Cisco UCS B-Series Reviews

The Dual Fabric design allows for online/in-service upgrades during production with no impact. Also, single point of management for all server profile and firmware management allows for guaranteed uniformity in the datacenter.

I have deployed 2-3 dozen UCS systems and managed many more for customers. Customers always love the unified management, speed of setup, and the improved performance after migration of workloads to UCS servers.

HTML5 interface is a much needed improvement over the old Java interface, but still needs a little work.

I have deployed and managed Cisco UCS solutions for approximately 5 years.

As with any system, there are very occasional bugs. But Cisco is quick to remedy any issue. Firmware is often already out to fix issues that we run into.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

The technical support is excellent.

I have experience with HP, IBM and Dell rack servers. I switched to UCS when I joined a Cisco partner and learned to deploy UCS.

when customers are first introduced to UCS, the setup is somewhat complex. Yet the learning curve is reasonable.

Cisco UCS is a fantastic product that is widely deployed with excellent support. Additionally, Cisco has developed CVD’s (Cisco Validated Designs) that assist partners and customers to properly deploy Cisco UCS with most major storage vendors. CVD’s are highly detailed deployment guides which are comprehensively tested by Cisco to ensure quick, highly reliable and predictable deployments.

The features of Cisco UCS that are of the most value to me is the ability to build Service Profiles for servers based on your needs. You can add HBAs and NICs to servers as needed, and you can remove them just as easily. 

Also, with UCS, updating firmware and drivers has been simplified and can be done throughout the system simply by associating new firmware policies to the hardware. You can also run different versions of firmware as needed to support legacy applications.

UCS has made it possible to replace and upgrade servers quickly and easily while keeping things up and running for the enterprise. 

Replacing the Fabric interconnects and IOMs can be done while the system is up and serving production data. You can almost effectively negate downtime from your organization as a result.

I would really like to see an integrated management interface for all the products for FlexPod, as well as a verification tool like Immersive that can give you feedback about your compatibility with FlexPod guidelines.

Get a qualified vendor to help you go through the process, and take some training to get familiar with how things work together.

The monitoring features and integration with other products can be improved.

In particular, integration with other products is difficult, especially for logging purposes. In this regard, it is not very good and improvement is required.

Technical support should be more timely.

We have been working with the Cisco UCS B-Series for more than a year.

This is a stable product.

The technical support is good although they respond very late to open cases.

One of the other products that we currently work with is Huawei, and they give us much cheaper prices. They also have a good product, which is sometimes even better than Cisco. Nonetheless, my team has a lot of experience and expertise with Cisco.

The initial setup is simple, and not very complex.

The pricing for Cisco products is always high.

My advice for anybody who is considering Cisco UCS is that if it's within your budget, I recommend it because they are popular in the market and it is easy to find experts.

Overall, this is a good product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

On-premises

The Cisco UCS Blade Server system is our newest blade server system. We bought the server as the winning server system for our Oracle Peoplesoft Campus Solution system. It bested bids from Oracle, IBM, HP and Dell.What we really like about the product is the scalability of the entire server system. the platform's architecture ensures that we can easily grow our systems as the need arises.The server system also has the necessary features that we want like tight integration with virtualization technologies and storage systems. We have gone full virtualization with our Oracle system implementation and we are very satisfied with the implementation.Lastly, Cisco really did a good job in making sure that such a server system does not produce unnecessary cable clutter.

The downside when using anything from Cisco is the required knowledge needed to ensure proper implementation. The server system can be very daunting for an untrained system administrator to configure.Also, the server system can consume a lot of power. Proper preparations must be taken to ensure that the electrical and cooling facilities where the new server will be housed is sufficient for this server system. I would definitely recommend this product as its benefits far outweigh its drawbacks. Just make sure that you buy all the necessary components to have a complete system.

Choosing the right partner for implementing the system is also critical. They must be knowledgeable in implementing the Cisco UCS system as its a very complicated system to set-up. The implementation must also include a system administrators training so that company administrators can manage the system after configuration and deployment.

