Cisco UCS B-Series Review

Centralized Management using UCS Manager, and State less Servers.

Scalability, Flexibility to reuse the same Server with different projects multiple OS (VMware ESXi / Centos, Microsoft Windows) just in minutes by creating new service profiles.

Stability of some of the old versions has afew bugs. Although I have to mention that Cisco has been releasing revised versions of Firmware very quickly to fix the bugs.

More then one year

No, but Cisco UCS is a complex system, it is very easy to deploy if you have the knowledge and understanding of the product, I have recently commissioned a new Cisco UCS Datacenter after all the rack and stack its very easy to manage the product via Cisco UCS Manager.

Some of the version of firmware does have issues but Cisco is very good at fixing the bugs and giving new firmware versions.

Cisco UCS is very good with scalability, this is one of the ups of the Cisco UCS and I have used this a lot.

Very good, as you can expect from Cisco TAC

I have had few issues when upgrading the firmware and the Techsupport of Cisco TAC was very quick in picking up the issue and resolving it.

I'm happy with the Tech Support.

Dell and HP Rack servers, issues with scalability. Space consuming.

Yes it was easy to setup provided you know the basics of Cisco UCS. I have done the low level design for our new site and it was very straightforward.

When it comes to racking I have to admit the chassis is very heavy with all the components as its a 6U chassis. So make sure you remove all the power supply modules and IOM's and Fans then rack it. Once its placed then you can easily slide everything back and blades into the chassis.

We had used a Cisco Partner and they did a very good job.

HP and IBM

Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) provides unified, embedded management of all software and hardware components in the Cisco UCS. It is scalable and it controls multiple chassis and manages resources for thousands of virtual machines.