Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

We use the solution for a server.

Some of the features I like from this solution are it has a fast configuration, it is not complex, and has high availability. 

A long while ago something went wrong with the solution and we had to back-up to the cluster, some stability issues could be improved.

For future improvements, it would be a benefit if the solution could integrate better with products such as Oracle. I recently worked at a company in Cambodia where we were using Oracle, we were having some difficulties with applying the licensing between the solutions.

I have been using the solution for approximately two years.

Over time the solution became more unstable. This is why I planned for a hyper-converged HyperFlex Infrastructure. Hopefully, this will reduce the percentage the server consumes and an overall performance improvement.

We have an internal team that does the support for the solution.

The setup was not complex, there was nothing standing out to me that was difficult.

The price of this solution compared to others is fair.

We have been evaluating Cisco HyperFlex which we will be upgrading soon. I compared the two on itcentralstation.com and downloaded the reports, it is better. There is a current need to choose this upgrade and my team will get on it soon.

I wanted to try out Cisco products because most of the big industries use them such as banks, IT, and telecommunications. Cisco itself produced the server and at the time I researched more about Cisco and then I want to try it. This is why I invested in a tool from Cisco. Additionally, I plan to implement level IP2, HyperFlex soon.

I would recommend this solution for the financial sector and big industry enterprise companies that can invest with Cisco long-term. The scalability, high availability, and security all combined is a good offering.

I rate Cisco UCS B-Series a nine out of ten.

We use this product for SAP HANA in a QA development environment. It is at the core of our business.

The most valuable feature is the service profile.

The amount of RAM that it supports for HANA is good.

The maintenance is very easy.

The configuration is a little bit complicated and could be made simpler.

The administration is somewhat complex.

I have been using the UCS B-Series for more than six years.

This is a very stable product.

The UCS B-Series is easy to scale. We have approximately 1,000 people using this solution, and it is used on a daily basis.

We have been in contact with technical support a couple of times and I would say that they are efficient.

Prior to working with this product, we used the HPE c7000 enclosure. Once we started using SAP HANA, we implemented Cisco. Our main environment still uses the HPE.

The HPE is more difficult to maintain because all of the addresses are hardcoded inside the enclosure. With Cisco, it is much easier.

The initial setup took us approximately one week. If you are connecting to a SAN then you need to bring up all of the virtual VLANs and set up the storage. It takes a lot of time.

We had assistance from the vendor for our deployment, and our in-house administrators are taking care of the maintenance.

Cisco products are at the high end in terms of cost, but everything is included with the licensing fees. The only thing that we pay for separately is VMware.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

• Deployment of new blade/host is quick via using hardware profiles
• No ethernet or fiber cabling required for new blades/hosts
• No zoning required to SAN storage for new blades/hosts
• New chassis can be quickly attached to fabric interconnect for deployment

• Faster deployments of new and replacement hardware
• Compact footprint saves valuable space on the rack.

We have used it for over four years.

Deployment was smooth.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

9/10.

We used standalone servers which were configured in clustered configuration, and switched because we wanted to improve efficiency.

The initial setup was straightforward. For the hardware setup, you do the following

• Non-blocking 10gig fiber lines going to core network switches from fabric interconnect
• Fiber lines for SAN storage to fiber switches from fabric interconnect 
• Converged data (Network & Storage) on 10gig lines from chassis to fabric interconnect
• Blades/hosts use Converged Network Adapters (CNA)

For the configuration using Cisco UCS manager

• Hardware profiles
• Boot from SAN
• Initial storage and network setup

We implemented through a vendor. If you are new to Cisco UCS platform, I would recommend implementing through a vendor.

Plan carefully and purchase adequate licenses with the initial purchase for better pricing.

• Dell
• HP

The stability provided by the product is its most valuable feature for our organization.

The management interface needs a lot of improvement. As it is right now, it's a pain to use. It's not user-friendly.

