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Cisco UCS B-Series Review

Power for Unified computing and State less Servers

What is most valuable?

Centralized Management using UCS Manager, and State less Servers.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

More then one year

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Very good, as you can expect from Cisco TAC

Technical Support:

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

HP and IBM

What other advice do I have?

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.

**Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Last updated: Nov 23 2014

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