The solution can be useful for cloud solutions and they are automatized. Everything is automatized, and it's highly available.

The solution is stable.

The scalability is good.

Everything is nice and I like that it is centrally managed. 

It's very easy to manage once you have everything set up.

The performance is great.

Technical support is helpful.

We sometimes have small issues with the hardware elements. The network interfaces could be better. The product needs to develop better firmware.  

The solution is difficult to set up. You need to be experienced in the product in order to be able to implement it.

I've used the solution for more than three years in this company, and in my previous company, I used it for two and a half to three years as well. In total, it's been five to six years. 

The solution, for the most part, is pretty stable. There aren't really bugs or glitches and it doesn't really crash or freeze. It's pretty reliable. 

The scalability of the solution is good. 

I'm not sure how many people are actually using the product. In America, we utilize about 3,000 servers and we utilize 4,000 servers ourselves. That's a total of 7,000 servers.

Technical support has been very good. We don't have any complaints. They are helpful and responsive. 

The initial setup can be a bit difficult and complex. This is because everything is centralized. That said, once you have everything deployed and up and running, the maintenance is easy and minimal. While you have to sacrifice something during the installation, after that, it's easier to manage. 

It took us about two months to complete the implementation.

We had a third party that handled the implementation process for us. We had a lot of server blades to set up.

I don't have any visibility on the licensing setup. That's managed by procurement, actually. I don't have any information about it.

We use both cloud and on-premises deployment models.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I'd recommend the solution to other users and other organizations. 

On-premises

The solution is primarily used for computation purposes. 

The hardware available for the solution is very good. It's quite reliable and robust.

The visualization is excellent.

The initial setup is pretty simple and straightforward. 

The scalability is excellent. 

We found that the stability is extremely reliable. 

Technical support is very good in general.

The price of this product is too high. They should work to make it more affordable.

I've been dealing with the solution for about three years at this point. It's been a while. 

The stability and performance of this Cisco product are excellent. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable. 

The scalability potential of the product is very, very good. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so with relative ease.

Technical support is pretty good. We find Cisco to be knowledgeable and responsive. We're satisfied with the level of support we receive overall. They're great. All UCS products have great support.

We found the initial setup to be pretty easy. It's straightforward. I wouldn't describe it as too complex or difficult. A company should have no problems deploying it. 

We have seen an ROI and would recommend the solution based on those observations.

The solution is quite expensive. It's pretty high, especially when you compare it against the offerings of other vendors. They need to be more competitive in terms of pricing.

We're a Cisco partner.

We are dealing with the latest version of the solution. I can't speak to the exact version number.

I can recommend the solution wholeheartedly to other organizations. I would really recommend it due to the fact that it's a really stable technology. Also, it can produce a return on investment for organizations as well.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the product at an eight. We've largely been quite pleased with its capabilities.

On-premises

We are using this solution to connect to a rack system.

The GUI makes is simple to use and deploy.

Managing could be improved. It's too hard.

The pricing could be less.

I have been working with Cisco UCS B Series for six years.

This solution is stable, we had not had any issues.

This solution is scalable. 

The scalability is very good.

Technical support is very good. We had two or three issues, but they were able to solve them.

The initials setup is straightforward.

It requires some preparation. It's not as easy as Microsoft, but for Cisco, it's still good.

Pricing with Cisco is very high.

The price is very inefficient.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

On-premises

The VM-FEX, hardware integration with VMware vSphere.

It's faster to provision virtual servers than physical. Also, it has very good orchestration with UCS Director 5.2.

The UCS Manager is written in Java and has many problems after the new Java releases. It should be rewritten in HTML5.

I've used it for one and a half years.

It was not a problem.

It is very stable.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

4/5

Technical Support:

4/5

IBM Blade Servers,was in place previously.

It was straightforward to do it. You need to have expert-level knowledge in LAN, SAN, and servers to be able to do it properly

I did by myself.

No, Cisco UCS was the stuff we wanted.