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 3.9% 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

820 Views
795 Comparison Views

73% willing to recommend

IBM Turbonomic

Read 205 IBM Turbonomic reviews

6,311 Views
3,219 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: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. IBM Turbonomic

December 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

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 (5th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (11th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, 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 3.9%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM Turbonomic	3.9%
Cisco UCS Director	1.8%
Other	94.3%

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

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

"Cisco's knowledge base is extensive."

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

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

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

"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."

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

More Cisco UCS Director pros

"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."

"It also brings up a list of machines and if something is under-provisioned and needs more compute power it will tell you, 'This server needs more compute power, and we suggest you raise it up to this level.' It will even automatically do it for you. In Azure, you don't have to actually go into the cloud provider to resize. You can just say, 'Apply these resizes,' and Turbonomic uses some back-end APIs to make the changes for you."

"The feature for optimizing VMs is the most valuable because a number of the agencies have workloads or VMs that are not really being used. Turbonomic enables us to say, 'If you combine these, or if you decide to go with a reserve instance, you will save this much.'"

"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."

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

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

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

Cons

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

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

"The product could allow more programmatic opportunities through better development of the API."

"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."

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

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

More Cisco UCS Director cons

"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."

"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 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."

"Additional interfaces would be helpful."

"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."

"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."

"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."

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

More IBM Turbonomic cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Cisco UCS Director is expensive...I rate the solution's pricing a three 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 budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."

"The cost of this solution is significant."

"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."

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

"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

11%

University

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

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

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Compared 19% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

OpenNebula vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 8% of the time

Densify vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 6% of the time

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VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

Spot by Flexera vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Cost Management 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

January 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 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

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