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 #4 with an average rating of 9.1. Cisco holds a 1.9% mindshare in CM, compared to IBM’s 4.0% 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

974 Views
945 Comparison Views

73% willing to recommend

IBM Turbonomic

Read 205 IBM Turbonomic reviews

7,181 Views
3,662 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Cisco UCS Director

IBM Turbonomic

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. IBM Turbonomic

February 2026

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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

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

4th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

205

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Migration (3rd), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (5th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (11th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.9%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 4.0%, down from 5.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM Turbonomic	4.0%
Cisco UCS Director	1.9%
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…

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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

"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."

"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."

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

"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 solution is helpful for centralized management."

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

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

More Cisco UCS Director pros

"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."

"We have a system where our developers automate machine builds, and that is constantly running out of resources. Turbonomic helps us with that, so I don't have to keep buying hardware. The developers always say, "They don't have enough. They don't have enough. They don't have enough," when they just configured it improperly. Therefore, Turbonomic helps us identify configuration issues on their side so it doesn't cost me money on the other end to buy resources that I don't really need."

"I like Turbonomic's built-in reporting. It provides a ton of information out of the box, so I don't have to build panels for the monthly summaries and other reports I need to present to management. We get better performance and bottleneck reporting from this than we do from our older EMC software."

"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 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."

"The proactive monitoring of all our open enrollment applications has improved our organization. We have used it to size applications that we are moving to the cloud. Therefore, when we move them out there, we have them appropriately sized. We use it for reporting to current application owners, showing them where they are wasting money. There are easy things to find for an application, e.g., they decommissioned the server, but they never took care of the storage. Without a tool like this, that storage would just sit there forever, with us getting billed for it."

"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."

"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

Cons

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

"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."

"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 tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."

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

"We cannot depend on this solution to manage all of the data center's infrastructure."

More Cisco UCS Director cons

"We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps."

"The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like."

"Turbonomic can modernize the look and feel, making it more user-friendly to access and obtain information."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The deployment process is a little tricky. It wasn't hard for me because I have pretty in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes, and their software runs on Kubernetes. To deploy it or upgrade it, you have to be able to follow steps and use the Kubernetes command line, or you'll need someone to come in and do it for you."

"The implementation could be enhanced."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 consider the pricing to be high."

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

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

16%

Computer Software Company

12%

Marketing Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

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

Cisco Intersight vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 18% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 17% of the time

OpenNebula vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 9% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 9% of the time

More Cisco UCS Director Competitors

VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 7% of the time

Densify vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

Spot by Flexera vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 5% of the time

IBM Kubecost vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 4% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 4% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director

February 2026

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

January 2026

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 enhances IT efficiency with automation, capacity planning, and reporting features, enabling organizations to optimize resource utilization and improve performance through advanced workload management and scenario analysis.

IBM Turbonomic equips organizations with robust capabilities for dynamic resource allocation and informed decision-making. Its planning module provides scenario analysis, right-sizing recommendations, and a customizable dashboard for tailored insights. Automation features improve workload placements and resource efficiency, while forecasting capabilities enhance performance. Simulation of environments helps in decision-making, leading to significant savings in cloud and hardware management. There is a need for a more intuitive interface, enhanced navigation, and improved customization in reporting with integration potential with third-party applications. Transition to the HTML5 interface and stronger training resources are among anticipated improvements.

What are the key features of IBM Turbonomic?

Automation: Automates workload placement and dynamic resource allocation to boost efficiency.
Capacity Planning: Provides scenario analysis and right-sizing for optimal resource use.
Customizable Dashboard: Offers tailored insights for organization needs.
Forecasting: Enhances decision-making through resource-use predictions.
Simulation Capabilities: Aids in assessing savings and performance gains.

What benefits and ROI should be evaluated?

Cost Optimization: Reduces spending on cloud and hardware resources.
Enhanced Performance: Promotes consistent application performance and resource efficiency.
Improved Decision-Making: Supports informed choices with scenario simulation.
Flexibility and Scalability: Assists with workload migrations and resource management across environments.

IBMTurbonomic is implemented across industries such as cloud management and virtualization, helping organizations balance clusters, optimize virtual machine performance, and manage Azure configurations. In resource-monitored environments like VMware and XenServer, its features facilitate load balancing, VM rightsizing, and automation shutoffs. Industries can rely on its insights for cost-saving measures, ensuring efficient resource allocation for hybrid and cloud environments.

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

February 2026

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