Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

The platform has valuable features for management and good monitoring tools. It provides efficient insights.

There is a delay in the product's reporting and the rebooting system compared to servers from other vendors like Dell and HP.

We have been using the Cisco UCS B-Series for two years.

It is a stable platform.

Organizations can purchase extra devices or appliances and integrate them easily with Cisco UCS B-Series. It has good scalability. We have more than 3000 end users for it, and we plan to gradually increase the number of users.

Sometimes, the technical support team delays the responses, and the connection works slowly. They could respond faster.

I have worked with HPE, Palo Alto, and Juniper before.

We do not encounter any complexity while deploying the software as we have worked with it twice or thrice. I have 29 technical engineers in my team working on the implementation.

The product is expensive. We encounter a licensing issue as well. It could be subscription-based.

Cisco UCS B-Series enables easy integration with existing infrastructure. The deployment process is well organized, including the basic foundation and design.

It has very good management capabilities. Integrating iOS and firmware management and comprehensive inventory tracking allows us to check and log the information through a single dashboard. There is no need to purchase any external software for insights.

It is a good solution. I rate it an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for our network system.

The product is easy to use. It's user-friendly.

The product could be made more secure.

I have been using the solution for approximately three or four years.

The tool is stable. I rate the stability a nine or ten out of ten.

The tool is scalable. We have 30,000 users.

The technical support is fast.

The initial setup was easy. Our IT department deployed the solution in our organization.

We use Cisco because of its VPN. I will recommend the product to others. It is easy to use and easy to connect. Overall, I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten.

We primarily use Cisco UCS B-Series in data center operations.

The system has reduced the number of customer aggregation requirements due to the aggressive network protocol cost.

Going inside with the management and monitoring is valuable. The aggregation in the data center is beneficial. It also makes management easier as we can manage everything from one place.

If we could get more reference architecture available on the portal, it would be helpful in making decisions. Also, the content should be more extensive, especially technical content.

I have been working with Cisco UCS B-Series for almost 12 years.

The performance, stability, scalability, and interface are fine.

The performance, stability, scalability, and interface are fine.

I would rate their technical support a six out of ten. They need more technical content in their documentation and perhaps more support personnel.

Positive

Before Cisco UCS B-Series, I worked with another system for about three years.

The initial setup was easy.

The pricing is competitive. While the UCS price was high before, it is more competitive now.

I would recommend that they include more technical content and ensure there is sufficient documentation available.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We get a few deployments here and there. Maybe we did one, two, or three years ago. Recently, we have done some blade architecture, but from Cisco. It's primarily about customer preference, so some customers prefer Cisco UCS.

In terms of ROI, our customers are very happy with Cisco UCS B-Series. For instance, a customer we worked with five years ago, a utility company, is very happy and is even planning to do a refresh because the solution has been running without many issues in terms of downtime and support tickets. Once you set it up the right way, you're good to go.

The most valuable feature is the service profiles. When you get a faulty blade, all you need to do is just decommission that blade and plug in a new one. The decommissioned blade is associated with the service profile, and you connect a new blade, associating it with the same profile the older blade had. This allows for the same settings, like the MAC addresses, management IPs, and worldwide port names for the storage to be retained, making maintenance quite easy.

Regarding improvements, there's a drawback with the FC functionality being removed from the Nexus switches, which we used to do integration with. Now, this requires having a different standalone switch for storage connectivity. Previously, the unified port functionality allowed the same port to function as both FC and Ethernet, however, this has now changed.

I can say it's been a while since we first started using Dell PowerEdge M. We don't deploy it every now and then, however, we did one deployment two or three years ago. Recently, we have been working with blade architecture from Cisco.

In terms of stability, our customers are very happy. There's a customer who has been using the solution for five years without many issues in terms of downtime and support tickets.

The technical support from Cisco is efficient. If the issue is a priority one, you can get on a call and have a technical engineer assigned right away. They are very efficient.

Positive

The initial setup is very straightforward and easy. It enables integration with multiple storage vendors. You can also tightly integrate it with VMware for managing distribution switches and virtual networks.

We have a team behind that does the fieldwork. I oversee and come in when needed to position products for customers, proposing and advising in terms of OpEx and CapEx.