For some clients, it may be useful if it was possible to switch the role for a server. I myself am running a VMware shop and so I would not personally gain any benefit from this, however, I see the value it would have for others - especially service providers.

I've been working with this solution for seven years at this point. It's been quite a while now.

The stability of the solution is fantastic. It's one of the greatest selling features. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs or glitches. It's extremely reliable.

The solution scales pretty well. We have not had any issues with that.

Currently, I'm the only one using the product in our organization.

I've never used technical support, so I can't speak to their level of knowledge or responsiveness.

I also have worked with IBM as well. 

At the time, the biggest difference was pricing. Also, there is the ability to switch roles or templates on the servers within IBM. However, it's not anything I have had any use for.

In our case, the solution's initial setup was not straightforward. It was rather complex.

It was part of a FlexPoint solution. And it was one of the first FlexPoint solutions delivered in the country. It was not the same solution delivered as the salesperson had promised.

You can typically get reasonable pricing on the solution. The hardware itself, however, isn't the biggest cost. The biggest cost is licensing, and that can be quite expensive.

If there are other organizations considering the solution, I'd strongly advise that they get training on the management side. It's very important to do this in order to successfully implement and use the product.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate this solution at a seven. It's good, however, it could use a simpler management structure. Cheaper licensing would go a long way as well. The UCS isn't the expensive part. It's more the Microsoft and VMware and the cost of running that.

Centralized Management using UCS Manager, and State less Servers.

Scalability, Flexibility to reuse the same Server with different projects multiple OS (VMware ESXi / Centos, Microsoft Windows) just in minutes by creating new service profiles.

Stability of some of the old versions has afew bugs. Although I have to mention that Cisco has been releasing revised versions of Firmware very quickly to fix the bugs.

More then one year

No, but Cisco UCS is a complex system, it is very easy to deploy if you have the knowledge and understanding of the product, I have recently commissioned a new Cisco UCS Datacenter after all the rack and stack its very easy to manage the product via Cisco UCS Manager.

Some of the version of firmware does have issues but Cisco is very good at fixing the bugs and giving new firmware versions.

Cisco UCS is very good with scalability, this is one of the ups of the Cisco UCS and I have used this a lot.

Very good, as you can expect from Cisco TAC

I have had few issues when upgrading the firmware and the Techsupport of Cisco TAC was very quick in picking up the issue and resolving it.

I'm happy with the Tech Support.

Dell and HP Rack servers, issues with scalability. Space consuming.

Yes it was easy to setup provided you know the basics of Cisco UCS. I have done the low level design for our new site and it was very straightforward.

When it comes to racking I have to admit the chassis is very heavy with all the components as its a 6U chassis. So make sure you remove all the power supply modules and IOM's and Fans then rack it. Once its placed then you can easily slide everything back and blades into the chassis.

We had used a Cisco Partner and they did a very good job.

HP and IBM

Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) provides unified, embedded management of all software and hardware components in the Cisco UCS. It is scalable and it controls multiple chassis and manages resources for thousands of virtual machines.

Cisco is expensive and difficult to manage. The product is not intuitive. It also needs to improve storage management and upgrades. 

I have been working with the product for one year. 

I would rate the product's stability a seven out of ten since we encountered bugs during the upgrade. 

The product is scalable and my company has 5000 users for the solution. 

The product's tech support has good people. However, the people in level 1 support do not know what they are talking about. Level 3 support is good. 

Neutral

I would rate the product a seven out of ten. We have two administrators for the product. The tool is a good product but maintenance is not easy. 

Previously, the physical trappings of Cisco UCS, Intel chip-sets and UCS Manager were the most useful part of this server system. As we embrace new Intel CPU's, Chip-sets and memory, we are gaining added value from the original UCS design - which was a software construct based on XML API's and a suite of code that is really starting to blossom as a central automation vehicle, that scales to deliver new features and extended integration with a suite of security, management and performance offerings Cisco has added to its portfolio.

