Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

The stability is very, very good. I haven't had any issues with it whatsoever over the past few years.

The scalability is very good. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The solution basically offers us everything we need. It's very complete. 

The pricing could be improved, as it is a bit expensive solution.

The GUI is not the greatest. They could work on improving the interface.

I've been using the solution for a few years now. It's been a while. 

The stability, in general, has been amazing. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. Cisco is extremely reliable and offers good performance. 

The scalability has been great. We started with a small amount, and we started to test the solution. After that, we grew with it as we needed. It's been great and has fit our needs perfectly.

There are thousands of users on the solution. It's used extensively.

We haven't had cause to sue technical support too much. We have Cisco partners we can call if we have issues, however, we haven't had many problems to speak of. 

We have found the initial setup to be very simple and straightforward. It's not a complex process. A company shouldn't struggle with a deployment. 

The solution can be quite expensive and is a bit of a higher cost when compared to others on the market.

We're a customer and an end-user.

Our current version is an older version. Right now, we are considering replacing it with the newest one.

I'd recommend the solution to other users and companies. We've been pretty happy with it overall.

I would rate it at a nine out of ten.

The UCS Manager, UCS Blades including chassis, and Main Data Centre Virtualization Physical Infrastructure on VMware between sites act as our critical and secure data center environment.

This solution is reliable, expandable, agile, manageable, and scales easily, allowing us to focus on using UCS Manager. We are now expanding the Cisco Hyperconverged solution embedded with the UCS manager.

This is the plus to expand the reliability, expandability, redundancy, and availability of our data center infrastructure environment.

This host-provisioning solution gives us peace of mind, SLA level, and ease of management from the operation team. It is reliable and gives me confidence when I upgrade firmware and expand the capacities of the data center.

Think about adding compute in 30 minutes instead of hours of technical effort. It reduced the amount of time that tech spent on support and operations instead of maintaining the whole infrastructure level.

ROI for the UCS manager solution is high and has lifted pressures and stressful burdens upon SWE.

Overall, all functionalities are excellent.

The feature that I found the most value is the abstract and stateless capacities. 

USC Central seems a bit confusing for technicians.

Many functionalities that are not used for a small environment should be enforced at the enterprise level.

I would like to see USC Central offered free for use, as well as made simpler to use for technicians. This will improve its adoption rate, especially for environments that are not exposed to the internet.

We have been using UCS Managers and UCS Blade for more than five years.

Stability-wise, it is excellent.

This is a scalable product.

Technical support is excellent.

With the help of Cisco tech support, I just finished an upgrade of firmware and felt that the support team is helpful and proactive in helping customers.

I feel that Cisco tech has value. They provided me assistance and guided me through difficulties. Overall, I felt that they were excellent and I appreciated it very much, especially the consistency in following up on what is happening, including progress.

I had used HP enclosures in a different environment.

The initial setup is always straightforward.

We initiated the engagement with Cisco Tech Team, and eventually, we can take ourselves.

The ROI is huge and I was surprised after seeing it when the environment was set up and stable.

I was not involved with the specific pricing agreement, so I don't know. However, I am familiar with some of the aspects.

Generally, the cheaper, the better. I believe that this is part of the procurement management that must be involved with requirements. Pricing will be based on your requirements so it is important to plan, engage, and negotiate directly with the Cisco Account Manager.

I have an excellent relationship and experience with them. They are accommodating in all areas such as reaching out, checking and engaging in setup and configuration of equipment that has arrived, training, help in designing, consulting, pricing, and licensing.

As part of our evaluation phase, we researched three vendors. Each was assessed using a scorecard to rate each in terms of functionality as it related to our environment. The scale was from one to five.

Overall, this is an excellent product.

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 are a system integrator and promote Dell solutions to our customers. We deal mostly with mid-range storage, servers, and some backup solutions.

It allows us to offer a variety of Dell products to our customers, helping them with secure data backup and recovery, particularly those in the financial sector.

Dell has a huge portfolio of products. It's easy to find whatever you need, and you can combine many types of products into a solution.

