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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
4th
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 September 2026, in the Blade Servers category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS B-Series is 7.5%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Superdome X is 6.8%, down from 9.7% 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

"I have a client who is currently managing 1500 servers with two people for a mission-critical retail operation."
"The most beneficial feature is UCS Manager. It's the best way to manage hardware, creating group policies, like scrub policies and maintenance policies."
"Cisco UCS B-Series is more scalable because of the blade servers."
"It's faster to provision virtual servers than physical, and it has very good orchestration with UCS Director 5.2."
"I can connect Cisco UCS B-Series to multiple chassis and rack servers using a unified platform, then manage them on a single console."
"Remote access to the server is very useful."
"Cisco UCS B-Series is scalable."
"Cisco provides good flexibility to choose different products or different equipment within the blade servers, like CPU memory, logic board, etc., to make your own server."
"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."
"The most valuable features of HPE Superdome X are speed, performance, and resilience."
"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."
"This product is very reliable."
"HPE Superdome X is a very resilient infrastructure, and stable."
"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."
 

Cons

"The product could be made more secure."
"HTML5 interface is a much needed improvement over the old Java interface, but still needs a little work."
"The solution’s pricing could be improved and made cheaper."
"Very tightly integrated, so once you are all in, you are likely to be there for a long time."
"There are some shortcomings in the product when you look at it from the perspective of the area involving multiple configurations, making it an aspect where improvements are required."
"Compared to the deployment of servers such as Dell XCDs, the deployment of UCS servers is more complex. They take longer to deploy."
"The price of this product is too high. They should work to make it more affordable."
"Next generation support for VMware needs to be introduced as it does not support eighth-generation VMware."
"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."
"Looking back to our original purchase of Superdome X, we bought the smallest model."
"The price of this product should be cheaper."
"I know we support Windows and I think it's Red Hat, and I'd like to see more OSs supported."
"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."
"There's a big upfront investment, but the total cost of ownership should be cheaper over the long term."
"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."
"It would be helpful if you could do the maintenance completely online."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of this solution is a little bit higher, but given that this system is Cisco, it feels more secure and dependable."
"The product is expensive."
"Cisco UCS B-Series is not a cheap solution."
"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 type of service level purchase will determine the level of support response that you receive from Cisco."
"It is highly-priced."
"Cisco products are at the high end in terms of cost, but everything is included with the licensing fees."
"UCS is expensive, and we will be migrating to the cheaper HP servers."
"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
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
University
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
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...
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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: August 2026.
911,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.