Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

We use the solution for a server.

Some of the features I like from this solution are it has a fast configuration, it is not complex, and has high availability. 

A long while ago something went wrong with the solution and we had to back-up to the cluster, some stability issues could be improved.

For future improvements, it would be a benefit if the solution could integrate better with products such as Oracle. I recently worked at a company in Cambodia where we were using Oracle, we were having some difficulties with applying the licensing between the solutions.

I have been using the solution for approximately two years.

Over time the solution became more unstable. This is why I planned for a hyper-converged HyperFlex Infrastructure. Hopefully, this will reduce the percentage the server consumes and an overall performance improvement.

We have an internal team that does the support for the solution.

The setup was not complex, there was nothing standing out to me that was difficult.

The price of this solution compared to others is fair.

We have been evaluating Cisco HyperFlex which we will be upgrading soon. I compared the two on itcentralstation.com and downloaded the reports, it is better. There is a current need to choose this upgrade and my team will get on it soon.

I wanted to try out Cisco products because most of the big industries use them such as banks, IT, and telecommunications. Cisco itself produced the server and at the time I researched more about Cisco and then I want to try it. This is why I invested in a tool from Cisco. Additionally, I plan to implement level IP2, HyperFlex soon.

I would recommend this solution for the financial sector and big industry enterprise companies that can invest with Cisco long-term. The scalability, high availability, and security all combined is a good offering.

I rate Cisco UCS B-Series a nine out of ten.

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 use this product for SAP HANA in a QA development environment. It is at the core of our business.

The most valuable feature is the service profile.

The amount of RAM that it supports for HANA is good.

The maintenance is very easy.

The configuration is a little bit complicated and could be made simpler.

The administration is somewhat complex.

I have been using the UCS B-Series for more than six years.

This is a very stable product.

The UCS B-Series is easy to scale. We have approximately 1,000 people using this solution, and it is used on a daily basis.

We have been in contact with technical support a couple of times and I would say that they are efficient.

Prior to working with this product, we used the HPE c7000 enclosure. Once we started using SAP HANA, we implemented Cisco. Our main environment still uses the HPE.

The HPE is more difficult to maintain because all of the addresses are hardcoded inside the enclosure. With Cisco, it is much easier.

The initial setup took us approximately one week. If you are connecting to a SAN then you need to bring up all of the virtual VLANs and set up the storage. It takes a lot of time.

We had assistance from the vendor for our deployment, and our in-house administrators are taking care of the maintenance.

Cisco products are at the high end in terms of cost, but everything is included with the licensing fees. The only thing that we pay for separately is VMware.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our whole VMware Farm is running on Flexpod, which uses the UCS B-Series for compute resources. Using the Blade along with Fibre Interconnect, it provides high availability and ease of migration to other hardware in case of failure. The cabling and power footprint is at the lowest so far.

It provides high availability with flexibility and a single point of administration using the Flexpod solutions. With all of the hardware on a single dashboard, it is easy to troubleshoot and to administer. The blade system provides faster back-end communication between systems.

The most valuable features of this solution are profiling, ease of administration, and monitoring.

Profiling provides easier deployment and configuration, especially if the new systems are intended only to increase compute resources.

The Dashboard is quite impressive and is, so far, the best based on my experience. It provides a detailed view that is easy to follow. The cross-links on the information are great.

I would like to see the availability increased during upgrades and patching. There are patches that cannot be implemented without any downtime or reboot required. If the newer version could eliminate downtime during patches or firmware upgrades, it would be great.

This solution is very much stable, especially the network side.

Scalability is very flexible, thanks to Profiling of the hardware on which you can transfer the profile of a system to another without any action or configuration needed.

Technical support is great all the way, although no major issues have yet been encountered in terms of UCS / Flexpod.

Prior to this solution, we used an HP Blade C3000 System. Based on the reviews and corporate standard we went to Cisco Flexpod solutions.

The initial setup of this solution is impressive.

The vendor helped us implement the Flexpod, and we would rate them an eight out of ten.

The price of this solution is a little bit higher, but given that this system is Cisco, it feels more secure and dependable.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

Right now we haven't encountered any issues on our system that could result in our KPI being impacted.

We use Cisco UCS B-Series as a central computing environment.

The solution has the ability to reuse or divide the networking, making it a flexible networking environment. We have a virtual network interface, which means that we can easily reconfigure the machines according to our needs.

Cisco UCS B-Series is a pretty complex environment to manage, and it's not very simple. The solution’s technical support could be better.

I have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for more than ten years.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.

Cisco UCS B-Series is a scalable solution with a fairly advanced environment that can scale easily. It is not cheap, but it provides the ability to scale up in terms of computing, networking, and memory. Around 2,000 people are using the solution as our central computing. In terms of management, we're a small team of ten people working with the solution. The solution is being used daily in our organization.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for scalability.

The technical support team takes some time to resolve our problems. It took them some time to ship us a spare part when we had a problem. For a big organization like Cisco, technical support is not straightforward and could be better.

Neutral

We previously used HPE and Cisco. We switched to Cisco UCS B-Series because we learned to trust Cisco. Cisco UCS B-Series was a very stable and good solution. When we bought it last time, we managed to use it for many years.

The solution’s initial setup wasn’t easy.

We implemented the solution through an in-house team. The solution was deployed by two people in a few days.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution's initial setup a four out of ten.

Cisco UCS B-Series is not a cheap solution.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing ten out of ten.

Cisco UCS B-Series is part of our VMware environment. The Unified Architecture is one of the unique features of the solution that is very usable for us. With the feature, we can immediately understand that we need to configure a separate environment and easily configure networking to allow us to distribute the environment.

The solution is deployed on-premises, but it's managed by the cloud environment. The solution’s maintenance is done by one person. I would recommend the solution to other users.

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. 

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.