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 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 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.

Previously, the physical trappings of Cisco UCS, Intel chip-sets and UCS Manager were the most useful part of this server system. As we embrace new Intel CPU's, Chip-sets and memory, we are gaining added value from the original UCS design - which was a software construct based on XML API's and a suite of code that is really starting to blossom as a central automation vehicle, that scales to deliver new features and extended integration with a suite of security, management and performance offerings Cisco has added to its portfolio.

While UCS hardware leveraged standard x86 designs, the use of a single pane of glass to monitor, deploy and provision servers was a huge timesaver. Since its UCS release in 2009, Cisco has extended the core functionality with Central, a tool for managing multiple domains, Director - an automation tool and Performance Manager. In the past few years CIsco has been on a buying binge for the Data Center, snapping up Cliqr, Lancope, AppDynamics, ContainrX, and several others that are being integrated with in-house analytics tools like Tetration and external tools like Turbonomic to provide an incredibly powerful, secure automation platform that will be the foundation of a future autonomic server environment with adaptive security and dynamic self diagnosis.

Cisco UCS Manager is embedded in the cost of the fabric controllers and is used to manage the servers, chassis and fabric. It also serves as a link point for integrating tools like Director, Performance Manager and Central. Future additions to the UCS tool set are extensions that Cisco is feeling out how best to offer to customers - for straight purchase - or via subscription.

I encourage UCS users and those considering UCS adoption to dig into the subscription offerings and get some clarity on how they grow over time. For example, as powerful security tools like Stealthwatch (Lancope) are added, what other systems are required and how are those subscriptions managed. When Analytics are required - do you need a Gigabuck Third Party offering or are you going to jump on Cisco's Tetration bandwagon and roll your own? I push for simplicity with Cisco. However, you need good data for that conversation. Talk to the apps, dev and ops teams as to what is needed today, where you are going and what future needs will become vs what might be nice to have. Once you understand where you are going, you are in a much better position to negotiate with a relative newbie like Cisco on how best to get there.

Things will only get better going forward. UCS Manager is an XML construct. Everything is in software and can scale and expand with increased hardware capability, while other architectures require extensive effort on each end to develop hardware, then update and test a new rev of software for reliability and consistency.

The big challenge for Cisco today is they built UCS manager for Cisco CCIE's anxious and able to have every knob and dial available to tweak. As a result, UCS manager is overly complex relative to functions and features and a lot of effort can go into streamlining and simplifying the User Experience. However, after 8 years in the market and huge acceptance of its increased ROI over competitive offerings and an appreciation for what UCS provides in OPex reduction, you can buy experienced UCS engineers vs having to develop and train them, only to see them purchased by a competitor.

I have a client who is currently managing 1500 servers with two people for a mission-critical retail operation. Previous operations teams using HP and IBM servers required 4x more people to manage the same number of servers.

This product comes from Cisco, who is fourth in the worldwide supply chain. That means options take a bit longer to get to their platform, as they insist on doing their own quality validations. Right now, the market is rapidly transitioning to solid-state media and the Cisco options tend to be less varied and more expensive than a broader slate of products from HP, Dell or IBM.

Cisco UCS offers a scalable platform with tremendous OpEx advantages. However, Cisco does not have the storage play that Dell (With Cisco Partner EMC in its fold) and HP have. With their long position in the market place on the PC supply chain side, both Dell and HP source and deliver high volume, low cost, advanced enterprise solutions from previous consumer focused suppliers like Samsung and Toshiba. Example’s like Sandisk’s 3.8TB SSD used in EMC VxRail products and newly announced Samsung 15TB and 6.4TB 1M IOPs SSD come to mind. While Cisco still carries the earlier versions of similar technology from FusionIO, the next gen lower cost options from Samsung will take a while to be approved and provided by Cisco.

Cisco’s internal testing and validation processes – to assure UCS Manager compatibility - mean they lag both HP and Dell in delivery on the newest storage paradigms – specifically the breadth of the SSD and NVRam offerings. Both these trends (High performance, High capacity SSD, and NVRam) offer major changes in architectural models. For organizations that seels to push the bleeding edge in testing and development, UCS will lag in delivery by a quarter or two. This has little impact on mainstream enterprises who will not adopt before a technology is thoroughly vetted by industry “Pioneers” – usually mid-sized shops that “took a chance” on introducing a new platform into their relatively modest environment.

I have used UCS since 2008, when the product was first released.

No issues with stability that we have not seen across other systems. In particular, due to Cisco networking dominance, the focus is on drivers that work with their products for all the competitors as well. Networking is typically the server area with the most work to be done – but this is the strength of Cisco.

UCS originally promised to support 40 chassis per fabric – that has now been scaled down to 20 – which limits users to domains of “just 160” physical server blades. This has not proven to be an issue or obstacle. The release of UCS Central provides software to manage an array of fabrics so we can scale to thousands of physical servers.

