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Cisco UCS E-Series Servers vs HPE Synergy comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 3, 2025

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 E-Series Servers
Ranking in Blade Servers
12th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
HPE Synergy
Ranking in Blade Servers
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Composable Infrastructure (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Blade Servers category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS E-Series Servers is 3.7%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Synergy is 8.5%, down from 17.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Blade Servers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HPE Synergy8.5%
Cisco UCS E-Series Servers3.7%
Other87.8%
Blade Servers
 

Featured Reviews

AK
Solution Architect at COPYCAT LIMITED
Automation and integration capabilities streamline IT infrastructure management
The most valuable feature of Cisco UCS E-Series Servers is the Cisco interface. The server management and automation capabilities have been outstanding in automation, greatly benefiting our IT team. Pricing is acceptable, and these servers have had a significant impact on cost savings and operational efficiency. The integration with Cisco routers simplifies the IT infrastructure.
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

"They are really easy to maintain. I've added RAM to them. I've done a lot of other things with the virtualization."
"The Cisco chassis is very easy to configure and any network engineer or expert can configure the solution and easily integrate it with the chassis."
"Stability-wise, it is a good product that remains stable."
"The product's most valuable features are stability, speed, and scalability."
"Cisco UCS E-Series Servers have been reliable, and it took almost five years for any hardware failure, which was only about a $100 repair, so nothing too major."
"The most valuable features are that they are efficient and easy to setup."
"The product is overall stable."
"Cisco has better visibility and manageability for disaster recovery."
"In the data center, you see customers with a lot of blade enclosures and a lot of servers, and this solution works fine."
"Its versatility, performance, and size are most valuable. It is very decent for its size. It has very good performance and very good specifications."
"The temporal value of it. If I only need a particular amount of compute for a specific period of time during business hours, then at night, I'm running a bunch of batch jobs, or doing something else, that ability to swap a profile, swap templates, and have compute assigned to something else, saves significant amount of money. As long as you are tying it into the automation and orchestration layers, it becomes much easier to do."
"Being able to connect my 3PAR arrays to the Synergy platform is the most valuable aspect to me."
"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."
"Valuable features include its dependability, reliability, and the ease of managing the system."
"This is above and beyond anything else any of the competitors have on the market. If you're researching this, you're going down the right path."
"The solution has decreased our deployment time by 10 to 20 percent."
 

Cons

"The platform's pricing needs improvement. There could be more collaborative tools included."
"The product should also be available in a standard edition or a standard license since currently there is a need to pay for an extra license, which is very expensive, especially when considering the budgeting part of our company."
"The biggest pain point for us is the matrix for the firmware upgrades. It is a pain. You look at that thing, you might as well be reading Greek. It would be a whole lot better if they could clean up their documentation on it."
"I think that's probably one of the biggest failure points with Cisco, from their documentation all the way to their products."
"It is not a solution that is cloud ready."
"One thing that could be improved is the cost - it is very high for this Blade chassis as compared to other vendors. Especially in Asia. Asian customers mostly prefer a cost effective, cheaper solution."
"The tool must be made compatible with multi-vendor ecosystems."
"The processing capacity could be improved."
"The technical support was about the only negative experience that I had. It was a mixed bag when we were first standing it up. We had some requirements from our information security department, and technical support wasn't able to give me immediate answers. They had to engage engineering, which they did, then they got me the answers. However, it took a week of back and forth conversations and phone calls to get it all worked out."
"The solution must concentrate on improving the product quality."
"I would like it to connect to the HPE Cloud Connect compute platform for simplicity of our infrastructure."
"Our IT infrastructure costs have gone up each year by 20 percent."
"There is certainly a feature or two missing."
"We haven't seen any ROI, and it hasn't reduced our cost of operations."
"The only issue that we had was our rack was too small. The product is heavy, so it took a lot to get it in there."
"The initial setup was complex. It was slow and just didn't work. Even HPE couldn't make it work for 45 days."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive."
"It's expensive, they are quite pricey."
"There is a need to pay towards the licensing costs of the solution. The most expensive server from Cisco is Cisco UCS B-Series."
"The pricing of the solution is reasonable. From a commercial point of view, the prices are okay."
"The solution is expensive."
"Our IT infrastructure costs have gone up each year by 20 percent."
"We don't have to pay for Synergy because it's part of our plan."
"The Nutanix platform came in a little more expensive than the Synergy."
"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."
"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."
"Synergy has lowered our total cost of ownership significantly. I would say ballpark around 25 percent, maybe more."
"For me, the scalability is how much money that I need to spend on switches for how many frames, which ultimately means servers. To get the best bandwidth before the most recent product announcement, I have buy new switches every three frames. The competition is shipping a product right now where I only need switches every ten frames."
"It costs us around $60,000 a year."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise5
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 E-Series Servers?
The pricing of Cisco UCS E-Series Servers is okay, costing around 30,000 per year. Support is included in this cost.
What needs improvement with Cisco UCS E-Series Servers?
I would like to see improvements in VMware integration with Cisco, especially in terms of documentation and integration tools. Support of NVIDIA integration would also make it better.
What is your primary use case for Cisco UCS E-Series Servers?
I use Cisco UCS E-Series Servers ( /products/cisco-ucs-e-series-servers-reviews ) for managing our IT infrastructure and supporting AI-driven projects. The integration with Cisco routers simplifies...
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

UCS E-Series Servers
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Navaho,  MiroNet AG, Columbia Sportswear
HudsonAlpha, Virgin Media, EMIS, United
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS E-Series Servers vs. HPE Synergy and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
921,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.