Cisco UCS B-Series vs HPE Synergy comparison

Cancel
You must select at least 2 products to compare!
Cisco Logo
2,109 views|1,576 comparisons
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Logo
4,978 views|3,595 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco UCS B-Series and HPE Synergy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Blade Servers solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS B-Series vs. HPE Synergy Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"It is less time-consuming to deploy the software.""The solution is very unified and the technical team is very supportive, no help is needed from outside vendors.""Stateless Blade is the best feature.""The most valuable features are monitoring and processing, which can handle a lot of throughput and are more powerful than the HPE series.""The initial setup is simple, and not very complex.""Great security and functionality.""From a return on investment perspective, Cisco UCS B-Series is worth the money.""It's modular."

More Cisco UCS B-Series Pros →

"We have been able to give the deployment team what they request more quickly. We are able to quickly deploy what is being asked of us. If the development team needs a platform of 20 servers to run a particular platform, we can give that to them within a day or two.""I like that it's suitable for virtualization. It's also stable and scalable. The newer version has a lot of memory, and you don't have to worry about updates.""We've found the scalability to be reasonable if you are ready to invest in it.""The flexibility to link them together and configure them gives us the ability to scale out easily, to add more compute resources as needed... The way that they're scalable and flexible means we can add additional servers in quickly... We're not spending a lot of time doing procurement and building of physical servers.""OneView is head and shoulders above the competition in this space.""It gives us ease of use. It's nice because we don't have to mess with networking once it's set up. Once it's done, we just put another blade in and go from there. We don't have to go back in, run more cables, deal with more data center stuff. We stick a blade in, use the server profile template, build out a server profile from that, and it just goes.""We like that the solution can be arranged for an all-in-one single pane of glass, something our customers find important.""Being able to connect my 3PAR arrays to the Synergy platform is the most valuable aspect to me."

More HPE Synergy Pros →

Cons
"Cisco UCS B-Series competitors have similar features as they do, Cisco needs to make some changes to make their offering better.""Integration with storage could be improved.""The initial setup process is complex.""HTML5 interface is a much needed improvement over the old Java interface, but still needs a little work.""The license is expensive. Cisco should decrease the delay in the delivery of their products.""Compared to the deployment of servers such as Dell XCDs, the deployment of UCS servers is more complex. They take longer to deploy.""The upgrades could be improved.""It needs a better UI. Cisco makes a great product, but doesn't know how to make a UI."

More Cisco UCS B-Series Cons →

"I would be more comfortable if Ansible actually rolled back the data used for automating platforms. If it could be communicated to the upstream Ansible, I wouldn't need to go back and forth and validate the libraries as we upgrade the Ansible version.""I would really like a way to validate the firmware in my specific environment before trying to deploy it. Those were the issues we had early on with firmware upgrades, particularly around certificates. All in all, having some level of confidence aside from it just having been tested generically would help. Something more specific to my environment would be very helpful.""The only good thing is that they have some powerful machines that you can use, such as the latest generations of HPE Compute that you can use.""Sometimes there are firmware or software difficulties when connecting between networks or with storage.""Synergy could probably do some code enhancements to simplify the deployment a bit more.""We haven't seen any ROI, and it hasn't reduced our cost of operations.""We had some challenges during the implementation and a few issues afterward, but they were all sort of related to how Synergy interacts with Nexus. Our Nexus on the network side is managed by another group, and they had just gotten Nexus, so they weren't really familiar with how Nexus even worked. Getting these two to interact well was the majority of our issues. It really didn't have anything to do with Synergy. It points to know the environment that you are putting it in and making sure you are dotting all your i's and crossing all your t's when you are figuring out what their requirements are to communicate.""You can always improve some things."

