No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Cisco UCS B-Series vs HPE Superdome X comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 3, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco UCS B-Series
Ranking in Blade Servers
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
HPE Superdome X
Ranking in Blade Servers
7th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Blade Servers category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS B-Series is 7.3%, down from 8.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Superdome X is 7.0%, down from 10.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Blade Servers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco UCS B-Series7.3%
HPE Superdome X7.0%
Other85.7%
Blade Servers
 

Featured Reviews

MB
Head of IT Operations at NCC BANK LIMITED
Efficient server management reduces costs and supports seamless operations
Cisco UCS B-Series has reliably sustained smooth operations without the need for significant maintenance. Its administration capabilities provide easy access to performance reports, logs, and utilization data, which are essential for effective server management. Additionally, the integration capabilities are seamless, and the power consumption and heat generation are low, resulting in reduced cooling costs and increased financial benefits.
reviewer2056329 - PeerSpot reviewer
Professor at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Robust product, helped with workload management and offers remote configuration
In this specific model, it could be beneficial to have a server configuration similar to Cisco, like the kind offered in HPE Superdome Flex X280. The ability to separate the chassis is important because we are forced to use two chassis even with lower loads. So introducing more flexibility in the Superdome environment would be helpful. One other problem is energy consumption. We are forced to use both chassis even when we only need, for example, all four processors. It's not always used at full capacity every day. When underutilized, we still need to have both chassis powered, which creates an energy consumption issue. While the machine can be configured to reduce consumption, the idea of having different possible configurations with varying chassis usage, similar to the Flex version, could be interesting for this model, too. This model leverages specific features of the Intel MAP board, so switching like in the Flex might be difficult due to the motherboard switching involved.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The Dual Fabric design allows for online/in-service upgrades during production with no impact."
"From a return on investment perspective, Cisco UCS B-Series is worth the money."
"Cisco UCS changed the server blade game, converging network and compute into a single profile-based platform."
"The Dashboard is quite impressive and is, so far, the best based on my experience."
"This host-provisioning solution gives us peace of mind, SLA level, and ease of management from the operation team."
"The product's tech support has good people."
"Customers and organizations are benefited by its scalability, flexibility, and the fact it takes less time to deploy."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to replace a server with another one, simply by applying the profile"
"One of the really cool things about Superdome is, depending on the model you choose, you can put 8-16 blades in it, but because of the structure and the engineering behind it, you can actually have your blades partitioned and they're actually physically divided."
"It's an amazing product, an amazing technology, that has the best of that world: performance and uptime, and standardization."
"Superdome X is a system that can compete in terms of performance and uptime, but it's now standard. That is the great value. There are competitors like IBM, for example, but IBM has a propietary operating system. With Superdome X, you have a system that can run Windows, Red Hat, or VMware, but in a mission critical server."
"We like the flexibility with the platform and our ability to stretch it across a lot of different areas of the company and product lines."
"We felt that the HPE's solution offered the best performance of the group."
"In summary, this is a good product and I recommend it."
"HPE Superdome X is a very resilient infrastructure, and stable."
"SDX gave us a very large RAM and we need that for the large-scale graph-handling applications."
 

Cons

"The aggregation in the data center is beneficial."
"The main issue with this solution is that it is quite vendor-restricted, meaning that when we use third party software, we cannot use all of the available configuration tools or pre-validated design features."
"Very tightly integrated, so once you are all in, you are likely to be there for a long time."
"Cisco is behind as far as SSD qualifications and options allowed, relative to other vendors, but that is in keeping with their philosophy of a stateless working environment."
"The configuration is a little bit complicated and could be made simpler."
"Next generation support for VMware needs to be introduced as it does not support eighth-generation VMware."
"Cisco is not going for perpetual licensing."
"The initial setup and service profile deployment can be tricky and should be improved for ease of use."
"I know we support Windows and I think it's Red Hat, and I'd like to see more OSs supported."
"The technical support sucks, would be understating it. Because the first line and the second line support tend to give out stupid suggestions that are completely useless, and they aren't listening to anything."
"HPE Superdome X can improve by adding a lot of cloud capabilities to allow this solution to be cloud-ready in case the customer wants to move it to the cloud."
"The price of this product should be cheaper."
"What would make it better from my point of view is if HPE spent more time on testing with the actual built-in Red Hat Linux drivers, as opposed to always trying to say, "Use our driver.""
"Looking back to our original purchase of Superdome X, we bought the smallest model."
"HPE Superdome X can improve by adding a lot of cloud capabilities to allow this solution to be cloud-ready in case the customer wants to move it to the cloud."
"There's a big upfront investment, but the total cost of ownership should be cheaper over the long term."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It makes much more sense for individual licenses for distributed environments"
"From a business point of view, the price is on the higher end."
"Pricing with Cisco is very high."
"It is highly-priced."
"We have to pay a monthly licensing fee for the solution."
"It is expensive."
"The pricing for Cisco is less than for the HP Proliant series."
"Cisco UCS does not require a license. However, this license is not specific to users."
"There is a very expensive one-time cost with no licensing fees."
"The pricing is not very cheap. I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, with one being very inexpensive, and ten being very expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Blade Servers solutions are best for your needs.
893,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Marketing Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
15%
University
10%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise41
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS B-Series?
Comparing Cisco UCS B-Series with traditional servers, while its initial cost may be slightly higher, it is not as expensive as Oracle Exadata, making it a worthwhile investment. It pays off in the...
What needs improvement with Cisco UCS B-Series?
There is a need for Cisco UCS B-Series to evolve and scale vertically, particularly with the increasing data demands and the integration of AI, ensuring the solution remains certified and capable u...
What is your primary use case for Cisco UCS B-Series?
The Cisco UCS B-Series servers are used to run backend databases ranging from small, medium, to large, running different versions of RDBMS such as Oracle, SQL, MySQL. It also includes cloud databas...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

UCS B-Series, Unified Computing System B-Series
HP Integrity Superdome, HP Superdome X
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Aegean Motorway, Anilana Hotels and Resorts, Anonymous Banking Group, Artoni Transporti, Bellevue, BH Telecom, Bowling Green State University, Children's Hospital Colorado, City of Biel, Dimension Data, Dualtec Cloud Builders, Hertz, Houston Methodist, Kuwait Petroleum Italia, Lufthansa Systems GmbH & Co.KG, Outscale, Sony Corporation, Talbots
Pella
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS B-Series vs. HPE Superdome X and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.