New Reviews Q1 2017: Blade Servers

What do users value in the blade servers that they use in Q1 2017?

In their blade server reviews, users from IT Central Station share what they value most and where they hope to see room for improvement in the following solutions:

• HPE BladeSystem

• Cisco UCS B-Series

• Lenovo Blade Servers

Continue reading to hear expert feedback from our community.

HPE BladeSystem

Valuable Features

“We've had to do very little maintenance on the backend connectivity components”, shares Phillip Sellers, Solutions Engineer at AmWINS Group, Inc.

“We really have been able to basically leave our fiber and Ethernet connections alone. I think in our ten years on two BladeSystem enclosures, we've done one infield upgrade, to raise our capacity limits on Ethernet and fiber channel. But really, the same enclosures have been doing fantastic for that entire time.”

Room for Improvement

ArulNathan Thangapandian shares:

“I would like to have a single console where we could manage multiple data centers. I'm expecting something like hardware visualization. I have different data centers where different BladeSystems are running.

Whenever there is an event, I need to get into that system individually and manage from different consoles. I would like to see a centralized console for BladeSystem management.”

Cisco UCS B-Series

Valuable Features

“Why pick a UCS blade over a Dell, HPE or Lenovo system?” asks a Technical Solutions Architect at a tech services company.

“The answer”, he writes, “depends on what application I need to run.

If I want a small-scale, 3-4 server application space in a localized area, I want a rack mount, for a price advantage. If I need a larger-scale virtualized environment, I prefer blades, and for the lowest OpEx as I scale out, I find Cisco's UCS lets me manage a larger footprint with fewer people.”

Room for Improvement

Bob Whitcombe, Technical Sales Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees, explains:

“Cisco’s internal testing and validation processes – to assure UCS Manager compatibility - mean they lag both HPE and Dell in delivery on the newest storage paradigms – specifically the breadth of the SSD and NVRam offerings…

For organizations that seek 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.”

Lenovo Blade Servers

Valuable Features:

Muhammad Sajid, Sr. System Administrator at a consumer goods company with 501-1,000 employees, writes:

“Central management of all blade servers and performance: It helps us to access blade servers remotely even at boot time, as well, when we can access the BIOS setup remotely. Other than that, we can restart and shutdown blade servers from a single console.”

Room for Improvement

“The storage part of this product needs to be improved”, finds Amirreza Yaseri, Design and Development Engineer at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees.

“If storage is also attached to this bundle, it would be a good solution for the databases.

In the new version of this product, the IBM Flex System, the storage feature is also available with the CPU and memory.”

Read more new 2017 blade servers reviews by the IT Central Station user community.