Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers vs HPE Synergy comparison

The compared Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise solutions aren't in the same category. Cisco is ranked #5 in Rack Servers , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 4.5% mindshare in the category. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #2 in Blade Servers , with an average rating of 8.7, and holds a 21.8% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users who would recommend it.

Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Ser...

Read 29 Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers reviews

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2,097 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

HPE Synergy

Read 89 HPE Synergy reviews

3,223 Views
2,345 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Ser...

HPE Synergy

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Executive Summary

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

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo and others in Rack Servers.

To learn more, read our detailed Rack Servers Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Rack Servers

January 2025

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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 C-Series Rack Ser...

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Rack Servers (5th), Density Optimized Servers (3rd)

HPE Synergy

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Blade Servers (2nd), Composable Infrastructure (1st)

Mindshare comparison

While both are IT Hardware and Infrastructure solutions, they serve different purposes. Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers is designed for Rack Servers and holds a mindshare of 4.5%, down 4.9% compared to last year.
HPE Synergy, on the other hand, focuses on Blade Servers, holds 21.8% mindshare, down 22.1% since last year.

Rack Servers

Blade Servers

Featured Reviews

Ehsan Emad

Head of IT at Synnapex

The VIC card is the most important feature.

I rate Cisco USC C-Series Rack Servers 10 out 10. If you plan to buy a C-Series, you should be clear about why you want to use it because the uses vary. different. Whether you're using Cisco, HPE, Dell or any other brand, it's essential to define your use case. For example, are you using it for a simulation graphics, calculations, etc.? Depending on the use case, you might want to go with a small server with more CPU. Sometimes you need a light CPU with a powerful GPU. For example, if we have a C-Series with four CPUs at the same time, or we have a server that's handled two CPUs at the same time—the purpose is crucial. C-Series is good enough compared to other competitors like HPE and the other ones. The HPE C20 is one unit and has a lot of RAM support, but the C-series is number one, in my opinion.

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CarlosArdila

Project Manager, Information Technology at Telelago

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The C-series is the most valuable."

"On the Cisco side, there is a benefit in terms of server management. Cisco provides UCS Manager, which is a multi-tenant site manager. We can manage multiple sites while maintaining disaster recovery, a feature not available on other platforms."

"Its hardware is really reliable. We also like Cisco for its support."

"The solution is scalable."

"The initial setup is straightforward and easy to do."

"The most valuable feature of Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers is server management."

"The solution is easily scalable."

"It is very stable and easy to use. It integrates easily with Cisco's cloud-based UC solutions. There are tools for management that make the management a bit easier, but we don't use them. We don't use what you would term as power users."

More Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers pros

"Support is very helpful."

"I love the satellite architecture for the Virtual Connect. I think this is great. I love the storage drawer, which you can present volumes to any compute node within the same frame."

"Great flexibility including configuring the interconnects on the use of the chassis."

"The solution's greatest strengths lie in its ability to maintain a high availability and combine networking with hyper channel connectivity into a single component."

"The solution helps us to implement new business requirements quickly with some app deployments."

"We have more control over the firmware and how we are managing our physical servers."

"Valuable features include its dependability, reliability, and the ease of managing the system."

"The scalability is great."

More HPE Synergy pros

Cons

"The product must add customer-friendly monitoring features."

"In the version we need to use, the manager is still reliant on a full Java install on a Windows OS. This is inconvenient and problematic if you have multiple management tools on different versions of Java or if you move to a machine without the appropriate Java environment."

"I would like to see a little more integration with VMware."

"There is room for better integration with other brands."

"There is very little scalability for the cluster. If you need a higher availability, there is a user limitation. So that is the low side."

"Cisco UCS C-Series Rack could improve by selling storage. Cisco doesn't sell storage, which is a problem because some customers ask for storage. There are several brands in the market, such as HPE, and Dell EMC. However, Cisco doesn't have any storage. This is where the tension comes from buying this solution."

"The initial setup could be easier."

"The C-Series is not designed to be as scalable. They are designed to have enough RAM and enough CPU on their own side. If you want scalability, it's better to choose the B-Series— the Blade Servers — because those are much more scalable with Fabric Interconnect."

More Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers cons

"A faster Composer module would be a good inclusion for the next release of this solution."

"The stability is not good right now. We have had a couple of outages where we have receive very good support from HPE. However, we have not been able to come up with cut and dried reasons for why the outages have occurred. They have not been able to be reproduced, so it has been difficult getting our trust back."

"In the past, I have had issues with configurations."

"We'd like to see faster networking in the back-end."

"There is certainly a feature or two missing."

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

"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."

"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."

More HPE Synergy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution is a little expensive."

"This product is slightly more expensive when compared to others."

"My company has an agreement with Cisco to get discounted rates. It is one of the reasons why we chose the product."

"The server itself isn't costly at all, but the CPU and the RAM can be pretty expensive. You can buy a UCS for $2,000, but the RAM and CPU can cost up to $80,000. The most expensive asset is the intel processor, but it depends on how many cores you want and the technology you want to use on your CPU, like Hyper-V, etc."

"We have to pay for the VMware and Cisco licenses."

"Best to buy all the blades configured for the same purposes of load balancing and failover or load shifting."

"The price of the Cisco UCS C-Series Rack could improve. It's a little more expensive in comparison with Dell or HPE solutions."

"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis, which is only $2,000 or $3,000."

More Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers pricing and cost advice

"The hardware licensing cost is reasonable."

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

"We pay for licensing on the fibre channel uplinks, on the Virtual Connect, which is an add-on."

"The price point is a little high. We were able to get a good deal on a promotion, to go with it. It would be nice to see the prices come down a little bit."

"There is a perpetual license given when you purchase HPE Synergy."

"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."

"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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

23%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

University

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

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 C-Series Rack Servers?

The C-series is the most valuable.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers?

The solution is moderately priced.

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What needs improvement with Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers?

The improvement should be done as per customer requirements.

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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?

The pricing is relatively high compared to Cisco servers. However, due to the volume of my purchases, I get good discounts.

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerEdge Rack Servers vs Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers

Compared 56% of the time

HPE ProLiant DL Servers vs Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers

Compared 25% of the time

Lenovo ThinkSystem Rack Servers vs Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers

Compared 6% of the time

IBM Power Systems vs Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers

Compared 3% of the time

Dell XR2 Rugged Server vs Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers

Compared 3% of the time

More Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers Competitors

HPE ProLiant DL Servers vs HPE Synergy

Compared 29% of the time

HPE BladeSystem vs HPE Synergy

Compared 22% of the time

Dell PowerEdge M vs HPE Synergy

Compared 21% of the time

Cisco UCS B-Series vs HPE Synergy

Compared 8% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs HPE Synergy

Compared 2% of the time

More HPE Synergy Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers

February 2025

Download Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE Synergy

January 2025

Download HPE Synergy product report

Also Known As

Unified Computing System C-Series, Cisco UCS C-Series

No data available

Overview

UCS C-Series Rack Servers deliver unified computing in an industry-standard form factor to reduce TCO and increase agility. Each server addresses varying workload challenges through a balance of processing, memory, I/O, and internal storage resources.

Cisco

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.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Sample Customers

Advanced Medical Transport, Aegean Motorway, Anilana Hotels and Resorts, Artoni Transporti, BH Telecom, Bowling Green State University, City of Mississauga, Dualtec Cloud Builders, Electricity Authority of Cyprus, Grupo Industrial Saltillo (GIS), Kind en Gezin, Kuwait Petroleum Italia, Nationwide, Quest, Talbots, University of St. Gallen

HudsonAlpha, Virgin Media, EMIS, United

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