Dell should address the issue of direct support and spare parts availability in our region. There can be problems if a specific part is not in stock, which is a big issue for our market.

We have been familiar with Dell Data Domain for about three or four years.

Dell does not provide direct support in our region, which is a big disadvantage. Other vendors such as Cisco, HP, and Lenovo do not have this issue.

Neutral

Cisco UCS pricing is reasonable and competitive. However, with Dell, the additional cost of spare parts and the lack of direct support add to the overall cost of the equipment.

HP, Lenovo, and other vendors do not have the same issue with spare parts and support as Dell.

We sometimes recommend Cisco UCS B-Series over Dell for midsize enterprises, government institutions, financial sectors, and other various types of companies. It depends on the situation and the customer's preference.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

Cisco is expensive and difficult to manage. The product is not intuitive. It also needs to improve storage management and upgrades. 

I have been working with the product for one year. 

I would rate the product's stability a seven out of ten since we encountered bugs during the upgrade. 

The product is scalable and my company has 5000 users for the solution. 

The product's tech support has good people. However, the people in level 1 support do not know what they are talking about. Level 3 support is good. 

Neutral

I would rate the product a seven out of ten. We have two administrators for the product. The tool is a good product but maintenance is not easy. 

The most valuable features of the Cisco UCS B-Series are reports for virtualization and the large memory it has. 

Cisco UCS B-Series competitors have similar features as they do, Cisco needs to make some changes to make their offering better.

The integration and support could improve, there are some challenges. Additionally, the competitor has its own storage in its portfolio, Cisco should have the option as well.

I have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for approximately five years.

Cisco UCS B-Series is a reliable solution.

I have found the solution scalable.

The technical support of the Cisco UCS B-Series is good.

The initial setup was difficult for us because we are used to the old systems. With the new solution, it is quite a different experience.

Cisco UCS B-Series is an expensive solution.

I rate Cisco UCS B-Series an eight out of ten.

I use this solution for general company services, including file-sharing, Microsoft services, active directory services, and backup solutions.

The most valuable features are monitoring and processing, which can handle a lot of throughput and are more powerful than the HPE series.

The graphic code that UCS can support is limited and less accessible than other systems. 

I've been using this solution for three years.

This solution is stable and powerful - we've had no problems with it.

The scalability is powerful.

The initial setup was complex, and deployment took two-and-a-half years.

UCS is expensive, and we will be migrating to the cheaper HP servers.

Cisco is a huge company that can support a lot of services and has the most powerful website, which means its systems are the most stable. I would advise potential customers to use and enjoy it because it is the greatest experience. I would give this solution a score of ten out of ten.

The solution can be useful for cloud solutions and they are automatized. Everything is automatized, and it's highly available.

The solution is stable.

The scalability is good.

Everything is nice and I like that it is centrally managed. 

It's very easy to manage once you have everything set up.

The performance is great.

Technical support is helpful.

We sometimes have small issues with the hardware elements. The network interfaces could be better. The product needs to develop better firmware.  

The solution is difficult to set up. You need to be experienced in the product in order to be able to implement it.

I've used the solution for more than three years in this company, and in my previous company, I used it for two and a half to three years as well. In total, it's been five to six years. 

The solution, for the most part, is pretty stable. There aren't really bugs or glitches and it doesn't really crash or freeze. It's pretty reliable. 

The scalability of the solution is good. 

I'm not sure how many people are actually using the product. In America, we utilize about 3,000 servers and we utilize 4,000 servers ourselves. That's a total of 7,000 servers.

Technical support has been very good. We don't have any complaints. They are helpful and responsive. 

The initial setup can be a bit difficult and complex. This is because everything is centralized. That said, once you have everything deployed and up and running, the maintenance is easy and minimal. While you have to sacrifice something during the installation, after that, it's easier to manage. 

It took us about two months to complete the implementation.

We had a third party that handled the implementation process for us. We had a lot of server blades to set up.

I don't have any visibility on the licensing setup. That's managed by procurement, actually. I don't have any information about it.

We use both cloud and on-premises deployment models.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I'd recommend the solution to other users and other organizations.