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Cisco UCS E-Series Servers vs HPE Synergy comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 3, 2025

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 E-Series Servers
Ranking in Blade Servers
11th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
HPE Synergy
Ranking in Blade Servers
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Composable Infrastructure (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Blade Servers category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS E-Series Servers is 3.3%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Synergy is 14.6%, down from 21.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Blade Servers Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
HPE Synergy14.6%
Cisco UCS E-Series Servers3.3%
Other82.1%
Blade Servers
 

Featured Reviews

AK
Solution Architect at COPYCAT LIMITED
Automation and integration capabilities streamline IT infrastructure management
The most valuable feature of Cisco UCS E-Series Servers is the Cisco interface. The server management and automation capabilities have been outstanding in automation, greatly benefiting our IT team. Pricing is acceptable, and these servers have had a significant impact on cost savings and operational efficiency. The integration with Cisco routers simplifies the IT infrastructure.
MS
Works at Saudi Telecom Company
Manage servers efficiently with an integrated view while reducing downtime
My use case is to serve the complete IT environment of the telecom, including all cloud applications. I use HPE Synergy servers for my private cloud and for network management systems. 70% of my workload is running on HPE servers The integrated view, such as managing complete servers and…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The Cisco chassis is very easy to configure and any network engineer or expert can configure the solution and easily integrate it with the chassis."
"The most valuable features are that they are efficient and easy to setup."
"They are really easy to maintain. I've added RAM to them. I've done a lot of other things with the virtualization."
"Cisco has better visibility and manageability for disaster recovery."
"The product is overall stable."
"The product's most valuable features are stability, speed, and scalability."
"The server management and automation capabilities have been outstanding in automation, greatly benefiting our IT team."
"Stability-wise, it is a good product that remains stable."
"Improved storage, scalability, and ease-of-use."
"The stability is very good. We haven't had any outages."
"Great data storage and very good for software defined solutions."
"The temporal value of it. If I only need a particular amount of compute for a specific period of time during business hours, then at night, I'm running a bunch of batch jobs, or doing something else, that ability to swap a profile, swap templates, and have compute assigned to something else, saves significant amount of money. As long as you are tying it into the automation and orchestration layers, it becomes much easier to do."
"The i3S module can be configured to provision storage to all blade servers and boot to any operating system without needing local hard drives."
"As we purchase and install more Synergy chassis, then we will be able to manage them together as one entity, as opposed to multiple separate cabinets."
"Give us the ability to seamlessly migrate from one operating environment to another within minutes, which is invaluable."
"Changing the form factor in Synergy allows us to have more RAM, which is significantly helpful for us."
 

Cons

"The platform's pricing needs improvement. There could be more collaborative tools included."
"The product should also be available in a standard edition or a standard license since currently there is a need to pay for an extra license, which is very expensive, especially when considering the budgeting part of our company."
"I would like to see improvements in VMware integration with Cisco, especially in terms of documentation and integration tools. Support of NVIDIA integration would also make it better."
"One thing that could be improved is the cost - it is very high for this Blade chassis as compared to other vendors. Especially in Asia. Asian customers mostly prefer a cost effective, cheaper solution."
"The biggest pain point for us is the matrix for the firmware upgrades. It is a pain. You look at that thing, you might as well be reading Greek. It would be a whole lot better if they could clean up their documentation on it."
"The processing capacity could be improved."
"The tool must be made compatible with multi-vendor ecosystems."
"It is not a solution that is cloud ready."
"Changes to the solution are quite complex."
"It would be nice if the updates were not accompanied by downtime."
"We had some challenges during the implementation and a few issues afterward, but they were all sort of related to how Synergy interacts with Nexus. Our Nexus on the network side is managed by another group, and they had just gotten Nexus, so they weren't really familiar with how Nexus even worked. Getting these two to interact well was the majority of our issues. It really didn't have anything to do with Synergy. It points to know the environment that you are putting it in and making sure you are dotting all your i's and crossing all your t's when you are figuring out what their requirements are to communicate."
"One of the things that I would like to see, and could be in their road map, is getting virtual connect to 100 Gig throughput."
"The setup was a bit complex."
"I would like it to connect to the HPE Cloud Connect compute platform for simplicity of our infrastructure."
"Technical support was time consuming and unsatisfactory. The initial product setup was complex, lasing around three weeks to a month."
"I would be more comfortable if Ansible actually rolled back the data used for automating platforms. If it could be communicated to the upstream Ansible, I wouldn't need to go back and forth and validate the libraries as we upgrade the Ansible version."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of the solution is reasonable. From a commercial point of view, the prices are okay."
"There is a need to pay towards the licensing costs of the solution. The most expensive server from Cisco is Cisco UCS B-Series."
"It's expensive, they are quite pricey."
"The product is expensive."
"The solution is expensive."
"The biggest cost is the VMware licensing."
"The solution can be expensive because it requires both hardware and software purchases."
"Our IT infrastructure costs have gone up each year by 20 percent."
"Synergy has lowered our total cost of ownership significantly. I would say ballpark around 25 percent, maybe more."
"It costs us around $60,000 a year."
"The platform that we run Synergy on is all virtualized. Our primary cost is likely VMware."
"Nutanix was really hard to implement, and it was very pricey compared to what we get from Synergy."
"We bought everything outright to start with. We don't do much consumption-based stuff."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise56
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS E-Series Servers?
The pricing of Cisco UCS E-Series Servers is okay, costing around 30,000 per year. Support is included in this cost.
What needs improvement with Cisco UCS E-Series Servers?
I would like to see improvements in VMware integration with Cisco, especially in terms of documentation and integration tools. Support of NVIDIA integration would also make it better.
What is your primary use case for Cisco UCS E-Series Servers?
I use Cisco UCS E-Series Servers ( /products/cisco-ucs-e-series-servers-reviews ) for managing our IT infrastructure and supporting AI-driven projects. The integration with Cisco routers simplifies...
How would you choose between HPE's Bladesystem and Synergy?
For me, choosing between HPE’s Bladesystem and Synergy came down to which solution was more powerful, reliable, and stable. It turns out Bladesystem was the winner. Bladesystem is excellent because...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE Synergy?
As far as the prices are concerned, rack mount solutions are less expensive than HPE Synergy prices; however, HPE Synergy prices are higher but justify themselves as the solution accommodates all t...
What needs improvement with HPE Synergy?
In my opinion, for future improvements in HPE Synergy, there should be better management of power consumption complexity as well as an increase in the number of servers that can fit in a single Syn...
 

Also Known As

UCS E-Series Servers
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Navaho,  MiroNet AG, Columbia Sportswear
HudsonAlpha, Virgin Media, EMIS, United
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS E-Series Servers vs. HPE Synergy and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.