This is a foundational core of the Cisco Data Center automation experience and is a far more robust platform than currently provided by competitors. Customer service from Cisco and its partner community is thus on par with the same exemplary service provided by its TAC teams for business critical network deployments.

Leveraging Cisco Network Technical Monitoring – the ability to call for a case and get resolution - is a process we are well aware of and very comfortable with.

HP was the incumbent, displaced by UCS, which has proven easier to manage scale and use. The HP system just had too many pieces and the iLO lockin was a major cost that the UCS architecture leapfrogged.

Initial setup requires some training due to its scale. It’s like riding a car vs driving a truck. You use the auto driving skills when you drive a truck – but there are a few things to be aware of. One of the nuances with UCS is that it is a fully abstracted, scalable environment. So you can set up your domain to accommodate a single server or 160 servers. This requires adopting a standard naming convention, IP addressing, etc. Once those are established, like a truck vs a car – you can haul a lot more freight with UCS.

Obviously, the worst-kept secret with all vendors is to negotiate as close to fiscal year-end as possible. For Cisco, the year-end is July 31st, so they are well positioned for organizations deploying summer projects. The other issue is the move to bundle licenses. That is great for highly dense environments like a data center, but it makes much more sense for individual licenses for distributed environments like hundreds of storefronts or clinics distributed across a wide geographic area.

As stated earlier, we had HP. As a marquis client they fought hard on equipment price to maintain their position. However, the decision was based on OpEx, which greatly favored UCS. Once we had a few systems in place and people trained up on their use, it was not long before HP was displaced. Because both the IBM and Dell management architectures were quite similar, we looked and got a few quotes, but did not see anything to justify further evaluation resources.

The biggest issue is automation. How to move the mundane tasks from people to machines; alert filters to improve management productivity and reduce overhead. Cisco is deploying a suite of products (Central, Director, Performance Manager, etc.), as are IBM, HP and even Dell. However, UCS manger provides such a robust base that the ability to scale and realize benefits is greater.

At the end of the day, the UCS product requires planning before just jumping in, due to its ability to scale. As a user, you need to evaluate naming conventions, IP addressing models and so forth – think about the entire enterprise as opposed to a single server or rack of servers.

Use very good hardware and innovative network elements, such as the VIC 10Gb cards that allow for traffic sequestration and partitioning across multiple virtual channels in a single link and of course UCS Manager. I actually have the patent on similar IP when we started blade server systems with an acquisition by Intel. The direct spin-off was the IBM Blade Center, but due to the IBM investment in Tivoli, they never used our central management system. Cisco took a network- vs compute-centric perspective as they embarked on their server designs and, with a clean sheet of paper, evolved a centralized manager for deployment and systems management that enables huge scales in management productivity.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients. These systems are for advanced data.

The template feature is very good, and it works well.

The Boot from SAN function is good because using OTV, we can boot the device from any remote location.

I like the level of complexity that this product offers because I have a lot of relevant knowledge, which makes troubleshooting and performance tuning easier.

This product uses a converged network adapter because it is the only way to provide flexibility with both fiber and ethernet connections.

I have been working with the Cisco UCS B-Series for approximately three years.

This is a stable product. However, if the customer is using devices from different vendors on the same network then there can be some small problems.

This product is very much scalable. Once you are using active/passive devices, you can switch them depending on the needs of the infrastructure.

Only one of my clients has this device implemented.

The technical support is very good. They are very knowledgeable and have taught us a lot.

I work with a variety of Cisco products. For example, I have a lot of clients that are using Cisco firewalls. As such, I have a lot of experience with Cisco devices including HyperFlex, UCS, Nexus 7K, 5K, 2K, and 1K virtualization.

Some of my clients are using products from vendors such as HP or Dell, rather than using a Cisco Blade Server. I also have customers using VxRack and VxRail. the Cisco products consume less energy, and I prefer to implement them.

The level of complexity for the initial setup depends on the client. For example, new clients usually only require a normal design. For clients that redesign their network, there is some inherent complexity.

In general, a hyperconverged system is very easy to configure.

This is a premium device and our clients are not as concerned about the reasonableness of the price compared to satisfaction with their productivity.

This is a product that I recommend. If somebody instead chooses to implement a Dell, then they will have a converged system or will be using NetApp. This is much more complex than setting up a hyperconverged system.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Primarily, we use UCS to run our virtualization stack.  

I think UCS is pretty typical of all blade servers in what is most valuable. We use it to try and save rack space. I think the ratio in terms of the number of units and the number of servers that we can get each chassis is quite good. We have a significant rack space saving in that regard. These B-series can hold up to eight servers.  