While UCS hardware leveraged standard x86 designs, the use of a single pane of glass to monitor, deploy and provision servers was a huge timesaver. Since its UCS release in 2009, Cisco has extended the core functionality with Central, a tool for managing multiple domains, Director - an automation tool and Performance Manager. In the past few years CIsco has been on a buying binge for the Data Center, snapping up Cliqr, Lancope, AppDynamics, ContainrX, and several others that are being integrated with in-house analytics tools like Tetration and external tools like Turbonomic to provide an incredibly powerful, secure automation platform that will be the foundation of a future autonomic server environment with adaptive security and dynamic self diagnosis.

Cisco UCS Manager is embedded in the cost of the fabric controllers and is used to manage the servers, chassis and fabric. It also serves as a link point for integrating tools like Director, Performance Manager and Central. Future additions to the UCS tool set are extensions that Cisco is feeling out how best to offer to customers - for straight purchase - or via subscription.

I encourage UCS users and those considering UCS adoption to dig into the subscription offerings and get some clarity on how they grow over time. For example, as powerful security tools like Stealthwatch (Lancope) are added, what other systems are required and how are those subscriptions managed. When Analytics are required - do you need a Gigabuck Third Party offering or are you going to jump on Cisco's Tetration bandwagon and roll your own? I push for simplicity with Cisco. However, you need good data for that conversation. Talk to the apps, dev and ops teams as to what is needed today, where you are going and what future needs will become vs what might be nice to have. Once you understand where you are going, you are in a much better position to negotiate with a relative newbie like Cisco on how best to get there.

Things will only get better going forward. UCS Manager is an XML construct. Everything is in software and can scale and expand with increased hardware capability, while other architectures require extensive effort on each end to develop hardware, then update and test a new rev of software for reliability and consistency.

The big challenge for Cisco today is they built UCS manager for Cisco CCIE's anxious and able to have every knob and dial available to tweak. As a result, UCS manager is overly complex relative to functions and features and a lot of effort can go into streamlining and simplifying the User Experience. However, after 8 years in the market and huge acceptance of its increased ROI over competitive offerings and an appreciation for what UCS provides in OPex reduction, you can buy experienced UCS engineers vs having to develop and train them, only to see them purchased by a competitor.

I have a client who is currently managing 1500 servers with two people for a mission-critical retail operation. Previous operations teams using HP and IBM servers required 4x more people to manage the same number of servers.

This product comes from Cisco, who is fourth in the worldwide supply chain. That means options take a bit longer to get to their platform, as they insist on doing their own quality validations. 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.

Cisco UCS offers a scalable platform with tremendous OpEx advantages. However, Cisco does not have the storage play that Dell (With Cisco Partner EMC in its fold) and HP have. With their long position in the market place on the PC supply chain side, both Dell and HP source and deliver high volume, low cost, advanced enterprise solutions from previous consumer focused suppliers like Samsung and Toshiba. Example’s like Sandisk’s 3.8TB SSD used in EMC VxRail products and newly announced Samsung 15TB and 6.4TB 1M IOPs SSD come to mind. While Cisco still carries the earlier versions of similar technology from FusionIO, the next gen lower cost options from Samsung will take a while to be approved and provided by Cisco.

Cisco’s internal testing and validation processes – to assure UCS Manager compatibility - mean they lag both HP and Dell in delivery on the newest storage paradigms – specifically the breadth of the SSD and NVRam offerings. Both these trends (High performance, High capacity SSD, and NVRam) offer major changes in architectural models. For organizations that seels to push the bleeding edge in testing and development, UCS will lag in delivery by a quarter or two. This has little impact on mainstream enterprises who will not adopt before a technology is thoroughly vetted by industry “Pioneers” – usually mid-sized shops that “took a chance” on introducing a new platform into their relatively modest environment.

I have used UCS since 2008, when the product was first released.

No issues with stability that we have not seen across other systems. In particular, due to Cisco networking dominance, the focus is on drivers that work with their products for all the competitors as well. Networking is typically the server area with the most work to be done – but this is the strength of Cisco.

