Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

We use it as a stand-alone for computing only in HyperFlex. Using multiple projects and VDI projects, you can utilize distribution and access codes to find the storage that works for various solutions and scenarios.

They have management on the enterprise side. So, we manage directly through Fabric internet or the rack-mounted directly, whether on-premise, on the cloud, or private.

The most significant benefit of the blade itself is its stethoscope-like functionality. You can remove and reinsert the blade and attach the service profile if any hardware is damaged. This is the main objective of the solution. Additionally, we can leverage it in a hybrid infrastructure. We are also authorized to integrate the solution with other vendors. They have a wide range of offerings, and we integrate HyperFlex, which is merged with fabric and implemented with the ACI or Application Centric Infrastructure, to advance software defense solutions.

The price of the solution can be improved.

I have been using the solution for ten years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. We have more than 52,000 customers using this solution. We have it installed in banking, government entities, and private sectors.

The initial setup is not easy. You should know or understand the data center, particularly when integrating with SAN, NAS storage, or NFS.

It generally takes 30 minutes to an hour for basic tasks. However, it may take several days to involve blade integration and integration with other systems. The project's timeline depends on various factors, such as integration requirements, scope, and configuration tasks. Based on these considerations, we can estimate the number of days required for integrating the object.

First of all, we gather information from the customer regarding the project's purpose. The project has multiple components, such as configuring IBM Athena for management, aligning with the latest stable software, and configuring service profiles based on the project scope.

Once we complete these tasks, we will move on to system administration, which includes providing a visual interface and configuring the operating system. Depending on the scenario, we will decide whether to install a hypervisor or directly install the working system on the server. This decision will be based on the sandbox environment we have.

Cisco UCS does not require a license. However, this license is not specific to users. In collaboration with the tech team, it also controls and stores other components, such as hypervisors, JES control, technology integration, and analytics.

It integrates with all other solutions, including building and internal solutions.

Overall, I rate the solution nine out of ten.

I use the solution in my company in our virtual environment along with VMware, and it hosts around 23 virtual servers while also being able to offer features in the area of unified collaboration in our call center.

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it offers reliable and easy functionalities. It can be used in a very easy manner, making it not a complicated tool.

The high price of the solution is an area of concern where improvements are required.

The product lacks to offer AI functionalities along with integration capabilities. From an improvement perspective, I want some AI features to be included to enhance the integration capabilities of the tool.

I have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for around two months.

It is a very stable solution, like a rock.

Until now, I haven't used the scalability feature of the product. I will have to use the scalability features of the product after five to six years of usage of the product.

If I consider the use of the solution in my company, I would say that there are around 600 endpoints in my organization.

There are 90,00,000 users of the solution.

I have worked with different products from Cisco since it is the DNA of our company's network, as it looks after our infrastructure network, which includes Cisco Core Switches and Cisco Access Switches.

The product's initial setup phase was complex. The product's initial setup phase is not easy for anyone.

For the deployment process, I have a third party person in Egypt who I contact to help with the implementation, designing and so want to improve the solution and to make it work correctly in our company's environment.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

Around 51 developers are required to take care of the deployment and maintenance of the tool.

There is always a need for a third-party provider or a partner to take care of the setup phase of the tool in your environment. My company's in-house team can manage the tool's deployment process.

The benefit of the product stems from the reliability and the dependability offered. You need to learn to be satisfied with the product, and it is not worth worrying until everything becomes bad with the product.

In my opinion, everything related to the product is very expensive right now. Every three years, I need to renew my license and support the product. I don't have to pay any extra costs in addition to the standard licensing charges attached to the product. Every time I have to opt for the renewal of the license, I am shocked to learn about the increase in the price of the product. If you purchase a solution for a particular amount, and then during the renewal process, you learn that you need to pay double the amount of what you had paid previously, you will definitely feel that you are paying a lot of money.

In terms of the ability of the product to improve our company's data center's computing efficiency, I feel that it is a very good solution for me right now, especially in areas like production and workflow. I am very satisfied with the product.

I think that every product from Dell, Cisco, HPE, or any other vendor can be well-integrated with the solutions in any infrastructure.

The most valuable feature of the product for workload optimization stems from the fact that I use the many dashboards offered by the tool. With the tool, I have many separate dashboards. I don't have just one in the dashboard where I can see the integration and take care of the management.

To others who plan to use the product, I can say that Cisco UCS B-Series can be good for networking but very bad with the security part.

In terms of the flexibility of the tool to adapt to technology needs, I think it is a very good solution. I can recommend the solution to others who plan to use it. Cisco doesn't need any recommendations from my end because it is the backbone of the networking infrastructure throughout the world, and it is currently present in 70 percent of the market share.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

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 primarily use Cisco UCS B-Series in data center operations.

