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Cisco UCS B-Series vs Dell PowerEdge M comparison

 

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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
8.2
Cisco UCS B-Series enhances performance and efficiency, reducing costs and power usage, surpassing expectations with minimal maintenance and strong returns.
Sentiment score
7.4
Dell PowerEdge M offers quick ROI and reliable performance with PCIe 5 and Intel CPUs, ideal for long-term stability.
Additionally, we achieved server consolidation, running multiple services on fewer servers without purchasing new ones, resulting in significant financial benefits.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.3
Users praise Cisco UCS B-Series support for professionalism, quick responses, and reliable 24x7 assistance, with occasional minor delays.
Sentiment score
6.8
Dell PowerEdge M's customer service is satisfactory with mixed reviews on technical support, varying from excellent to needing improvement.
Cisco's technical support is highly helpful and responsive.
They provide excellent help when needed.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Cisco UCS B-Series offers robust scalability and flexibility, allowing seamless integration and effortless expansion to meet diverse needs.
Sentiment score
7.5
Dell PowerEdge M excels in scalability and efficient maintenance, supporting enterprise applications and virtualization, despite upgrade challenges.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Cisco UCS B-Series is praised for its robust stability and reliability, despite minor challenges in certain operations.
Sentiment score
7.8
Dell PowerEdge M offers high stability and uptime, with minor interoperability and disk latency issues under certain configurations.
The stability of Cisco UCS B-Series is impeccable, as it has been running smoothly without any need for maintenance.
 

Room For Improvement

Cisco UCS B-Series needs improved storage integration, user-friendly management, lower costs, HTML5 transition, and better support for new technologies.
The Dell PowerEdge M needs improvements in boot times, networking, scalability, support services, and SNMP configuration for better performance.
Last year, we faced challenges with firmware upgrades, but they were quickly resolved with assistance from Cisco TAC.
There are differences in security configurations, particularly in SNMP and SNMP3, between HP ILO and iDRAC.
 

Setup Cost

Cisco UCS B-Series is costly but offers value and reliability, with discounts available during year-end negotiations.
Dell PowerEdge M offers competitive pricing and flexibility, ensuring accessibility for medium enterprises despite recent technological cost increases.
The management software, Cisco One, is priced a bit high but still considered reasonable.
 

Valuable Features

Cisco UCS B-Series excels in scalability, centralized management, ease of deployment, virtualization integration, and offers robust performance and reliability.
Dell PowerEdge M excels in performance and efficiency, offering scalability, manageability, and reliability for advanced workloads like machine learning.
Its administration capabilities provide easy access to performance reports, logs, and utilization data, which are essential for effective server management.
The ease of troubleshooting and managing through remote access, using tools like iDRAC, significantly saves me time.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco UCS B-Series
Ranking in Blade Servers
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
73
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Dell PowerEdge M
Ranking in Blade Servers
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Blade Servers category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS B-Series is 8.8%, down from 10.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerEdge M is 18.9%, up from 17.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
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Featured Reviews

Prasanth Kailasam - PeerSpot reviewer
Supports multiple hypervisors but needs to improve in the area of configuration
Speaking about how the tool can improve computing efficiency in data centers, I feel that, ultimately, there are other kinds of hardware or servers that Cisco provides. From a management perspective, certain aspects can be incorporated to help users understand their current standing. It would be good if certain larger configurations could also be made suitable for the tool to suit the needs of multiple customer bases. For virtualization needs, the product works well. I have dealt with certain virtualization environments using - Cisco UCS B-Series. As of now, the tool is fine. Cisco UCS B-Series recently got registered with Nutanix, one of the market's HCI platforms. Nutanix can run on Cisco. Cisco UCS B-Series' direction is right. I don't think any further improvement is required in the tool right now. The integration capabilities of the product are okay. I haven't seen any challenges when installing the tool in an environment. I think that the tool supports multiple hypervisors. Speaking about the feature that has improved our company's data center operation, I would say that the Cisco brand name provides our organization with the benefits we need from the product. I believe that manageability is one crucial aspect of the tool, considering that it is pretty easy to manage. Performance-wise, some improvements have been introduced in Cisco UCS B-Series. Whenever somebody evaluates and goes ahead with some traditional setup in their environment, along with HP and Dell, they can also consider Cisco as a part of it because it has become more cost-effective and competitive presently. Networking-wise, the tool is pretty strong, and it operates as a brand that actually helps with the support offered to customers. The support offered by Cisco adds a lot of confidence for the clients. I feel that Cisco is doing a lot of innovation in order to offer scalability and flexibility to adopt future technologies. I believe Cisco users might see a lot more solutions that get introduced in the market that might become more and more compatible with many products in the future. In the future, I think that users will see AI and other related aspects run pretty well in a Cisco environment. I would say that the benefits and value of the use of the product stem from the brand name attached to Cisco products. Cisco's support when you use Cisco UCS B-Series is good. In the networking space, Cisco has been a leader for a very long time, and the same kind of credibility is what you can expect when you consider Cisco UCS B-Series. Considering the availability of the products from competitors, I rate the tool a seven out of ten.
JohnDeavers - PeerSpot reviewer
Average pricing and good feature sets but is complex to set up
We use the solution for hyper-converged infrastructures with VMware and physical/virtual SQL solutions.  Both Dell and Cisco would be data center modernization. We're modernizing from a three-tier to a single infrastructure.  The enterprise manager feature sets are great. It's great for managing…
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

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?
The licensing cost for three years, followed by an AMC for two years, is reasonable. However, the management software, Cisco One, is priced a bit high but still considered reasonable. No additional...
What needs improvement with Cisco UCS B-Series?
Last year, we faced challenges with firmware upgrades, but they were quickly resolved with assistance from Cisco TAC.
What do you like most about Dell PowerEdge M?
The solution's most valuable features are centralized monitoring and management and the ease of upgrading firmware.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell PowerEdge M?
The cost of Dell is reasonable. Dell is not expensive compared to HP. It is a little cheaper, but customers still prefer HP.
What needs improvement with Dell PowerEdge M?
There are differences in security configurations, particularly in SNMP and SNMP3, between HP ILO and iDRAC. When configuring SNMP or SNMP3, I face challenges that require additional support, althou...
 

Also Known As

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

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
Newport City Homes, Neuroblastoma and Medulloblastoma Translational Research Consortium (NMTRC), Georgian College, AgreeYa Solutions, IIHT Cloud Solutions, Arizona State University, AudienceScience, University of the Incarnate Word (UIW), The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), Holy Cross School
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS B-Series vs. Dell PowerEdge M and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,194 professionals have used our research since 2012.