Cisco UCS B-Series Room for Improvement
PK
PankajKumar19
Data Center SME at Orange España
From a physical hardware point of view, it's excellent compared to Dell and HP, but from Cisco UCS Manager, it should be more user-friendly.
There are certain things not described in the UCS Manager, like changing or editing profiles. It should be more user-friendly.
In future releases, I would like to see an automated setup process.
View full review »
JohnDeavers
Senior Solutions Architect at ePlus Technology
InterSite is still working on a lot of bugs. Specifically, going from UCF's manager to all strictly interstate-managed environments, there have been a lot of challenges. It is a challenging environment as far as migration from UCS manager director to strictly an inter-site managed in the cloud. Cisco's still working out those bugs. We've been doing a lot of troubleshooting.
I would like to see more density within the blades compared to HPE and other Dell blades. They do have more slots available. However, the UCSX series that's going to be a game-changer. I'm going through advanced architect training for that engineering training for that product as well. I foresee that X is probably going to replace the C or B series blades since you'll be able to get more density. In the end, you may be able to get double the nodes per slot.
The solution is expensive.
Sometimes, support isn't as fast or knowledgeable as customers need them to be.
Olalowo Olaleye
Senior VMware\Cloud Solutions Engineering Consultant · at Shell
The upgrades could be improved because the software needs various upgrades to be safeguarded against liability. Cisco should be very close to the customer to tell them if they need a new upgrade. In addition, they should include other features to make it useful for public cloud computing.
Buyer's Guide
Cisco UCS B-Series
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Cisco UCS B-Series. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
767,319 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Rishabh_Jain
Senior Member Of Technical Staff at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
If a customer is moving towards a UCS-only solution, then it would be great if storage could be provided with it.
Compared to the deployment of servers such as Dell XCDs, the deployment of UCS servers is more complex. They take longer to deploy.
Prasanth Kailasam
Senior Client Manager at GBM
There are some shortcomings in the product when you look at it from the perspective of the area involving multiple configurations, making it an aspect where improvements are required. The server configuration, along with various other configurations, can be improved.
From the product's console perspective, some improvement is needed.
From a configuration perspective, the product should introduce the tool with more configurations in the market to suit the requirements of multiple customer bases.
In the future, I want the tool to offer different flexibility for the configurations on the hardware front that can be incorporated into them.
Filip Kopecký
Chief Technology Officer at HOPI HOLDING a.s.
The solution’s pricing could be improved and made cheaper.
View full review »
Mahmoud Elsayed
Senior Solution Architect at Zak Solution
The price of the solution can be improved.
View full review »
Muhammad Alihyder Bhuiyan
Head of IT Operations at NCC Bank PLC
There is a delay in the product's reporting and the rebooting system compared to servers from other vendors like Dell and HP.
View full review »
Javed Koor
VMware Administrator L3 Support at Diyar United Company
The cost is expensive and has room for improvement.
View full review »
Ehsan Emad
Head of IT at Synnapex
The license is expensive.
Cisco should decrease the delay in the delivery of their products.
View full review »HN
Hoang Quan Nguyen
Infrastructure Integration Analyst at a government with 10,001+ employees
USC Central seems a bit confusing for technicians.
Many functionalities that are not used for a small environment should be enforced at the enterprise level.
I would like to see USC Central offered free for use, as well as made simpler to use for technicians. This will improve its adoption rate, especially for environments that are not exposed to the internet.
View full review »
Taha Yegenler
Application Programmer at Turkish Airlines
The product could be made more secure.
View full review »SB
reviewer1199268
Sr. Network Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Integration with the storage to get a heatmap of what's going on in the storage site could be improved -- the dashboard, that kind of thing. We have a virtualized environment and it's the same dashboard that links together the front end, the VMware and the backend storage. We have to use multiple views, multiple solutions for that. We log in to multiple places to see what's going on in the storage, what's going on in the switches, on the Blades, on the VMware. It would be great if there was a single platform, a dashboard that could integrate all of those. That kind of improvement wouldn't just help me but would also benefit management. If they want to see what's going on, for example, to get a five-year forecast, and the dashboard could show how much space is left for computing power, or show that something is not working, that would make a difference.
