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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 July 2026, in the Blade Servers category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS B-Series is 7.5%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Superdome X is 6.6%, down from 10.5% 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 X6.6%
Other85.9%
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

"None of them have come close to the combination of performance and reliability that I get from Cisco."
"The Cisco solution provides a unified dashboard which enhances virtualization tasks, allowing configurations from a single interface. It also helps with space and power management, which are vital for data center efficiency."
"Great consolidation, high mem capacity, excellent reduction on ports."
"Dell has a huge portfolio of products."
"The most valuable feature is definitely the service profile."
"The solution is very unified and the technical team is very supportive, no help is needed from outside vendors."
"Cisco UCS B-Series is flexible as it can be built as a standalone system and expanded horizontally and vertically in a cluster mode, with a standout feature being the Unified Fabric which combines LAN and SAN, reducing the need for numerous cables and offering consistent configuration, unlike traditional setups."
"The product's tech support has good people."
"I would tell you that if you are looking for a product that can be used by multiple groups especially multiple groups with one point of administration, Superdome is very good."
"We felt that the HPE's solution offered the best performance of the group."
"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."
"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."
"This product is very reliable."
"HPE Superdome X is a very resilient infrastructure, and stable."
"CPU and memory, it's just pretty good and helps us to support the students and the teachers of the school."
"If you're looking for a solution where you need a lot of workload and power, it's a great solution."
 

Cons

"There is also a need for better local parts replacement, as HP is superior in this area."
"The high price of the solution is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The solution’s technical support could be better."
"Software defects that result in false environmental alarms have been a pain point for us."
"Right now, the market is rapidly transitioning to solid-state media and the Cisco options tend to be less varied and more expensive than a broader slate of products from HP, Dell or IBM."
"GUI had some trouble before with Java updates, but that is fixed now."
"For future improvements, it would be a benefit if the solution could integrate better with products such as Oracle."
"They use LSI for their RAID, while they may be robust RAID controllers, they lack a lot of functionality that Adaptec or HP Smart array."
"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."
"The price of this product should be cheaper."
"It would be helpful if you could do the maintenance completely online."
"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."
"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.""
"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."
"Looking back to our original purchase of Superdome X, we bought the smallest model."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have to pay a monthly licensing fee for the solution."
"The price of this solution is a little bit higher, but given that this system is Cisco, it feels more secure and dependable."
"Pricing with Cisco is very high."
"Considering our market, I rate the pricing of Cisco UCS B-Series as a six."
"The type of service level purchase will determine the level of support response that you receive from Cisco."
"The pricing for Cisco products is always 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."
"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
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
14%
University
10%
Government
10%
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...
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: June 2026.
905,526 professionals have used our research since 2012.