Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

We use the solution to host all of our USX. The solution was deployed for the hypervisor.

The most valuable feature is definitely the service profile. I feel it provides a more stable environment, with very few issues with the hardware or fabric. These issues are rare and usually minor.

The cost is expensive and has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for almost eight years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

The technical support was excellent; it was professional and very effective. The support I received was satisfactory, although it may have been due to the fact that my issue was not particularly significant.

The initial setup was straightforward and we have not encountered any issues in a very long time. I believe the FCOE protocol has been improved since we first used it, as the IQ N number was not generated automatically. This was the only issue I have encountered with Cisco UCS, but since then it has been quite stable and robust.

The solution is definitely expensive. Compared to the more in-demand hyper-converged environments such as Nutanix or DVX rail, Cisco UCS B-Series is even more costly due to the expensive fabric interconnects. The only benefit we will get when adding more chassis to the two fabrics is the ability to scale up. Therefore, if we are only using two, three, or four chassis, the cost is high.

I give the solution a ten out of ten.

We have four people that use the solution and one person who is primarily responsible for any related UCS.

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.

My company uses Cisco UCS B-Series for multiple use cases. Mainly, we use the product in our company for the general IT infrastructure deployment.

The solution's most valuable feature stems from its massive computing power, so you can have big data or mission-critical applications running on SQL Server.

The integration is an area where Cisco UCS B-Series needs to provide users with more details. The price of the product's license could be improved.

I have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for almost seven years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution, but it requires a lot of the skills to be able to manage and expand the product.

Around six to seven customers of my company work with Cisco UCS E-Series Servers.

The solution's technical support is good and knowledgeable.

The initial setup can be complex, even for someone skilled enough to deploy the product. The deployment is generally not easy since Cisco UCS B-Series directly interacts with Cisco Fabric Interconnect.

The solution can be deployed in five to six days.

The deployment process for Cisco UCS B-Series consists of an approach in which you just provision the servers and upgrade Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects. Whatever the hypervisor will be, you can take the product to the next level when starting with the product.

An experienced person can handle the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

From a return on investment perspective, Cisco UCS B-Series is worth the money.

There is a need to pay towards the licensing costs of the solution on a yearly basis. Price-wise, it is an expensive product.

There is an additional cost consisting of the modules a person wants to use, apart from the standard licensing costs of the solution.

Cisco makes it possible for its users to work with the new series of its products, which is Cisco's M6 series blade servers, and Cisco also allows for a lot of enhancements to be made. It is a fine solution for big customers.

Considering the multiple use cases for which the solution can be used, others who plan to use it can consider purchasing and deploying it.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

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.

The most valuable feature that the B-Series has is related to the structure and architecture of the solution because in these solutions, you are using fabric interconnect as an interconnect device. The beauty of fabric interconnect is that it can work as in-house mode.

Fabric interconnect is the main component in the UCS solution. Fabric interconnect can act as two modes. One is in-house mode, and the other one is switching mode. The recommended one is in-house mode. When it works in in-house mode, it means that it won't process any storage, like flagging things, zoning, etc. It won't process Spanning Tree Protocol either. It will just proxy everything to the higher switch.

For example, if you have storage network traffic, the fabric interconnect won't process your flagging. It will make a proxy, and send it to your NPIV storage switch. It acts literally as in-house, and that makes the solution and architecture very easy, convenient, and scalable.

The other important feature is the switch technology that Cisco uses on their chassis. It's not like those of other brands. The beauty of Cisco is that with traffic interconnect, your network and storage won't come down to the chassis level.

It will stop at the fabric interconnect, and the traffic between the fabric interconnect and the chassis acts very similar to the fixed technology that Cisco uses between 2K and 5K. This means that the same architecture and the same technology that we use between 2K and 5K is used between the fabric interconnect and the IO module that's used at the back of the chassis.

This means that when you are using the IOM input/output module, the IOM module on the back of the chassis will not be like a regular switchboard. It will be just IO. So, this means that it is scalable. You can add as many chassis as you want to this whole solution, and you can remove them. You can move one chassis to another chassis. You can move one server from chassis one to chassis eight or chassis seven. You can have a lot of clusters. You can have a lot of failovers over the whole package.

Recently, with the new chassis, UCS X-Series, that Cisco recently introduced to the market, it is much more scalable.

The license is expensive.

Cisco should decrease the delay in the delivery of their products.

It's very stable.

Cisco UCS B-Series is more scalable because of the blade servers. It's one of the most scalable solutions in the whole world.

The licensing cost is a little bit expensive because by default, it depends on your fabric interconnect model. Most of the time, however, Cisco provides a lot of promotions to the customers, so the cost can be waived for many projects. The price of the chassis itself is fair.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate this solution at ten.

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.

I use it for telephony. 

The telepresence devices are improved. You can call by phone handset only, video call, and integrate with Teams and other third-party tools.

First of all, Cisco is not going for perpetual licensing. They charge recurring fees every year for everything, even adding phones. Technically, it's good, but that is one fault.

Previously, it was perpetual. Buy it and use it. But now, it has changed. 

I have five years plus experience with it. 

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability as seven out of ten. Other vendors also have easy deployment methods, sometimes even easier than Cisco.

Our clients are enterprise businesses. 

Overall service and support from Cisco is very good. They give the perfect solution.

They are good, but the warranty claiming process is lengthy. We have to get on calls with different people. The channel partner also charges to claim it. The end-user should have all the privileges to claim the devices directly with Cisco.

Positive

We are not going to use Cisco for our upcoming large telephony project because of the high pricing and recurring charges.

The initial setup is easy. It takes a few hours. 

I am the implementor. 

It's expensive. Cisco is always expensive compared to other vendors.

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

We primarily use the product for hosting our servers.

The platform provides robust compute power for hosting our servers.

The product pricing needs improvement. 

We have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for a year. 

Cisco's technical support is top-notch. They've been responsive and helpful whenever we've needed assistance.

Positive

We used Dell previously but have since used Cisco and HPE solutions exclusively.

The product cost is high compared to HPE solutions. However, maintenance and support services are included in the standard licenses for the first three years. 

Managing Cisco UCSB B-Series has been straightforward. While we've also used HPE in the past, both platforms offer similar manageability features. 

The documentation and support have been comprehensive. I rate it a nine out of ten.