Cisco UCS B-Series vs HPE Synergy comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco UCS B-Series
Ranking in Blade Servers
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
HPE Synergy
Ranking in Blade Servers
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
87
Ranking in other categories
Composable Infrastructure (1st)
 

Market share comparison

As of June 2024, in the Blade Servers category, the market share of Cisco UCS B-Series is 10.2% and it decreased by 28.3% compared to the previous year. The market share of HPE Synergy is 26.8% and it increased by 14.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Blade Servers
Unique Categories:
No other categories found
 

Featured Reviews

JohnDeavers - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 4, 2023
Modular, extendable, and high-density
InterSite is still working on a lot of bugs. Specifically, going from UCF's manager to all strictly interstate-managed environments, there have been a lot of challenges. It is a challenging environment as far as migration from UCS manager director to strictly an inter-site managed in the cloud. Cisco's still working out those bugs. We've been doing a lot of troubleshooting. I would like to see more density within the blades compared to HPE and other Dell blades. They do have more slots available. However, the UCSX series that's going to be a game-changer. I'm going through advanced architect training for that engineering training for that product as well. I foresee that X is probably going to replace the C or B series blades since you'll be able to get more density. In the end, you may be able to get double the nodes per slot. The solution is expensive. Sometimes, support isn't as fast or knowledgeable as customers need them to be.
Petr Student - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 3, 2022
The composable infrastructure allows you to build and stack shared capacity
The hardware is fine but OneView needs additional event management and filtering options. Documentation could better describe the solution's configuration possibilities. Sometimes there are firmware or software difficulties when connecting between networks or with storage. The solution is a hardware that is defined by its software so management issues can occur on servers or within the software running the hardware. For example, an electric car depends on its software. If the software is bad, then you can expect issues and problems that might not allow you to start the car. A technician might have uploaded the wrong code into firmware or a software developer might have make code mistakes and these things cause issues. The solution can only be as reliable as the software used to run it.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The stability provided by the product is its most valuable feature for our organization."
"In terms of the flexibility of the tool to adapt to technology needs, I think it is a very good solution."
"The most valuable features are monitoring and processing, which can handle a lot of throughput and are more powerful than the HPE series."
"The platform has valuable features for management and good monitoring tools. It provides efficient insights."
"The hardware is easily swappable and, utilizing the boot from SAN option, you can always keep your server intact due to the service profiles."
"Since its UCS release in 2009, Cisco has extended the core functionality with Central, a tool for managing multiple domains"
"The architecture of this solution is very valuable; it has five traffic interconnects, and uses a network highway so bandwidth is never an issue."
"The most valuable feature is the service profile."
"Support is very helpful."
"The Online firmware update for the virtual connects has minimized our downtime windows."
"Changing the form factor in Synergy allows us to have more RAM, which is significantly helpful for us."
"OneView, as a single point, a single management tool, it makes me delirious. It's really nice."
"There is no problem with the scalability."
"The solution is built very well. It's very robust and durable."
"I love the satellite architecture for the Virtual Connect. I think this is great. I love the storage drawer, which you can present volumes to any compute node within the same frame."
"We're able to provision different applications, different demonstrations, add cloud-like speeds on-prem, which is unheard of in the industry."
 

Cons

"For future improvements, it would be a benefit if the solution could integrate better with products such as Oracle."
"Integration with storage could be improved."
"The monitoring features and integration with other products can be improved."
"Right now, the market is rapidly transitioning to solid-state media and the Cisco options tend to be less varied and more expensive than a broader slate of products from HP, Dell or IBM."
"The integration is an area where Cisco UCS B-Series needs to provide users with more details."
"The price of the solution could improve."
"There is a delay in the product's reporting and the rebooting system compared to servers from other vendors."
"The solution’s pricing could be improved and made cheaper."
"I'd get the firmware to be a little more secure and a little more streamlined."
"The update is problematic. When you want to update the firmware, or when you want to update software on Composer, it takes a lot of time. A lot."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see more nodes in a single chassis so we wouldn't have to purchase additional chassis."
"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."
"Gen 11 is being released. That's going to have a lot of advantages over Gen 10 and previous generations in terms of the cooling modules in the servers to keep them cooler and run with more efficiency and better performance. There are more management features with iLO 6 and the latest OneView management."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for Cisco is less than for the HP Proliant series."
"It is highly-priced."
"Pricing with Cisco is very high."
"This is a premium device and our clients are not as concerned about the reasonableness of the price compared to satisfaction with their productivity."
"From a business point of view, the price is on the higher end."
"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."
"It makes much more sense for individual licenses for distributed environments"
"Nutanix was really hard to implement, and it was very pricey compared to what we get from Synergy."
"VMware is part of the cost. We bought the chassis, we bought the solution. The blades are roughly running us $60,000 a pop right now."
"We bought everything outright to start with. We don't do much consumption-based stuff."
"It costs us around $60,000 a year."
"The platform that we run Synergy on is all virtualized. Our primary cost is likely VMware."
"The Nutanix platform came in a little more expensive than the Synergy."
"We don't have to pay for Synergy because it's part of our plan."
"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
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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?
It is not a yearly subscription but a yearly support renewal that you need to do for Cisco UCS B-Series.
What needs improvement with Cisco UCS B-Series?
There are some shortcomings in the product when you look at it from the perspective of the area involving multiple configurations, making it an aspect where improvements are required. The server co...
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 do you like most about HPE Synergy?
It is a good product for hypervisors.
 

Also Known As

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

Learn More

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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
HudsonAlpha, Virgin Media, EMIS, United
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS B-Series vs. HPE Synergy and other solutions. Updated: June 2024.
787,061 professionals have used our research since 2012.