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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 August 2026, in the Blade Servers category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS B-Series is 7.5%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Superdome X is 6.8%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Blade Servers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco UCS B-Series7.5%
HPE Superdome X6.8%
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 solution is stable."
"Cisco UCS changed the server blade game, converging network and compute into a single profile-based platform."
"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."
"The product's tech support has good people."
"Cisco UCS B-Series is more scalable because of the blade servers."
"The most valuable features are monitoring and processing, which can handle a lot of throughput and are more powerful than the HPE series."
"The stability of the solution is fantastic."
"UCS has made it possible to replace and upgrade servers quickly and easily while keeping things up and running for the enterprise."
"We felt that the HPE's solution offered the best performance of the group."
"This product is very reliable."
"HPE Superdome X is a very resilient infrastructure, and stable."
"If you're looking for a solution where you need a lot of workload and power, it's a great solution."
"It's an amazing product, an amazing technology, that has the best of that world: performance and uptime, and standardization."
"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."
"SDX gave us a very large RAM and we need that for the large-scale graph-handling applications."
"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."
 

Cons

"Stability of some of the old versions has a few bugs."
"Next generation support for VMware needs to be introduced as it does not support eighth-generation VMware."
"It could be helpful to have a wizard to make the setup routine better, and a wizard to help with the managerial processes to avoid misconfiguration issues."
"It is more expensive than the competitors."
"The product pricing needs improvement."
"Initial setup was complex. UCS deployment and management requires deep knowledge of the platform."
"Despite the benefits gained from the product implementation, the cost could be more appealing if the overall cost of ownership were reduced."
"The UCS Manager is written in Java and has many problems after the new Java releases."
"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."
"It would be helpful if you could do the maintenance completely online."
"There's a big upfront investment, but the total cost of ownership should be cheaper over the long term."
"Looking back to our original purchase of Superdome X, we bought the smallest model."
"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."
"I know we support Windows and I think it's Red Hat, and I'd like to see more OSs supported."
"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.""
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing cost is a little bit expensive because by default, it depends on your fabric interconnect model. Most of the time, however, Cisco provides a lot of promotions to the customers, so the cost can be waived for many projects. The price of the chassis itself is fair."
"The cost of the blade servers is okay, but the cost of Fabric Interconnects ends up increasing the overall costs. For example, suppose it costs 3,500 USD per blade server. When you include the Fabric Interconnects, you could pay up to 30,000 USD. Therefore, compared to the cost of servers from Lenovo, Huawei, Dell, or HP, the cost of Cisco servers can be high. However, Cisco gives good discounts (about 90% to 94%) to partners and to customers who are already using Cisco servers. New Cisco customers do not get the level of discount that an existing customer does. Because you can get discounts with Cisco, I would give pricing a rating of four out of five."
"The product is expensive."
"The product cost is high."
"The price of this solution compared to others is fair."
"Compared to the more in-demand hyper-converged environments such as Nutanix or DVX rail, Cisco UCS B-Series is even more costly due to the expensive fabric interconnects."
"UCS is expensive, and we will be migrating to the cheaper HP servers."
"A physical licensing fees needs to be paid."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
13%
University
10%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
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...
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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: June 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.