Cisco UCS B-Series vs HPE Synergy comparison

Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are both solutions in the Blade Servers category. Cisco is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.4, while Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.4. Cisco holds a 8.7% mindshare in Blade Servers, compared to Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s 21.3% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users who would recommend it.

Cisco UCS B-Series

Read 72 Cisco UCS B-Series reviews

1,680 Views
1,217 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

HPE Synergy

Read 88 HPE Synergy reviews

3,569 Views
2,572 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Cisco UCS B-Series

HPE Synergy

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco UCS B-Series and HPE Synergy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Blade Servers solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS B-Series vs. HPE Synergy Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS B-Series vs. HPE Synergy

October 2024

Download the complete report

Helped 816,406 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

Cisco UCS B-Series

Ranking in Blade Servers

4th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

HPE Synergy

Ranking in Blade Servers

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Composable Infrastructure (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Blade Servers category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS B-Series is 8.7%, down from 11.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Synergy is 21.3%, down from 22.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Blade Servers

Featured Reviews

Olalowo Olaleye

Senior VMware\Cloud Solutions Engineering Consultant · at Shell

A great solution with high availability, reliability and a low cost of ownership

It has reliability, high availability, and a low total cost of ownership. Your servers stand a better chance of having data available because the total cost of ownership is very low. Once you buy it, you can almost afford to go to the last, because you don't need to buy another one.

Read full review

Petr Student

Senior Technical Architect at Tietoevry

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"They've been responsive and helpful whenever we've needed assistance."

"The solution has the ability to reuse or divide the networking, making it a flexible networking environment."

"Stateless Blade is the best feature."

"The platform has valuable features for management and good monitoring tools. It provides efficient insights."

"The GUI makes is simple to use and deploy."

"It is a very robust and reliable solution."

"From a return on investment perspective, Cisco UCS B-Series is worth the money."

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

More Cisco UCS B-Series pros

"In terms of the productivity of our deployment team, the amount of time has been decreased a lot. In the past, to deploy one c7000 chassis with 15 or 16 blades, we literally used to spend two to three weeks. But with a Synergy, it's very quick. Within three days we can do the deployment."

"The scalability is great."

"It is a simple software to integrate with others."

"As we purchase and install more Synergy chassis, then we will be able to manage them together as one entity, as opposed to multiple separate cabinets."

"The composable infrastructure allows us to build our own server profiles, then build up the infrastructure that we need from compute modules."

"The stability is very good. We haven't had any outages."

"The benefit is that it's going to be maintained, contrary to what we had last year, when the maintenance went off for the last generation of the servers that we had there."

"It has had a positive effect on the efficiency of our IT infrastructure team. The manageability of it is so easy, we're able to install it quickly, and replacement parts are easy to get in and out quickly."

More HPE Synergy pros

Cons

"Despite the benefits gained from the product implementation, the cost could be more appealing if the overall cost of ownership were reduced."

"Compared to the deployment of servers such as Dell XCDs, the deployment of UCS servers is more complex. They take longer to deploy."

"The UCS manager interface needs to be cleaned up a bit and can be streamlined, but no major complaints."

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

"Cisco is not going for perpetual licensing."

"This model does not support virtualization of the switch."

"Previously, the unified port functionality allowed the same port to function as both FC and Ethernet, however, this has now changed."

"It needs a better UI. Cisco makes a great product, but doesn't know how to make a UI."

More Cisco UCS B-Series cons

"This solution could be improved by increasing the speed on the conversion adapters. It should be 100 gigs."

"We had some challenges during the implementation and a few issues afterward, but they were all sort of related to how Synergy interacts with Nexus. Our Nexus on the network side is managed by another group, and they had just gotten Nexus, so they weren't really familiar with how Nexus even worked. Getting these two to interact well was the majority of our issues. It really didn't have anything to do with Synergy. It points to know the environment that you are putting it in and making sure you are dotting all your i's and crossing all your t's when you are figuring out what their requirements are to communicate."

"Sometimes there are firmware or software difficulties when connecting between networks or with storage."

"The pricing can be improved as it is a costly solution due to sanctions in Iran."

