Cisco UCS E-Series Servers Reviews

We use Cisco UCS E-Series Servers to host enterprise systems.

The product's most valuable features are stability, speed, and scalability. We rarely encounter downtime issues, and it has an expandable memory storage. Additionally, it blends well with Cisco's security tools.

My company uses Cisco UCS E-Series Servers in its IT infrastructure and for mission-critical applications.

The solution's most valuable feature stems from the fact that you can upgrade and do all the network provisioning from Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects, so you just go to one single pane of glass, allowing you to manage the complete solution that comes to the networking, especially Cisco UCS B-Series.

It was a government organization and we only developed a data set. We have data centers. So where I designed cell phones for the customer, I used two Blade chassis 5108 for a primary data center and one Dell Chassis. I used two Blade chassis with two fabric interconnects that were F5-6-2-4-4-8 series and was able to interconnect A and able to interconnect B. So I was able to figure it out. First of all, I am mega cabling metrics for both the chassis and I used two IOM for each chassis. Then I connected it to an IBM storage with their servers. I also added EMC storage and HP 3PAR storage as well with this Dell chassis.

If you provide the high-end skill and high-end bandwidth for this single port it will be more beneficial for that customer. The high-end traffic is going to be more beneficial for customers and provide high bandwidth traffic between servers or between chassis.

Cisco UCS E-Series Servers have been reliable. I think that's one of the big things. Their hardware has been pretty, pretty reliable. I have noticed some issues with their controllers failing due to the thermal paste drying up and the heat sinks falling off causes them to fail. But that was something we experienced last year. It took almost five years for any hardware failure. And even that was like a $100 repair. So nothing too major. 

Additionally, the UCS GUI is pretty straightforward. The server itself is a lot easier to maintain than some of the other Cisco equipment, like the routers and switches.

They are really easy to maintain. I've added RAM to them. I've done a lot of other things with the virtualization.

In terms of what needs improvement, I would say the biggest pain point for us is the matrix for the firmware upgrades. It is a pain. You look at that thing, you might as well be reading Greek. You just look at it and you're like, well, is it this with this one? Or this with this one? My model matches this, but my CPU is running this. It's just a nightmare. It would be a whole lot better if they could clean up their documentation on it.

It would be good if they organized that more making it a little bit easier for people who don't understand the language as much. I think that's kind of what Cisco in general is, if you're not a CCNA or something like that you're going to have a lot of trouble managing and maintaining it. I think that's probably one of the biggest failure points with Cisco, from their documentation all the way to their products. I mean it's a solid product for sure. And they have some of the best experts working for them. But for small house users and schools, it's not really feasible.

The UCS Servers are our primary servers processing payment for our 600,000 plus small scale growers on a monthly basis. They Host our SAP ERP system and all other on premise systems across the different factories in the country.

The support from CISCO for all their products that we are using is great. The servers are stable. We once had a major power surge that went through our UPSs as a result of fault in the power distribution channel. The only equipment that was not affected were the CISCO Servers.

We have also brought down the processing time from 6 hours to 1 hour.

Cisco has better visibility and manageability for disaster recovery. It is the best thing about it. It is compatible and has a low form factor. It is good for minimum-requirement deployments and processes that are not highly intensive.

The fabric controller and fabric access we use must be from Cisco. The tool must be made compatible with multi-vendor ecosystems.

It is not a solution that is cloud ready. So, it should be made cloud ready.

The solution should have a cloud version.

I have been using Cisco UCS E-Series Servers for ten years. My company has a partnership with Cisco.