In terms of room for improvement, I think there is room for improvement with the service profile. Cisco products are technically quite bulky if you ask me. You really need to be very proficient technically to deploy it and to understand the assignment of the service profiles before you can really make the most of it. The product comes with a lot of technical overhead. I know they have advancements that are coming and I foresee they are ready to address that problem at least to a certain extent.  

For the purposes it is built for, I can not really think of any room for improvement, honestly. It is as advertised; it is doing what it is supposed to in the way the company represents it. I do not think they are really in need of any other improvement this year than what I know they already have on the roadmap. The only thing I can think of might be improving the user-friendliness.  

We have been using Cisco UCS B-series (Unified Computing System) for probably five years.  

The B-series is definitely stable, that is for sure. We rarely have any issues with the B-series. If there are any issues, we are covered by the four-hour response window and we can get parts replaced within a few hours if there's any faulty hardware. Stability is something I would say is over 90 percent better than most other products.  

The scalability of this Cisco product goes without saying because it is what the B-Series was designed to do. You can always add in additional blade servers to your existing chassis. So the scalability is really good and something Cisco built into the product.  

We have had contact with the technical support and this is usually for hardware replacements. That covers faulty memory or CPUs or motherboards — that kind of thing. It is typically day-to-day issues with hardware that we need service for.  

I would say that Cisco really excels in day-to-day operations — if you are talking about hardware replacement and things like that. Their model and framework are really mature. They know exactly what to do. The replacements are fast, the engineer that is assigned also knows what he is doing. So far our experience with Cisco technical support is pretty positive.  

We came to UCS from HP Proliant servers. When we transitioned into the Cisco UCS series, we obviously found that there were pros and cons in comparing these products.  

I think the HP Proliant user interface and user-friendliness are better than UCS. Cisco had an advantage in coming to the market later. They had the advantage in redeveloping and redesigning the server compute from scratch. So they designed it with management in mind. They deployed service profiles and they have a central overview of all the server hardware using the UCS B-series, and I think this was what really convinced us to transition to the Cisco hardware. Of course, the pricing is positioned better than the HP Proliant series which influenced the decision as well.  

Because we already have established the connects and configured the initial instance, putting in additional B-series blades is a breeze because everything is assigned to the service profile.  

So the initial setup depends on "how initial" you are talking about. If you are talking about the very first configuration including the server interconnects setup, then it is a bit cumbersome. If you are talking about additional setups after that, then it is a breeze. You really need in-depth knowledge about how service profiles and assignments are used before you can really make it work. This is coming from someone who had previous experience with the HP Proliant product where they did not really have service profiles. It is a different way of doing things.  

We had the luxury of engaging a vendor, the initial setup was all done by the vendor, which was good for us. It was really fast and was far enough along within half a day that they were able to deploy it.  

Advice that I might want to give to someone considering the product is that I would say they really have to know their own use case to determine whether UCS is applicable as a solution for what they need. The B-Series is really meant for data center deployment. I would not propose or suggest it for small or medium enterprises simply because the initial investment is quite high. You need to get a server interconnection if you get a chance. And if you are not looking to potentially deploy a large number of servers in the near future, then B-series is really not necessary — it is overkill.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate the product as a nine-out-of-ten.  

To make it 10, the user-friendliness needs to be improved. Right now the user experience really detracts from the technical abilities of the product. The users need to have too much technical know-how. Cisco should make administration much easier and more straight forward. Maybe there could be some automation and translation of all the operations so that the user does not have to be so technically adept to operate it.  

We have been working with Cisco UCS B-Series for data center operations since 2018. We implemented it in one bank, but everything else is handled by HP.

The Cisco solution provides a unified dashboard that enhances virtualization tasks, allowing configurations from a single interface. It also helps with space and power management, which are vital for data center efficiency.

The dashboard of Cisco UCS B-Series allows users to have multiple options displayed on a single interface and facilitates configuration from that dashboard. This ease of manageability is also appreciated.

It would be beneficial for Cisco UCS B-Series to improve on the technological adaptability aspect, especially with regard to containerized applications, as the market in our region is still adapting to newer technologies. There is also a need for better local parts replacement, as HP is superior in this area.

We have been familiar with and using Cisco UCS B-Series solutions since 2018.

Both Cisco and HP solutions are similar in scalability, supporting up to sixteen blades. There are no significant differences in scalability between the two.

Cisco's tech support is superior to that of HP's, at least online. However, HP surpasses Cisco in local parts availability and replacement.

Positive

Our team handled the implementation as we executed it in a bank successfully while other projects were handled by HP.

Previously, Cisco pricing was higher, but now both Cisco and HP are competitive with pricing. At the end of negotiations, the pricing is usually matched between the two, so cost is not a major differentiating factor anymore.

HP solutions were considered and are still predominantly used.

I recommend focusing on the relationship with the customer as it plays a more significant role than the technical specifications in our region.