View full review »
RajPrakash
Associate Project Manager at MSSL
The technical support is sometimes delayed and has room for improvement.
The cost of the solution has room for improvement.
View full review »FA
Fred Armantrout
Senior System Specialist at Burns & McDonnell
Smaller locations are held up where they use a pair of converged infrastructure interfaces for redundancy.
To deploy a standard Cisco Blade system with redundancy for maintenance and reliability you have to purchase two converged infrastructure 6296 or 6396 interface / switches, and the chassis, uplink interfaces, plus the blade servers to drop in one or more blade chassis. From my point of view the initial cost to do this for a small regional office where we usually have the computer in a dedicated network closet for the switches and servers.
Cisco does now have a “Mini” solution where they have put the converged infrastructure and management into the chassis via the slots where the uplink interfaces normally install. This setup can support multiple blades and even external C series chassis in a converged environment all sharing some form of external storage from what I have read but never used or experienced.
Most of my companies need is for data distribution from a file sharing server(s), a domain controller and possibly a local database server. I can cover this all in one 2U server from another company that I can cram in 3-6 TB of DAS / RAID disks for file storage with enough RAM and CPU cores in 2 sockets to cover my compute / VM needs.
My demands for servers in most remote sites are different than most. Our end-users all have either a laptop or powerful CAD workstation to do their engineering on. We don’t do VDI via VDI terminals. We do use VDI for engineering apps in 2D on our VBlock and in C-Series UCS servers with NVidia shared video cards for CAD / 3D rendering in our VDI pools.
HK
Himanshu-Kumar
Associate Engineer at Quess GTS
This product uses a converged network adapter because it is the only way to provide flexibility with both fiber and ethernet connections.
View full review »MM
Mohamed Mourshedy
IT infrastructure at Halcon
The integration is an area where Cisco UCS B-Series needs to provide users with more details. The price of the product's license could be improved.
Mohsin-Raza
Manager Data Center & Services at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
The configuration could be simplified as the initial setup process is complex.
View full review »
it_user429375
Technical Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Cisco is behind as far as SSD qualifications and options allowed, relative to other vendors, but that is in keeping with their philosophy of a stateless working environment. If I add a unique storage attribute to my blades, I encumber it with a state that requires manual intervention to move around.
SSD evolution is coming hard and fast with higher density, lower cost options popping up each quarter. New form factors like M.2, U.2, Multi-TB, NVMe and now signs of Optane are emerging across a range of price points turning the once stolid server domain into the wild west. Dell and HPE have field qualification processes with vendors such that very soon after new products are shipping, they are available for use in their servers.
The process is slower for UCS as Cisco must perform extensive validation to assure compatibility with UCS-Manager. Does the device respond in time to blade controller logic, are there issues with time-outs for UCS-Manager that might have either type 1 or type 2 fault errors. Hence the array of new SSD products are more robust with HPE and Dell than for Cisco.
This goes to the core difference in architectural philosophy between the Legacy server vendors and Cisco that calls for a stateless environment leveraging networked storage so that any workload can be readily moved to a new server as a more powerful system is deployed, or a fault occurs on the old server. If an HPE blade has a local boot option with a new 1TB SSD – then you cannot move that workload remotely to a new 2-socket 36-core blade. You have to have a technician go on site to physically pull the boot SSD from the older blade and insert it into a new blade, then confirm it got the right one. This adds labor cost and slows down the upgrade process – increasing OpEx costs to manage the legacy infrastructure.
View full review »
David Fartouk
CTO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Cisco UCS B-Series is a pretty complex environment to manage, and it's not very simple. The solution’s technical support could be better.
View full review »it_user68991
Manager of Engineering with 1,001-5,000 employees
Software defects that result in false environmental alarms have been a pain point for us. These defects are not operational or performance impacting, but they do result in many hours troubleshooting to rule out any potential risks.
View full review »ST
Sotiris Tomopoulos
Presales Solutions Architect at Intracom Telecom
Next generation support for VMware needs to be introduced as it does not support eighth-generation VMware.