Our customers have had good ROI with Cisco UCS B-Series. For example, a utility company has been using it for five years without significant issues and is planning a refresh.

The pricing depends on the size of the deal. If the deal is huge, you get better margins from Cisco. Also, if you were the one who initiated the deal, you get a better margin over other partners.

We use the solution to help manage our data centers.

Stateless Blade is the best feature. If we have a blade go down we find that the server continues to work well.

The technical support is sometimes delayed and has room for improvement.

The cost of the solution has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for ten years.

Cisco UCS B-Series is stable.

The solution is scalable by adding additional hardware.

The technical support is good but can sometimes be delayed.

Positive

We use HPE BladeSystem and Cisco UCS B-Series but we are going to replace them both with the Cisco X210c M6 series because of the high performance.

The initial setup is straightforward. The configuration is also simple.

The implementation is completed in-house.

The cost of the Cisco UCS B-Series is comparable to HP solutions but higher than Dell solutions.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

Around ten administrators are required to manage the solution.

I recommend the solution to others because it has good performance and is highly stable with little downtime.

We've used blades and hyperflex. It's for data center refreshes and greenfield solutions. We've done a lot of HCI Solutions.

We're basically taking old three-tier storage, no compute, networking solutions and then pulled into an ACI solution hyperflex or blades. I've worked on both the UCSX series and also the B series. M6, M7, and M5, and with a lot of fabric interconnects - just pretty much anything and everything for UCF.

Over the years, it's been it's come a long way from going from UCS manager to intersite managed solution. So we're doing a lot of cloud type management where we've been able to use that as which are like tenant managed services solutions with Cisco UCS and Hyperflex. We have managed services. Engineers that do manage all the customer's inter-site portal configurations, and then also we manage all the deployments, and pretty much we build run books and everything for them so that they know how to customers know how to how to work with their the hard new hardware for the hyperflex environments. Overall infrastructure-wise, we manage that for them, and they just manage internally.

It's modular. You can get higher-density blades within the 5108 chassis and the 9508 chassis. With the X series, it's even better, as you can add bigger blades and more processing and memory. It is a lot more resource-intensive and scalable. 

The solution is stable.

The setup is straightforward. 

InterSite is still working on a lot of bugs. Specifically, going from UCF's manager to all strictly interstate-managed environments, there have been a lot of challenges. It is a challenging environment as far as migration from UCS manager director to strictly an inter-site managed in the cloud. Cisco's still working out those bugs. We've been doing a lot of troubleshooting.  

I would like to see more density within the blades compared to HPE and other Dell blades. They do have more slots available. However, the UCSX series that's going to be a game-changer. I'm going through advanced architect training for that engineering training for that product as well. I foresee that X is probably going to replace the C or B series blades since you'll be able to get more density. In the end, you may be able to get double the nodes per slot.

The solution is expensive.

Sometimes, support isn't as fast or knowledgeable as customers need them to be.

I've used the solution for probably over ten years. 

It's pretty stable. I'd rate the reliability eight out of ten. 

The B series is pretty scalable. You can have several chassis within an FI pair. Then you could have multiple UCS domains. Now, with the InterSite, you can have multiple configurations more so than the UCSB series with the InterSite managed solutions where you can have B series and you can have both UCS manager and InterSite yet you can't have both. With the UCS X series available, that's another game change.

Our customer base definitely intends to increase usage.

From a partner perspective, we pretty much can troubleshoot more in-depth than some of the tech engineers. We've had a lot of tech engineer engagements with our large customers, and wasn't that I wasn't that impressed. They just seemed not to have a full understanding of what the customer issues were, and that took a long time to sort out. 

They also had multiple tech engineers involved. That prolonged the overall support for the customer. We jumped in and had more expertise, and we were able to help solve the issue before the tech in a lot of cases.

Neutral

The initial setup was straightforward. 

You can deploy on-premises. We've also worked with customers in remote installations where they would rack a stack, and then we would do a remote configuration on everything if it's through either a VPN or a Webex session, a Cisco secure Webex session. If it's InterSite, we can pretty much do it remotely. There's no UCS manager available to support that now, and everything's pretty much in the cloud managed, which is nice.

