiveness through intelligent workload management. With real-time analysis, Spot determines and deploys the most efficient resources, ensuring optimal performance for applications. Businesses benefit from reduced cloud expenses and increased operational efficiency, making it an essential tool for managing cloud infrastructure effectively.

What are the key features of Spot?

Automated Scaling: Automatically adjusts cloud resources based on demand and usage patterns.
Real-Time Monitoring: Provides continuous oversight to ensure optimal performance and operational efficiency.
Cost Optimization: Reduces expenses by utilizing spot instances and leveraging cost-effective cloud resources.
Seamless Integration: Easily integrates with existing cloud services and infrastructures.

What benefits should users look for in Spot?

Cost Reduction: Users can expect to see a significant decrease in cloud expenses.
Improved Efficiency: Enhancements in operational processes and workload management.
Resource Optimization: Better allocation and usage of cloud resources.
Scalability: Capability to handle increasing amounts of work effectively.

In finance, Spot ensures cost-effective cloud computing for trading platforms, while in e-commerce, it dynamically manages back-end processes. In the entertainment industry, Spot optimizes media streaming by deploying resources when user demand spikes. Each industry leverages Spot to maximize performance and minimize operational costs, demonstrating its versatility and reliability across sectors.

Spot

Sample Customers

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

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge

Freshworks, Zalando, Red Spark, News, Trax, ETAS, Demandbase, BeesWa, Duolingo, intel, IBM, N26, Wix, EyeEm, moovit, SAMSUNG, News UK, ticketmaster

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. Spot

April 2025

Free Report: Cisco UCS Director vs. Spot

Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS Director vs. Spot and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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