View full review »SP
reviewer1803549
Senior Technical Consultant at a engineering company with 10,001+ employees
The main issue with this solution is that it is quite vendor-restricted, meaning that when we use third party software, we cannot use all of the available configuration tools or pre-validated design features.
We would like to see a storage solution added to this product as, at present, there is no file system storage available.
Also, this product is very expensive, and whilst they will apply discounts for larger projects, these are not as competitive as those offered by other vendors of comparative solutions.
RO
reviewer1414053
Senior Principal Systems Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
In terms of room for improvement, I think there is room for improvement with the service profile. Cisco products are technically quite bulky if you ask me. You really need to be very proficient technically to deploy it and to understand the assignment of the service profiles before you can really make the most of it. The product comes with a lot of technical overhead. I know they have advancements that are coming and I foresee they are ready to address that problem at least to a certain extent.
For the purposes it is built for, I can not really think of any room for improvement, honestly. It is as advertised; it is doing what it is supposed to in the way the company represents it. I do not think they are really in need of any other improvement this year than what I know they already have on the roadmap. The only thing I can think of might be improving the user-friendliness.
SM
Sreevatsa M
Systems Administrator at Diyar United Company
The solution's console could be easier for accessing and managing internal help documents.
View full review »DR
Dhruba Roy
Sr. Information Officer at Merino Industries Ltd (Merino Group)
The price of the solution could improve.
View full review »
BOUMAIZA Aymen
Infrastructure Consultant at Adactim
This model does not support virtualization of the switch.
There are occasionally hardware problems that may be related to memory.
View full review »RS
Ricky Santos
System Administrator at ON Semiconductor Phils. Inc.
I would like to see the availability increased during upgrades and patching. There are patches that cannot be implemented without any downtime or reboot required. If the newer version could eliminate downtime during patches or firmware upgrades, it would be great.
View full review »BW
Bob Whitcombe
Technical Sales Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
This product comes from Cisco, who is fourth in the worldwide supply chain. That means options take a bit longer to get to their platform, as they insist on doing their own quality validations. Right now, the market is rapidly transitioning to solid-state media and the Cisco options tend to be less varied and more expensive than a broader slate of products from HP, Dell or IBM.
Cisco UCS offers a scalable platform with tremendous OpEx advantages. However, Cisco does not have the storage play that Dell (With Cisco Partner EMC in its fold) and HP have. With their long position in the market place on the PC supply chain side, both Dell and HP source and deliver high volume, low cost, advanced enterprise solutions from previous consumer focused suppliers like Samsung and Toshiba. Example’s like Sandisk’s 3.8TB SSD used in EMC VxRail products and newly announced Samsung 15TB and 6.4TB 1M IOPs SSD come to mind. While Cisco still carries the earlier versions of similar technology from FusionIO, the next gen lower cost options from Samsung will take a while to be approved and provided by Cisco.
Cisco’s internal testing and validation processes – to assure UCS Manager compatibility - mean they lag both HP and Dell in delivery on the newest storage paradigms – specifically the breadth of the SSD and NVRam offerings. Both these trends (High performance, High capacity SSD, and NVRam) offer major changes in architectural models. For organizations that seels to push the bleeding edge in testing and development, UCS will lag in delivery by a quarter or two. This has little impact on mainstream enterprises who will not adopt before a technology is thoroughly vetted by industry “Pioneers” – usually mid-sized shops that “took a chance” on introducing a new platform into their relatively modest environment.
KE
KareemEzzat
Cyber Security Analyst at Petrotrade
The high price of the solution is an area of concern where improvements are required.
The product lacks to offer AI functionalities along with integration capabilities. From an improvement perspective, I want some AI features to be included to enhance the integration capabilities of the tool.
David Fartouk
CTO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
The pricing could be improved, as it is a bit expensive solution.
The GUI is not the greatest. They could work on improving the interface.
View full review »it_user901308
Consultant at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Better UI. Cisco makes a great product but doesn't know how to make a UI.
SM
SilaMAY
Head Of IT Infrastructure and Support at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
A long while ago something went wrong with the solution and we had to back-up to the cluster, some stability issues could be improved.