"The solution should support Cisco or other vendor interconnect models."

"The speed in OneView and how it updates the entire configuration needs improvement. If they can do that, and it could be a little more clear on what impact different actions will have for certain things, that would be good."

"The performance could be better. The converged network cards initially didn't work. However, later on in the newer version, they came up with 50 GB network cards to replace the 20 GB ones, and it's perfectly fine now. At times, it could also be more stable."

"The setup was a bit complex."

More HPE Synergy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Make sure you work with a vendor partner than can get you a substantial discount off of list pricing."

"It makes much more sense for individual licenses for distributed environments"

"Cisco products are at the high end in terms of cost, but everything is included with the licensing fees."

"The pricing for Cisco products is always high."

"It is highly-priced."

"There is a need to pay towards the licensing costs of the solution on a yearly basis. Price-wise, it is an expensive product"

"UCS is expensive, and we will be migrating to the cheaper HP servers."

"Compared to the more in-demand hyper-converged environments such as Nutanix or DVX rail, Cisco UCS B-Series is even more costly due to the expensive fabric interconnects."

More Cisco UCS B-Series pricing and cost advice

"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."

"Our IT infrastructure costs have gone up each year by 20 percent."

"We pay about £500 for the solution."

"The solution can be expensive because it requires both hardware and software purchases."

"The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs because we have had to buy less services than we used to."

"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."

"We do CAPEX."

"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."

More HPE Synergy pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Blade Servers solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS B-Series?

Previously, Cisco pricing was higher, but now both Cisco and HP are competitive with pricing. At the end of negotiations, the pricing is usually matched between the two, so cost is not a major diff...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco UCS B-Series?

It would be beneficial for Cisco UCS B-Series to improve on the technological adaptability aspect, especially with regard to containerized applications, as the market in our region is still adaptin...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about HPE Synergy?

It is a good product for hypervisors.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE Synergy?

Synergy is more expensive than Cisco.

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerEdge M vs Cisco UCS B-Series

Compared 25% of the time

HPE BladeSystem vs Cisco UCS B-Series

Compared 17% of the time

Super Micro SuperBlade vs Cisco UCS B-Series

Compared 15% of the time

Cisco UCS E-Series Servers vs Cisco UCS B-Series

Compared 5% of the time

More Cisco UCS B-Series Competitors

HPE BladeSystem vs HPE Synergy

Compared 24% of the time

Dell PowerEdge M vs HPE Synergy

Compared 22% of the time

HPE ProLiant DL Servers vs HPE Synergy

Compared 22% of the time

HPE Apollo Systems vs HPE Synergy

Compared 6% of the time

HPE Superdome X vs HPE Synergy

Compared 5% of the time

More HPE Synergy Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS B-Series

November 2024

Download Cisco UCS B-Series product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE Synergy

November 2024

Download HPE Synergy product report

Also Known As

UCS B-Series, Unified Computing System B-Series

No data available

Learn More

Video not available

Cisco

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Overview

Based on Intel Xeon processor E7 and E5 product families, Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers work with virtualized and non-virtualized applications to increase: Performance, Energy efficiency, Flexibility and Administrator productivity.

HPE Synergy, the first platform built from the ground up for Composable Infrastructure, offers an experience that empowers IT to create and deliver new value instantly and continuously. It is a single infrastructure that reduces operational complexity for traditional workloads and increases operational velocity for the new breed of applications and services. Through a single interface, HPE Synergy composes physical and virtual compute, storage, and fabric pools into any configuration for any application. As an extensible platform, it easily enables a broad range of applications and operational models such as virtualization, hybrid cloud, and DevOps. With HPE Synergy, IT can become not just the internal service provider but the business partner to rapidly launch new applications that become the business.

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

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS B-Series vs. HPE Synergy

October 2024

Free Report: Cisco UCS B-Series vs. HPE Synergy

Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS B-Series vs. HPE Synergy and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.

DOWNLOAD NOW

816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Cisco UCS B-Series vs. HPE Synergy report.

See our list of best Blade Servers vendors.

We monitor all Blade Servers reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.