More HPE Synergy Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It makes much more sense for individual licenses for distributed environments"
  • "Make sure you work with a vendor partner than can get you a substantial discount off of list pricing."
  • "The type of service level purchase will determine the level of support response that you receive from Cisco."
  • "The price of this solution is a little bit higher, but given that this system is Cisco, it feels more secure and dependable."
  • "Cisco products are at the high end in terms of cost, but everything is included with the licensing fees."
  • "The pricing for Cisco is less than for the HP Proliant series."
  • "The pricing for Cisco products is always high."
  • "Pricing with Cisco is very high."
  • More Cisco UCS B-Series Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The Nutanix platform came in a little more expensive than the Synergy."
  • "The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs because we have had to buy less services than we used to."
  • "In our whole environment, the cost is in the millions. On this particular chassis, the annual cost is 12 blades times approximately $40,000."
  • "The biggest cost is the VMware licensing."
  • "We do a biannual renewal. I know how much that renewal is, but I don't know how much it breaks down to be just Synergy, since we have our VMware, all of our physical equipment, etc. all rolled up into one renewal, which is a little over $300,000 every two years. However, only a subset of that is the Synergy product."
  • "There was at least about a 20 percent savings in cost over our purchase based on the purchase price of the compute modules themselves versus what we've had to pay before. It was significantly less."
  • "Synergy has lowered our total cost of ownership significantly. I would say ballpark around 25 percent, maybe more."
  • "We bought everything outright to start with. We don't do much consumption-based stuff."
  • More HPE Synergy Pricing and Cost Advice →

    report
    Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Blade Servers solutions are best for your needs.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The platform has valuable features for management and good monitoring tools. It provides efficient insights.
    Top Answer:The product is expensive. We encounter a licensing issue as well. It could be subscription-based.
    Top Answer:There is a delay in the product's reporting and the rebooting system compared to servers from other vendors like Dell and HP.
    Top Answer:For me, choosing between HPE’s Bladesystem and Synergy came down to which solution was more powerful, reliable, and stable. It turns out Bladesystem was the winner. Bladesystem is excellent because it… more »
    Top Answer:It is a good product for hypervisors.
    Top Answer:You have to propose Synergy with your customer base.
    Ranking
    3rd
    out of 22 in Blade Servers
    Views
    2,109
    Comparisons
    1,576
    Reviews
    20
    Average Words per Review
    442
    Rating
    8.6
    1st
    out of 22 in Blade Servers
    Views
    4,978
    Comparisons
    3,595
    Reviews
    17
    Average Words per Review
    380
    Rating
    8.3
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    UCS B-Series, Unified Computing System B-Series
    Learn More
    Overview
    Based on Intel Xeon processor E7 and E5 product families, Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers work with virtualized and non-virtualized applications to increase: Performance, Energy efficiency, Flexibility and Administrator productivity.

    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.

    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
    HudsonAlpha, Virgin Media, EMIS, United
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm23%
    Manufacturing Company17%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Comms Service Provider13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company21%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Government10%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Retailer9%
    Healthcare Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company14%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Government8%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise68%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise58%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise66%
    Buyer's Guide
    Cisco UCS B-Series vs. HPE Synergy
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS B-Series vs. HPE Synergy and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Cisco UCS B-Series is ranked 3rd in Blade Servers with 62 reviews while HPE Synergy is ranked 1st in Blade Servers with 85 reviews. Cisco UCS B-Series is rated 8.6, while HPE Synergy is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco UCS B-Series writes "Robust hardware and efficient management of hardware, creating group policies, such as scrub policies and maintenance policies". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE Synergy writes "Local hard drives are not needed for the i3S module that boots to any operating system". Cisco UCS B-Series is most compared with Dell PowerEdge M, HPE BladeSystem, Super Micro SuperBlade, Pure Storage FlashBlade and Lenovo Flex System, whereas HPE Synergy is most compared with HPE BladeSystem, Dell PowerEdge M, HPE Apollo, HPE Superdome X and Lenovo Flex System. See our Cisco UCS B-Series vs. HPE Synergy report.

    See our list of best Blade Servers vendors.

    We monitor all Blade Servers reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.