Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

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.

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.

The solution is being used for our internal use along with VMware.

The solution is very unified and the technical team is very supportive, no help is needed from outside vendors. 

Next generation support for VMware needs to be introduced as it does not support eighth-generation VMware. 

I have been using Cisco for the last ten years. 

The solution is stable. 

It is a scalable solution. A total of fifty users are using the solution at the moment. 

The technical support team is knowledgeable, customer-friendly and fast in their responses. 

As long as one knows the process, the installation is straightforward. The deployment takes a week's time as it's a big installation. A group of engineers are required for the deployment. The deployment is done by taking track installations and then a few more updates and putting them under the sphere, and you should be using Cisco UCS Manager for the updates.

I have seen a return on investment. 

Cisco is compatible with Mac and Dell. Overall, I rate the solution an eight 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. 

We do not use the Cisco UCS B-Series in our company. Rather, we support it for one of our customers.

Using this product allows for the virtualization of all things, including MAC addresses and the profile. If we have an issue in a physical server then we just have to remove it, put another one in its place, and reapply the profile.

I'm not an expert in using the UCS Blade but I work on it enough to speak a little bit about it. My primary job is support, although I perform some actions.

The most valuable feature is the ability to replace a server with another one, simply by applying the profile. This is not possible with others, where the MAC address is not virtualized.

If there is an issue with a server then it's simple to replace. In 10 minutes, it can be done, even if there's a hardware issue. This is the most powerful and important aspect.

This model does not support virtualization of the switch.

There are occasionally hardware problems that may be related to memory. 

I have been working with Cisco UCS B-Series for two years. The company was using the same solution before I joined.

Although we have experienced some hardware issues, that is normal for this product. Overall, it is stable.

This is a scalable solution.

We have four people that work with it.

When we have had hardware problems, technical support comes to our site to replace the defective part. The support team is good, including their response time.

I did not work with other similar products before this one.

There is a new model, the X-Series, that I would like to look at in the future. The B-series will be deprecated shortly. After which, we will need to replace it.

I was not part of the deployment, although I have performed general support such as creating profiles.

Overall, this Cisco Blade is really good. My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to purchase the support agreement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We host mostly our production environment in these Blades. We choose this series due to the reliability/stability and for ease of scalability. We are a 24/7 business and uptime is most critical for us. Stable environment with 99.99% uptime including a good scalable architecture is something like "Gold with Fragrance"

Management wise, I liked the "Service Profile" concept where we can create the appropriate profiles for the blades and just deploy them with ease. Time management and getting the configuration right is important so that there are no hassle during the initial setup. Performance wise, I like it better than the HP Proliant servers.

We jumped from old HP servers to this UCS and, of course, we very much like it in terms of its security, its interface, its functionality, the CPU, the memory and its central management interface. The computing power that it's given us has greatly improved the processing of our system. Overall, it's good.

Integration with the storage to get a heatmap of what's going on in the storage site could be improved -- the dashboard, that kind of thing. We have a virtualized environment and it's the same dashboard that links together the front end, the VMware and the backend storage. We have to use multiple views, multiple solutions for that. We log in to multiple places to see what's going on in the storage, what's going on in the switches, on the Blades, on the VMware. It would be great if there was a single platform, a dashboard that could integrate all of those. That kind of improvement wouldn't just help me but would also benefit management. If they want to see what's going on, for example, to get a five-year forecast, and the dashboard could show how much space is left for computing power, or show that something is not working, that would make a difference. 

I've been using this solution for five years. 

I especially like the scalability aspect because, compared to the HP servers that we had before, those were rack-mount servers whereas the Blade is just a plug and play. If we need more computing power, we just bring a new Blade and plug it in and auto-conservation setup in the profiler takes over the new Blade and it's that easy. We are a team of three admins using this solution. 

We haven't had a chance to contact Cisco for any issues because everything has been running smooth and fine. And we have our corporate team as well. If there's an issue we reach out to them first before reaching out for support. It's been three years and we haven't had any major issues, we've been able to solve anything that's come up. 

In short, management with a central dashboard is really good as compared to the older HP Proliant environment. You have a bird's eye view of your infrastructure through the dashboard.

The initial setup was pretty good. It was a new thing for us and took us some time, but it was good, it was straightforward. We had to deploy it here first to make sure everything was up and running. It required a lot of regression tests before moving it to the actual production site and that's what took time. It wasn't the time taken to configure it, but the time taken to deploy the whole system in the production site. We did the deployment ourselves. 

Having experience with the product for over 5 years, the ROI is definitely over our expectations. The level of performance improvement has increased in such a way that we are able to scale up with the ability to process more data (faster), making our customers happy with the output. 

Price wise, Cisco B-series was better. 

We compared it with HP C7000 series blade infrastructure but the Cisco B-Series cost that was presented to us and the comparison of performance details were superior.

I haven't had experience with others series, like the C-Series. I hope they are good but so far, after three, four years, this has been good and we haven't had any issues. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

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. 

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 solution is primarily used for computation purposes. 

The hardware available for the solution is very good. It's quite reliable and robust.

The visualization is excellent.

The initial setup is pretty simple and straightforward. 

The scalability is excellent. 

We found that the stability is extremely reliable. 

Technical support is very good in general.

The price of this product is too high. They should work to make it more affordable.

I've been dealing with the solution for about three years at this point. It's been a while. 

The stability and performance of this Cisco product are excellent. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable. 

The scalability potential of the product is very, very good. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so with relative ease.

Technical support is pretty good. We find Cisco to be knowledgeable and responsive. We're satisfied with the level of support we receive overall. They're great. All UCS products have great support.

We found the initial setup to be pretty easy. It's straightforward. I wouldn't describe it as too complex or difficult. A company should have no problems deploying it. 

We have seen an ROI and would recommend the solution based on those observations.

The solution is quite expensive. It's pretty high, especially when you compare it against the offerings of other vendors. They need to be more competitive in terms of pricing.

We're a Cisco partner.

We are dealing with the latest version of the solution. I can't speak to the exact version number.

I can recommend the solution wholeheartedly to other organizations. I would really recommend it due to the fact that it's a really stable technology. Also, it can produce a return on investment for organizations as well.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the product at an eight. We've largely been quite pleased with its capabilities.