Cisco UCS B-Series and HPE Synergy compete in the enterprise server market. Cisco holds an advantage in support and ROI, while HPE leads in flexibility and composability.
Features: Cisco UCS B-Series is praised for its scalability, efficient firmware updates using service profiles, and centralized management, making it ideal for rapidly growing IT environments. It offers seamless server provisioning and tightly integrates with virtualization technologies. HPE Synergy stands out with its composability, allowing easy hardware repurposing for various workloads, thus improving resource utilization and supporting diverse IT environments.
Room for Improvement: Cisco UCS B-Series demands significant technical expertise for optimal deployment and can improve in interface management and storage integration. Users point out its power requirements as a challenge. HPE Synergy could enhance integration with third-party products and improve automation for handling complex deployments, with some users calling for better technical support and less downtime during updates.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco UCS B-Series users frequently commend the efficient and responsive support from Cisco TAC, highlighting their expertise and availability, which is unmatched by HPE Synergy, where users suggest improvements in response times and comprehension levels despite acknowledging the support team.
Pricing and ROI: Cisco UCS B-Series, though having higher initial costs, is regarded for delivering substantial long-term ROI due to its consistent performance, appealing to enterprises that value stability. HPE Synergy, also considered expensive, provides a compelling ROI by reducing IT infrastructure costs through its composable infrastructure. Both systems are acknowledged for robust ROI, but Cisco often involves more negotiation in its pricing strategy.
Additionally, we achieved server consolidation, running multiple services on fewer servers without purchasing new ones, resulting in significant financial benefits.
Cisco's technical support is highly helpful and responsive.
The stability of Cisco UCS B-Series is impeccable, as it has been running smoothly without any need for maintenance.
Last year, we faced challenges with firmware upgrades, but they were quickly resolved with assistance from Cisco TAC.
Currently, it supports only two drives in the blade server, which can be limiting.
The management software, Cisco One, is priced a bit high but still considered reasonable.
Pricing in the blade server market is very competitive, with HPE offering a competitive price.
Its administration capabilities provide easy access to performance reports, logs, and utilization data, which are essential for effective server management.
It offers significant compute power in approximately ten rack units, making it practical for workload optimization.
HPE Synergy, the first platform built from the ground up for Composable Infrastructure, offers an experience that empowers IT to create and deliver new value instantly and continuously. It is a single infrastructure that reduces operational complexity for traditional workloads and increases operational velocity for the new breed of applications and services. Through a single interface, HPE Synergy composes physical and virtual compute, storage, and fabric pools into any configuration for any application. As an extensible platform, it easily enables a broad range of applications and operational models such as virtualization, hybrid cloud, and DevOps. With HPE Synergy, IT can become not just the internal service provider but the business partner to rapidly launch new applications that become the business.
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