Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

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.

We use it in our data center. In our infrastructure, we virtualize our servers.

I like that it's very manageable very easy to use and configure. I am not an expert, but the graphic user interface is quite simple very easy to use. It's a complete solution.

We have to have Java to manage the infrastructure. It would be great if we can manage the infrastructure through a web browser. 

We have Dell EMC, and I would like to connect my product directly to the chassis. I would like to have an interface to integrate the storage directly chassis and not through the network. If that could be possible, that would be great for me. 

I have been using Cisco UCS B200 since 2015.

We haven't had any problem or any outage, and it's always running. Every process and everything you run, memory and cache memory, is always running. It's very stable.

I think it's very scalable. I have an opportunity to provide for more Blade Servers, and if I need more power or resources, I just have to provide the Blade Servers. Right now, we have two administrators.

When we had a problem once with a virtual server, our Cisco partner came to us within three hours and provided support. It was very good.

We have stand-alone servers, and we used Dell Servers. For example, we installed VMware on top of the server. When we needed more power or infrastructure that's a little bit easier to buy, we bought this Cisco UCS platform.

I don't know if it was straightforward because our partner set up and deployed this solution. It took about 20 days to implement this solution.

We received the infrastructure entirely configured by our partner. It was a very good experience.

Before you buy infrastructure like this, I would recommend some training. It'll help to get really good training in infrastructure management. For example, in my case, a quick overview when I started to manage the infrastructure definitely helped. It's very hard because at the beginning you are a little lost. The infrastructure is easy to manage, but it would be better if you take time before you install the infrastructure to learn more.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco UCS B-Series a nine.

We are using this solution to connect to a rack system.

The GUI makes is simple to use and deploy.

Managing could be improved. It's too hard.

The pricing could be less.

I have been working with Cisco UCS B Series for six years.

This solution is stable, we had not had any issues.

This solution is scalable. 

The scalability is very good.

Technical support is very good. We had two or three issues, but they were able to solve them.

The initials setup is straightforward.

It requires some preparation. It's not as easy as Microsoft, but for Cisco, it's still good.

Pricing with Cisco is very high.

The price is very inefficient.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The monitoring features and integration with other products can be improved.

In particular, integration with other products is difficult, especially for logging purposes. In this regard, it is not very good and improvement is required.

Technical support should be more timely.

We have been working with the Cisco UCS B-Series for more than a year.

This is a stable product.

The technical support is good although they respond very late to open cases.

One of the other products that we currently work with is Huawei, and they give us much cheaper prices. They also have a good product, which is sometimes even better than Cisco. Nonetheless, my team has a lot of experience and expertise with Cisco.

The initial setup is simple, and not very complex.

The pricing for Cisco products is always high.

My advice for anybody who is considering Cisco UCS is that if it's within your budget, I recommend it because they are popular in the market and it is easy to find experts.

Overall, this is a good product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The stability provided by the product is its most valuable feature for our organization.

The management interface needs a lot of improvement. As it is right now, it's a pain to use. It's not user-friendly.

For some clients, it may be useful if it was possible to switch the role for a server. I myself am running a VMware shop and so I would not personally gain any benefit from this, however, I see the value it would have for others - especially service providers.

I've been working with this solution for seven years at this point. It's been quite a while now.

The stability of the solution is fantastic. It's one of the greatest selling features. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs or glitches. It's extremely reliable.

The solution scales pretty well. We have not had any issues with that.

Currently, I'm the only one using the product in our organization.

I've never used technical support, so I can't speak to their level of knowledge or responsiveness.

I also have worked with IBM as well. 

At the time, the biggest difference was pricing. Also, there is the ability to switch roles or templates on the servers within IBM. However, it's not anything I have had any use for.

In our case, the solution's initial setup was not straightforward. It was rather complex.

It was part of a FlexPoint solution. And it was one of the first FlexPoint solutions delivered in the country. It was not the same solution delivered as the salesperson had promised.

You can typically get reasonable pricing on the solution. The hardware itself, however, isn't the biggest cost. The biggest cost is licensing, and that can be quite expensive.

If there are other organizations considering the solution, I'd strongly advise that they get training on the management side. It's very important to do this in order to successfully implement and use the product.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate this solution at a seven. It's good, however, it could use a simpler management structure. Cheaper licensing would go a long way as well. The UCS isn't the expensive part. It's more the Microsoft and VMware and the cost of running that.

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 it for computing and virtualization. All the blade servers are used for database uploads.

We are a system integrator. So, we sell multiple type of software and hardware solutions. We implement solutions and provide support. 

We have multiple versions of the solution currently running. It depends on our customer.

The overall consolidation of hardware is helping us.

• Manageability
• Performance

I can connect Cisco UCS B-Series to multiple chassis and rack servers using a unified platform, then manage them on a single console.

The solution is stable. We haven't encounter any failures or problems in these particular servers. We have had three to four years without any downtime happening.

The technical support is good from Cisco. The type of service level purchase will determine the level of support response that you receive from Cisco.

The setup is a bit complex in terms of configuration. While as an admin or an end user, it is very easy to use. The configuration is a bit complex, as it requires very high technical expertise to apply it.

We are the integrator. We use two engineers for the deployment.

The time for deployment depends customer to customer and the number of servers that we deploy. For example, our last deployment took three days.

It requires some basic configuration, then you can just plug and play.

We still have multiple vendors that we work with. It depends on the customer requirements whom we select to work with.

We work with this solution because we find that the technology is superior to others.

We have also evaluated Dell EMC blade and rack servers, along with Cisco rack servers.

Our customers are very happy people.