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Cisco UCS B-Series vs HPE Synergy 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco UCS B-Series
Ranking in Blade Servers
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
HPE Synergy
Ranking in Blade Servers
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
89
Ranking in other categories
Composable Infrastructure (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Blade Servers category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS B-Series is 8.3%, down from 11.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Synergy is 21.8%, down from 22.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Blade Servers
 

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.
CarlosArdila - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps grow horizontally or vertically within one box or chassis
The initial setup is very easy. We deployed this in two days, including installation, system setup, firmware upgrades, configuration, and network connection. By the next day, we were already deploying virtual machines. We initially began with the Blade system. As the migration to SAP HANA approached, it seemed prudent to upgrade our hardware. Consequently, we facilitated their transition from the Blade system to Synergy. Subsequently, we collaborated closely with the SAP consultancy company to oversee the migration process, ensuring seamless integration of all workloads and sub-environments. We have four people working on the deployment, including a project manager, two specialists, and one tech support.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Overall service and support from Cisco is very good."
"The most beneficial feature is UCS Manager. It's the best way to manage hardware, creating group policies, like scrub policies and maintenance policies."
"The GUI makes is simple to use and deploy."
"If we could get more reference architecture available on the portal, it would be helpful in making decisions"
"The most valuable feature is the service profile."
"The servers' resilience was particularly impactful."
"The most valuable features are monitoring and processing, which can handle a lot of throughput and are more powerful than the HPE series."
"Since its UCS release in 2009, Cisco has extended the core functionality with Central, a tool for managing multiple domains"
"It is a good product for hypervisors."
"The hyper-converged infrastructure where everything is stateless is valuable. Basically, you have your compute storage and networking management."
"The composable feature is amazing as it helps avoid downtimes."
"We're able to provision different applications, different demonstrations, add cloud-like speeds on-prem, which is unheard of in the industry."
"We have been able to give the deployment team what they request more quickly. We are able to quickly deploy what is being asked of us. If the development team needs a platform of 20 servers to run a particular platform, we can give that to them within a day or two."
"There is no problem with the scalability."
"It allows for easy management."
"We like that the solution can be arranged for an all-in-one single pane of glass, something our customers find important."
 

Cons

"The configuration is a bit complex, as it requires very high technical expertise to apply it."
"For future improvements, it would be a benefit if the solution could integrate better with products such as Oracle."
"The product pricing needs improvement."
"The price of the solution could improve."
"Its scalability could be better."
"It is more expensive than the competitors."
"Dell should address the issue of direct support and spare parts availability in our region."
"There are patches that cannot be implemented without any downtime or reboot required."
"Its management needs some work. It is not the best in terms of management. It has decent management. Its user interface can also be better."
"The installation and initial setup process is complex and needs to be improved."
"I would like the ability to have my storage components accessed from any other frame across the backplane. If we have a storage module and we run out of space in that frame, it'd be nice to be able to share it across the frames. You can do it with hyperconverged. Why can't you do it with Synergy?"
"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."
"Technical support was time consuming and unsatisfactory. The initial product setup was complex, lasing around three weeks to a month."
"The possibility of using storage directly in the frame in order to have bigger storage directly there, and not having an attached storage like SAN or NAS. That would be helpful."
"A faster Composer module would be a good inclusion for the next release of this solution."
"The solution must concentrate on improving the product quality."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product cost is high."
"The price of this solution compared to others is fair."
"The cost of the blade servers is okay, but the cost of Fabric Interconnects ends up increasing the overall costs. For example, suppose it costs 3,500 USD per blade server. When you include the Fabric Interconnects, you could pay up to 30,000 USD. Therefore, compared to the cost of servers from Lenovo, Huawei, Dell, or HP, the cost of Cisco servers can be high. However, Cisco gives good discounts (about 90% to 94%) to partners and to customers who are already using Cisco servers. New Cisco customers do not get the level of discount that an existing customer does. Because you can get discounts with Cisco, I would give pricing a rating of four out of five."
"There is a need to pay towards the licensing costs of the solution on a yearly basis. Price-wise, it is an expensive product"
"The type of service level purchase will determine the level of support response that you receive from Cisco."
"Make sure you work with a vendor partner than can get you a substantial discount off of list pricing."
"The pricing for Cisco products is always high."
"The pricing for Cisco is less than for the HP Proliant series."
"Nutanix was really hard to implement, and it was very pricey compared to what we get from Synergy."
"We outright purchased Synergy."
"The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs by 50 percent."
"For temporal use, when you throw on the fact that you're essentially doubling your capacity, right there you could claim a 50 percent TCO reduction."
"The platform that we run Synergy on is all virtualized. Our primary cost is likely VMware."
"We pay about £500 for the solution."
"In our whole environment, the cost is in the millions. On this particular chassis, the annual cost is 12 blades times approximately $40,000."
"The biggest cost is the VMware licensing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
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 pricing is competitive. While the UCS price was high before, it is more competitive now.
What needs improvement with Cisco UCS B-Series?
If we could get more reference architecture available on the portal, it would be helpful in making decisions. Also, the content should be more extensive, especially technical content.
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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE Synergy?
The pricing is relatively high compared to Cisco servers. However, due to the volume of my purchases, I get good discounts.
 

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
HudsonAlpha, Virgin Media, EMIS, United
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS B-Series vs. HPE Synergy and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.