The system has reduced the number of customer aggregation requirements due to the aggressive network protocol cost.

Going inside with the management and monitoring is valuable. The aggregation in the data center is beneficial. It also makes management easier as we can manage everything from one place.

If we could get more reference architecture available on the portal, it would be helpful in making decisions. Also, the content should be more extensive, especially technical content.

I have been working with Cisco UCS B-Series for almost 12 years.

The performance, stability, scalability, and interface are fine.

The performance, stability, scalability, and interface are fine.

I would rate their technical support a six out of ten. They need more technical content in their documentation and perhaps more support personnel.

Positive

Before Cisco UCS B-Series, I worked with another system for about three years.

The initial setup was easy.

The pricing is competitive. While the UCS price was high before, it is more competitive now.

I would recommend that they include more technical content and ensure there is sufficient documentation available.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We've used blades and hyperflex. It's for data center refreshes and greenfield solutions. We've done a lot of HCI Solutions.

We're basically taking old three-tier storage, no compute, networking solutions and then pulled into an ACI solution hyperflex or blades. I've worked on both the UCSX series and also the B series. M6, M7, and M5, and with a lot of fabric interconnects - just pretty much anything and everything for UCF.

Over the years, it's been it's come a long way from going from UCS manager to intersite managed solution. So we're doing a lot of cloud type management where we've been able to use that as which are like tenant managed services solutions with Cisco UCS and Hyperflex. We have managed services. Engineers that do manage all the customer's inter-site portal configurations, and then also we manage all the deployments, and pretty much we build run books and everything for them so that they know how to customers know how to how to work with their the hard new hardware for the hyperflex environments. Overall infrastructure-wise, we manage that for them, and they just manage internally.

It's modular. You can get higher-density blades within the 5108 chassis and the 9508 chassis. With the X series, it's even better, as you can add bigger blades and more processing and memory. It is a lot more resource-intensive and scalable. 

The solution is stable.

The setup is straightforward. 

InterSite is still working on a lot of bugs. Specifically, going from UCF's manager to all strictly interstate-managed environments, there have been a lot of challenges. It is a challenging environment as far as migration from UCS manager director to strictly an inter-site managed in the cloud. Cisco's still working out those bugs. We've been doing a lot of troubleshooting.  

I would like to see more density within the blades compared to HPE and other Dell blades. They do have more slots available. However, the UCSX series that's going to be a game-changer. I'm going through advanced architect training for that engineering training for that product as well. I foresee that X is probably going to replace the C or B series blades since you'll be able to get more density. In the end, you may be able to get double the nodes per slot.

The solution is expensive.

Sometimes, support isn't as fast or knowledgeable as customers need them to be.

I've used the solution for probably over ten years. 

It's pretty stable. I'd rate the reliability eight out of ten. 

The B series is pretty scalable. You can have several chassis within an FI pair. Then you could have multiple UCS domains. Now, with the InterSite, you can have multiple configurations more so than the UCSB series with the InterSite managed solutions where you can have B series and you can have both UCS manager and InterSite yet you can't have both. With the UCS X series available, that's another game change.

Our customer base definitely intends to increase usage.

From a partner perspective, we pretty much can troubleshoot more in-depth than some of the tech engineers. We've had a lot of tech engineer engagements with our large customers, and wasn't that I wasn't that impressed. They just seemed not to have a full understanding of what the customer issues were, and that took a long time to sort out. 

They also had multiple tech engineers involved. That prolonged the overall support for the customer. We jumped in and had more expertise, and we were able to help solve the issue before the tech in a lot of cases.

Neutral

The initial setup was straightforward. 

You can deploy on-premises. We've also worked with customers in remote installations where they would rack a stack, and then we would do a remote configuration on everything if it's through either a VPN or a Webex session, a Cisco secure Webex session. If it's InterSite, we can pretty much do it remotely. There's no UCS manager available to support that now, and everything's pretty much in the cloud managed, which is nice.

I typically note a three-year ROI.

The solution is pricey, and Cisco's prices change every month - or, at least, it seems that way. It's a constant challenge for our customers. However, we work with account executives at Cisco and work to get discounts. 

New users need to definitely understand how the UCF manager works. They need to understand InterSites, fabric interconnects, and how everything connects both up links to the northbound core switches and make sure all the connectivity is correct. 

Connectivity is a big issue. If you don't have the right connectivity configured specifically for the UCS manager with the FIs and also the fabric modules coming off the chassis, there will be a lot of issues. I've seen a lot of attack-related issues going forward. Users need to make sure that they have everything configured correctly.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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.

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.