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Cisco UCS B-Series vs HPE Superdome X comparison

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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
6th
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
8th
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 November 2026, in the Blade Servers category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS B-Series is 7.7%, up from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Superdome X is 6.6%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Blade Servers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco UCS B-Series7.7%
HPE Superdome X6.6%
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's most valuable feature is KVM Launch Manager."
"The most valuable feature is the service profile."
"I have a client who is currently managing 1500 servers with two people for a mission-critical retail operation."
"You will be very happy to have had spent the money upfront and you will look like a rock star to your management and customer base by choosing Cisco UCS blade server system for your infrastructure needs."
"I can recommend the solution wholeheartedly to other organizations."
"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, and technical support is helpful."
"The product's tech support has good people."
"The stability provided by the product is its most valuable feature for our organization."
"It's an amazing product, an amazing technology, that has the best of that world: performance and uptime, and standardization."
"This product is very reliable."
"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."
"In summary, this is a good product and I recommend it."
"We've got a few of them, because we needed some really large machines. So far, they've been working pretty good."
"HPE Superdome X is a very resilient infrastructure, and stable."
"The most valuable features of HPE Superdome X are speed, performance, and resilience."
"We felt that the HPE's solution offered the best performance of the group."
 

Cons

"Initial setup was complex. UCS deployment and management requires deep knowledge of the platform."
"The graphic code that UCS can support is limited and less accessible than other systems."
"I would really like to see an integrated management interface for all the products for FlexPod, as well as a verification tool like Immersive that can give you feedback about your compatibility with FlexPod guidelines."
"From my point of view the initial cost to do this for a small regional office where we usually have the computer in a dedicated network closet for the switches and servers."
"These are not stable servers because we have seen some cases where the servers have gone down when there were power fluctuations."
"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 under such conditions."
"The UCS manager interface needs to be cleaned up a bit and can be streamlined, but no major complaints."
"Previously, the unified port functionality allowed the same port to function as both FC and Ethernet, however, this has now changed."
"I know we support Windows and I think it's Red Hat, and I'd like to see more OSs supported."
"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.""
"I'd like to see the onboarding of some storage class memory to really expand the already very large RAM, into something that could be even much bigger."
"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 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."
"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."
"The price of this product should be cheaper."
"There's a big upfront investment, but the total cost of ownership should be cheaper over the long term."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for Cisco products is always high."
"Every three years, I need to renew my license and support the product...Every time I have to opt for the renewal of the license, I am shocked to learn about the increase in the price of the product."
"Pricing with Cisco is very high."
"The cost of the Cisco UCS B-Series is comparable to HP solutions but higher than Dell solutions."
"It is expensive."
"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."
"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."
"Cisco UCS B-Series is not a cheap solution."
"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."
"There is a very expensive one-time cost with no licensing fees."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
12%
University
10%
Government
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

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...
Ask a question
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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: September 2026.
919,919 professionals have used our research since 2012.