I typically note a three-year ROI.

The solution is pricey, and Cisco's prices change every month - or, at least, it seems that way. It's a constant challenge for our customers. However, we work with account executives at Cisco and work to get discounts. 

New users need to definitely understand how the UCF manager works. They need to understand InterSites, fabric interconnects, and how everything connects both up links to the northbound core switches and make sure all the connectivity is correct. 

Connectivity is a big issue. If you don't have the right connectivity configured specifically for the UCS manager with the FIs and also the fabric modules coming off the chassis, there will be a lot of issues. I've seen a lot of attack-related issues going forward. Users need to make sure that they have everything configured correctly.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use it for our digital adjustment. It's a technology that allows you to unify all the major components you need. You have the networking component, and your servers are connected too. We have an established enterprise system for data, and we do not use the historical component of the use case. We only use the networking and the server component. It is a very robust and reliable solution.

It has reliability, high availability, and a low total cost of ownership. Your servers stand a better chance of having data available because the total cost of ownership is very low. Once you buy it, you can almost afford to go to the last, because you don't need to buy another one.

The upgrades could be improved because the software needs various upgrades to be safeguarded against liability. Cisco should be very close to the customer to tell them if they need a new upgrade. In addition, they should include other features to make it useful for public cloud computing.

We have been using this solution since 2014, deployed on-premises.

It is stable and one of the most reliable systems I've ever encountered. You won't regret going for Cisco UCS B-Series because it is very good.

It's already made to scale, so you don't need to buy add-ons. In addition, you can use it to restore almost all your needs, not just for Cisco UCS B-Series. We have over 50,000 jobs running on our servers, which is valuable to our whole organization.

There is wide support. Anytime we have some FDN issues that we cannot fix, we get help from Cisco support. The technical support is very reliable, but you must buy it when buying the service.

The deployment was easy, but you must be skilled to complete it. It requires two engineers to deploy and takes a minimum of five days. Regarding maintenance, you get everything from Cisco and have to follow the guides.

The price is competitive. It's not too expensive, it's good, and it's worth the price.

I rate this solution a ten out of ten. I recommend the solution to others because they will gain from using it, and it is very reliable.

We use it primarily for computing purposes.

The complexity is reduced by having one blade with four servers and half-blade servers. The server profile makes it easier to deploy and to manage with Cisco UCS Manager.

Cisco provides good flexibility to choose different products or different equipment within the blade servers, like CPU memory, logic board, etc., to make your own server. Other vendors don't have this option.

If a customer is moving towards a UCS-only solution, then it would be great if storage could be provided with it.

Compared to the deployment of servers such as Dell XCDs, the deployment of UCS servers is more complex. They take longer to deploy.

I have used Cisco UCS B-Series for around two to three years.

These are not stable servers because we have seen some cases where the servers have gone down when there were power fluctuations. Though the servers came with in-built batteries and in-built SPS, the blade servers were not accessible. They're designed to have one blade not dependent on another blade, but they still went down.

The scalability is good because it comes with Fabric Interconnects, and you can directly add more blades as you go. Therefore, scalability is not a problem.

I have not had any issues with technical support. Because the solution has been in the market for 15 years now, the support is mature. I'd give technical support a rating of nine out of ten. 

Positive

As a partner who has deployed multiple servers, I found the initial deployment to be okay. However, it was not the easiest process. From a customer's perspective, the initial deployment can be a challenge. The customer could do something unknowingly that could make the whole system go down. Because we need to create server profiles, etc., I would rate the initial setup at three out of five.

The cost of the blade servers is okay, but the cost of Fabric Interconnects ends up increasing the overall costs. For example, suppose it costs 3,500 USD per blade server. When you include the Fabric Interconnects, you could pay up to 30,000 USD. Therefore, compared to the cost of servers from Lenovo, Huawei, Dell, or HP, the cost of Cisco servers can be high. However, Cisco gives good discounts (about 90% to 94%) to partners and to customers who are already using Cisco servers. New Cisco customers do not get the level of discount that an existing customer does. Because you can get discounts with Cisco, I would give pricing a rating of four out of five.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Cisco UCS B-Series at eight.