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Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers vs HPE Synergy 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Ser...
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
4.3
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
Rack Servers (7th), Density Optimized Servers (3rd)
HPE Synergy
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Blade Servers (4th), Composable Infrastructure (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are IT Hardware and Infrastructure solutions, they serve different purposes. Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers is designed for Rack Servers and holds a mindshare of 5.4%, up 4.7% compared to last year.
HPE Synergy, on the other hand, focuses on Blade Servers, holds 9.2% mindshare, down 21.3% since last year.
Rack Servers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers5.4%
Dell PowerEdge R-Series22.1%
HPE ProLiant DL Servers17.8%
Other54.7%
Rack Servers
Blade Servers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HPE Synergy9.2%
Dell PowerEdge MX- Series9.1%
HPE BladeSystem8.4%
Other73.30000000000001%
Blade Servers
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1441011 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr, Manager- Network Solution Architect at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Comprehensive support and integration ensure smooth cloud infrastructure operations
I may not be the right person to comment on advanced improvements because we are just using basic functionalities. We are getting all the functionalities which we used to get in other OEM rack servers. Potential areas for improvement may include a more flexible pricing model, better technical support, or tutorials from the vendor for users.
MS
Works at Saudi Telecom Company
Manage servers efficiently with an integrated view while reducing downtime
My use case is to serve the complete IT environment of the telecom, including all cloud applications. I use HPE Synergy servers for my private cloud and for network management systems. 70% of my workload is running on HPE servers The integrated view, such as managing complete servers and…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is stable."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is performance."
"The first advantage of Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers is that you don't need to buy physical hardware like I used to have to do for each application."
"We have many people in my organization using Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers in the administration."
"It is very nice and stable with an easy administration GUI."
"It is very stable and easy to use. It integrates easily with Cisco's cloud-based UC solutions. There are tools for management that make the management a bit easier, but we don't use them. We don't use what you would term as power users."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the expansion and replacement of parts."
"The product's stability is good. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."
"Except for the setup, everything else is fantastic."
"For temporal use, when you throw on the fact that you're essentially doubling your capacity, right there you could claim a 50 percent TCO reduction."
"The Synergy environment provides us with one view. We're able to manage the entire stack, top to bottom, from that single view."
"The i3S module can be configured to provision storage to all blade servers and boot to any operating system without needing local hard drives."
"The composable infrastructure allows us to build our own server profiles, then build up the infrastructure that we need from compute modules."
"Synergy is first in class for composable infrastructure; it has the scalability that meets our future needs and the automation that builds into something that we are really looking forward to using."
"The centralized management of HPE Synergy is beneficial because it is easy to manage and administer."
"The most valuable feature is its composable infrastructure. Everything I need is in the box. Manageability is through OneView, so I can get all the information about the box itself at any time I want."
 

Cons

"Technical support could be more responsive."
"Definitely the support area needs improving. Especially the time response in case of hardware failure."
"The C-Series is not designed to be as scalable."
"The price of the solution is problematic, not the solution itself. It could be less expensive."
"The scalability of the product is an area of concern where Cisco needs to focus on making some improvements."
"There is very little scalability for the cluster. If you need a higher availability, there is a user limitation. So that is the low side."
"Absolutely we had scalability issues. We tried several times to upgrade, scale up, expand our infrastructure, but Cisco insists to demand excessive amounts of money."
"The product must add customer-friendly monitoring features."
"When templates are created, there are some steps where you need to reboot the machines. Being in production, this is not a good idea. For example, if you reconfigure the network, you should not have to reboot the machine. You should just apply the new template and that's it."
"Sometimes there are firmware or software difficulties when connecting between networks or with storage."
"We have flaky things, like a lot of bad fans."
"Technical support was time consuming and unsatisfactory. The initial product setup was complex, lasing around three weeks to a month."
"We had an issue during the initial setup with the 40 Gigabyte cards. They weren’t working, so we had to work really closely with HPE support to get them to work."
"I would like to see more nodes in a single chassis so we wouldn't have to purchase additional chassis."
"The initial setup was quite complex and it is being done by the HPE support department."
"I would like it to connect to the HPE Cloud Connect compute platform for simplicity of our infrastructure."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The prices of Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers are higher compared to the competition. When we try and sell against the competition, then it becomes quite difficult to sell"
"The price of the solution could be better when compared to other solutions. However, when we purchased the solution we received Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers in a bundle with other hardware, such as IP phones and networking switches."
"The pricing is expensive."
"​Best to buy all the blades configured for the same purposes of load balancing and failover or load shifting.​"
"The price of the Cisco UCS C-Series Rack could improve. It's a little more expensive in comparison with Dell or HPE solutions."
"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis, which is only $2,000 or $3,000."
"This solution is a little expensive."
"This product is slightly more expensive when compared to others."
"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."
"The Nutanix platform came in a little more expensive than the Synergy."
"Nutanix was really hard to implement, and it was very pricey compared to what we get from Synergy."
"We do CAPEX."
"The licensing is more around the software for RGS, because we are deploying bare metal installs. It is mainly the operating system and any lights-out management. So, licensing is minimum. We are licensing it annually."
"The cost is high and that is a drawback for some customers."
"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."
"In our whole environment, the cost is in the millions. On this particular chassis, the annual cost is 12 blades times approximately $40,000."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise56
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers?
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers is not troublesome, but it is confusing. It takes a lot of time to navigate licensing and to work through ...
What needs improvement with Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers?
I think Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers could be improved, but I'm not really a forward thinker; everything works pretty well with how we're using it. It's not really an improvement, but the soluti...
What is your primary use case for Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers?
My main use case for Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers is hypervisors, using them as a hypervisor.
How would you choose between HPE's Bladesystem and Synergy?
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE Synergy?
As far as the prices are concerned, rack mount solutions are less expensive than HPE Synergy prices; however, HPE Synergy prices are higher but justify themselves as the solution accommodates all t...
What needs improvement with HPE Synergy?
In my opinion, for future improvements in HPE Synergy, there should be better management of power consumption complexity as well as an increase in the number of servers that can fit in a single Syn...
 

Also Known As

Unified Computing System C-Series, Cisco UCS C-Series
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Advanced Medical Transport, Aegean Motorway, Anilana Hotels and Resorts, Artoni Transporti, BH Telecom, Bowling Green State University, City of Mississauga, Dualtec Cloud Builders, Electricity Authority of Cyprus, Grupo Industrial Saltillo (GIS), Kind en Gezin, Kuwait Petroleum Italia, Nationwide, Quest, Talbots, University of St. Gallen
HudsonAlpha, Virgin Media, EMIS, United
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902,270 professionals have used our research since 2012.