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."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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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.
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