UCS originally promised to support 40 chassis per fabric – that has now been scaled down to 20 – which limits users to domains of “just 160” physical server blades. This has not proven to be an issue or obstacle. The release of UCS Central provides software to manage an array of fabrics so we can scale to thousands of physical servers.

This is a foundational core of the Cisco Data Center automation experience and is a far more robust platform than currently provided by competitors. Customer service from Cisco and its partner community is thus on par with the same exemplary service provided by its TAC teams for business critical network deployments.

Leveraging Cisco Network Technical Monitoring – the ability to call for a case and get resolution - is a process we are well aware of and very comfortable with.

HP was the incumbent, displaced by UCS, which has proven easier to manage scale and use. The HP system just had too many pieces and the iLO lockin was a major cost that the UCS architecture leapfrogged.

Initial setup requires some training due to its scale. It’s like riding a car vs driving a truck. You use the auto driving skills when you drive a truck – but there are a few things to be aware of. One of the nuances with UCS is that it is a fully abstracted, scalable environment. So you can set up your domain to accommodate a single server or 160 servers. This requires adopting a standard naming convention, IP addressing, etc. Once those are established, like a truck vs a car – you can haul a lot more freight with UCS.

Obviously, the worst-kept secret with all vendors is to negotiate as close to fiscal year-end as possible. For Cisco, the year-end is July 31st, so they are well positioned for organizations deploying summer projects. The other issue is the move to bundle licenses. That is great for highly dense environments like a data center, but it makes much more sense for individual licenses for distributed environments like hundreds of storefronts or clinics distributed across a wide geographic area.

As stated earlier, we had HP. As a marquis client they fought hard on equipment price to maintain their position. However, the decision was based on OpEx, which greatly favored UCS. Once we had a few systems in place and people trained up on their use, it was not long before HP was displaced. Because both the IBM and Dell management architectures were quite similar, we looked and got a few quotes, but did not see anything to justify further evaluation resources.

The biggest issue is automation. How to move the mundane tasks from people to machines; alert filters to improve management productivity and reduce overhead. Cisco is deploying a suite of products (Central, Director, Performance Manager, etc.), as are IBM, HP and even Dell. However, UCS manger provides such a robust base that the ability to scale and realize benefits is greater.

At the end of the day, the UCS product requires planning before just jumping in, due to its ability to scale. As a user, you need to evaluate naming conventions, IP addressing models and so forth – think about the entire enterprise as opposed to a single server or rack of servers.

Use very good hardware and innovative network elements, such as the VIC 10Gb cards that allow for traffic sequestration and partitioning across multiple virtual channels in a single link and of course UCS Manager. I actually have the patent on similar IP when we started blade server systems with an acquisition by Intel. The direct spin-off was the IBM Blade Center, but due to the IBM investment in Tivoli, they never used our central management system. Cisco took a network- vs compute-centric perspective as they embarked on their server designs and, with a clean sheet of paper, evolved a centralized manager for deployment and systems management that enables huge scales in management productivity.

Probably the Cisco Integrated Management Controller.

Remote access to the server is very useful.

They use LSI for their RAID, while they may be robust RAID controllers, they lack a lot of functionality that Adaptec or HP Smart array.

Two years.

The LSI controller is very "finiky", even though it had deployment software, the only way to successfully configure the RAID was via the boot command line.

No, we haven't had issues post setup.

Probably the RAID card really limits what the servers are capable of if you require storage.

I haven't needed to deal with technical support yet.

We use this as a potential alternative for HP ProLiant servers.

There are some quirks in the setup (e.g. for non Disk servers, you need to go into the CIMC to enable the SD Card for HyperVisor Installs, not the BIOS) but generally its fairly straight forward.

We haven't had a full life span on the Cisco UCS but so far we have not had to do nearly as much firmware maintenance as the HP Servers.

No but we have used HP for a number of years and IBM before that.

These are good servers for SAN environments, I think their Disks (RAID) need a lot of improvement before you consider them as a storage server.