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Cisco UCS B-Series vs Pure Storage FlashBlade comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.6
Cisco UCS B-Series improved performance, reduced costs by 40%, and enabled management of 1600 servers with just two people.
Sentiment score
6.6
Pure Storage FlashBlade reduces total cost of ownership by enhancing efficiency, enabling fast restorations, and supporting diverse use cases.
Additionally, we achieved server consolidation, running multiple services on fewer servers without purchasing new ones, resulting in significant financial benefits.
It does not require much management once you set up correctly, so it saves time, allowing an admin to focus on other work.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Cisco UCS B-Series support is praised for efficient, proactive service, though improvements are suggested for response times.
Sentiment score
7.6
Pure Storage FlashBlade's support is generally praised for responsiveness, despite occasional delays and communication issues, maintaining a favorable reputation.
Cisco's technical support is highly helpful and responsive.
Their technical support has been perfect lately, so I would give it a 10.
The support is done through email and is not that great, making it a very problematic area I've been dealing with for over four years.
I would rate them an eight out of ten.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Cisco UCS B-Series excels in seamless scalability and integration, efficiently supporting thousands of servers for diverse industry needs.
Sentiment score
8.6
Pure Storage FlashBlade excels in scalability, with seamless expansion, downtime-free growth, and praised support across various sectors.
There are between 5 and 10,000 people using it in our organization.
Pure Storage FlashBlade is scalable.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Cisco UCS B-Series is praised for its stability, reliability, and strong performance, with swift resolutions to occasional issues.
Sentiment score
8.1
Pure Storage FlashBlade offers exceptional reliability and impressive stability, featuring 99.999% uptime, seamless upgrades, and high performance.
The stability of Cisco UCS B-Series is impeccable, as it has been running smoothly without any need for maintenance.
In case there is any issue with any blade, the data is moved to another.
 

Room For Improvement

Cisco UCS B-Series requires improved user-friendliness, integration, pricing, storage management, and software update processes per user feedback.
Users recommend better pricing, cloud integration, support, documentation, and analytics for Pure Storage FlashBlade, improving efficiency and compatibility.
Last year, we faced challenges with firmware upgrades, but they were quickly resolved with assistance from Cisco TAC.
Technical support definitely needs significant improvement.
Its configuration should be easier.
One way Pure Storage FlashBlade can be improved is by having more compatibility between the FlashArray and FlashBlade.
 

Setup Cost

Cisco UCS B-Series has high pricing, complex licensing, but offers discounts and long-term value through reliability and integration.
Pure Storage FlashBlade is costly but valued for performance, reliability, and reduced administrative overhead, justifying its premium price.
The management software, Cisco One, is priced a bit high but still considered reasonable.
The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the past, but one benefit is that they have built-in ransomware protection.
Regarding pricing, it is okay; we needed exactly this in size, and the price was a lot lower than competitors, making it good for us.
 

Valuable Features

Cisco UCS B-Series provides centralized management, scalability, high memory, virtualization support, and reduced costs, enhancing efficiency and performance.
Pure Storage FlashBlade excels with ease of use, fast performance, scalability, seamless integration, and efficient storage features.
Its administration capabilities provide easy access to performance reports, logs, and utilization data, which are essential for effective server management.
The best features of Pure Storage FlashBlade include better throughput and better performance.
Pure Storage FlashBlade's scalability is one of the most valuable features, and importantly, it always works, allowing for seamless upgrades.
We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco UCS B-Series
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
Blade Servers (5th)
Pure Storage FlashBlade
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (16th), Software Defined Storage (SDS) (8th), File and Object Storage (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Cisco UCS B-Series and Pure Storage FlashBlade aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Cisco UCS B-Series is designed for Blade Servers and holds a mindshare of 7.2%, down 8.6% compared to last year.
Pure Storage FlashBlade, on the other hand, focuses on File and Object Storage, holds 5.6% mindshare, down 6.2% since last year.
Blade Servers Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cisco UCS B-Series7.2%
HPE Synergy17.4%
Dell PowerEdge MX- Series14.2%
Other61.2%
Blade Servers
File and Object Storage Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Pure Storage FlashBlade5.6%
MinIO17.4%
Red Hat Ceph Storage16.7%
Other60.3%
File and Object Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Prasanth Kailasam - PeerSpot reviewer
Supports multiple hypervisors but needs to improve in the area of configuration
Speaking about how the tool can improve computing efficiency in data centers, I feel that, ultimately, there are other kinds of hardware or servers that Cisco provides. From a management perspective, certain aspects can be incorporated to help users understand their current standing. It would be good if certain larger configurations could also be made suitable for the tool to suit the needs of multiple customer bases. For virtualization needs, the product works well. I have dealt with certain virtualization environments using - Cisco UCS B-Series. As of now, the tool is fine. Cisco UCS B-Series recently got registered with Nutanix, one of the market's HCI platforms. Nutanix can run on Cisco. Cisco UCS B-Series' direction is right. I don't think any further improvement is required in the tool right now. The integration capabilities of the product are okay. I haven't seen any challenges when installing the tool in an environment. I think that the tool supports multiple hypervisors. Speaking about the feature that has improved our company's data center operation, I would say that the Cisco brand name provides our organization with the benefits we need from the product. I believe that manageability is one crucial aspect of the tool, considering that it is pretty easy to manage. Performance-wise, some improvements have been introduced in Cisco UCS B-Series. Whenever somebody evaluates and goes ahead with some traditional setup in their environment, along with HP and Dell, they can also consider Cisco as a part of it because it has become more cost-effective and competitive presently. Networking-wise, the tool is pretty strong, and it operates as a brand that actually helps with the support offered to customers. The support offered by Cisco adds a lot of confidence for the clients. I feel that Cisco is doing a lot of innovation in order to offer scalability and flexibility to adopt future technologies. I believe Cisco users might see a lot more solutions that get introduced in the market that might become more and more compatible with many products in the future. In the future, I think that users will see AI and other related aspects run pretty well in a Cisco environment. I would say that the benefits and value of the use of the product stem from the brand name attached to Cisco products. Cisco's support when you use Cisco UCS B-Series is good. In the networking space, Cisco has been a leader for a very long time, and the same kind of credibility is what you can expect when you consider Cisco UCS B-Series. Considering the availability of the products from competitors, I rate the tool a seven out of ten.
MikaelHellström - PeerSpot reviewer
Has handled backup storage needs reliably and supports seamless upgrades
In environments requiring high throughput and low latency, Pure Storage FlashBlade provides high throughput and normal latency, but we do not have any application that requires low latency right now, so the latency of three to five milliseconds is considered kind of high. Pure Storage FlashBlade's ability to integrate with enterprise applications is not important for us, as we only want to present an S3 bucket for our backup, which we have done, and it works very fast. We use the Purity software's data reduction techniques; we have a backup software that compresses everything before sending it to the S3 bucket, achieving a data reduction of 1.1 to one. I would recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other companies because it's a very fast and scalable solution for anyone who needs it. On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution an 8.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Performing Arts
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise41
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco UCS B-Series?
The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it is easily scalable.
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 do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?
The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power outages when we need to quickly move data between different data centers. It ensure...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?
The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the past, but one benefit is that they have built-in ransomware protection. Approximate...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?
I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bit complex to understand. You have to understand it more deeply because it's hard...
 

Also Known As

UCS B-Series, Unified Computing System B-Series
No data available
 

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
ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL
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