For future improvements, it would be a benefit if the solution could integrate better with products such as Oracle. I recently worked at a company in Cambodia where we were using Oracle, we were having some difficulties with applying the licensing between the solutions.
View full review »AR
ARAVIND RANGA
VMware Administrator at a consumer goods company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The configuration is a little bit complicated and could be made simpler.
The administration is somewhat complex.
View full review »JL
reviewer2200413
System Administrator
Cisco is expensive and difficult to manage. The product is not intuitive. It also needs to improve storage management and upgrades.
View full review »MJ
Mikael Jensen
Sr. Operations Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The management interface needs a lot of improvement. As it is right now, it's a pain to use. It's not user-friendly.
For some clients, it may be useful if it was possible to switch the role for a server. I myself am running a VMware shop and so I would not personally gain any benefit from this, however, I see the value it would have for others - especially service providers.
View full review »JD
Juan Dominguez
Senior Solutions Architect & Consultant at ZAG Technical Services
Areas that require improvement are notably small in comparison to other similar products. The UCS system would benefit from less-expensive performance monitoring tools or other third-party tools that perform this function. Surprisingly enough, that is all I can come up with at this time.
View full review »it_user164016
Works at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
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.
View full review »BB
SrEngineer672
Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
They use LSI for their RAID, while they may be robust RAID controllers, they lack a lot of functionality that Adaptec or HP Smart array.
View full review »KW
reviewer2234919
Senior Infrastructure and Storage Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
The cost of the product is its biggest weakness. It is more expensive than the competitors.
View full review »AH
ArashHaghighifard
Team leader at Dana energy
The graphic code that UCS can support is limited and less accessible than other systems.
View full review »AP
AMADO PLATA
IT Infrastructure Manager at a tech company with 11-50 employees
We have to have Java to manage the infrastructure. It would be great if we can manage the infrastructure through a web browser.
We have Dell EMC, and I would like to connect my product directly to the chassis. I would like to have an interface to integrate the storage directly chassis and not through the network. If that could be possible, that would be great for me.
View full review »it_user287739
Data Center Practice Manager at The Plow Group
The UCS manager interface needs to be cleaned up a bit and can be streamlined, but no major complaints. Get off Java once and for all and release 3.2 so it can be all HTML 5.
View full review »it_user331470
Senior Network Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The management interface in the current version is Java based. I would like to see a move away from Java based management consoles, which I think Cisco has already road-mapped for the UCS product range.
View full review »MS
reviewer909156
VMware Software Engineer at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
We sometimes have small issues with the hardware elements. The network interfaces could be better. The product needs to develop better firmware.
The solution is difficult to set up. You need to be experienced in the product in order to be able to implement it.
View full review »DA
Daniel Aramayo
Implementation and Support Engineer at PRACSO S.R.L.
The price of this product is too high. They should work to make it more affordable.
View full review »it_user413451
Infrastructure Consultant at a tech consulting company with 501-1,000 employees
- Hardware platform configuration
it_user326826
Cyber Security System Architect at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It could be helpful to have a wizard to make the setup routine better, and a wizard to help with the managerial processes to avoid misconfiguration issues.
View full review »it_user683436
Data Center Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
HTML5 interface is a much needed improvement over the old Java interface, but still needs a little work.
View full review »it_user331449
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I would really like to see an integrated management interface for all the products for FlexPod, as well as a verification tool like Immersive that can give you feedback about your compatibility with FlexPod guidelines.
View full review »SS
reviewer1365930
Network Security Manager at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
The monitoring features and integration with other products can be improved.
In particular, integration with other products is difficult, especially for logging purposes. In this regard, it is not very good and improvement is required.
Technical support should be more timely.
View full review »it_user1020
Head of Data Center at a tech company with 51-200 employees
The downside when using anything from Cisco is the required knowledge needed to ensure proper implementation. The server system can be very daunting for an untrained system administrator to configure.Also, the server system can consume a lot of power. Proper preparations must be taken to ensure that the electrical and cooling facilities where the new server will be housed is sufficient for this server system.
I would definitely recommend this product as its benefits far outweigh its drawbacks. Just make sure that you buy all the necessary components to have a complete system.
View full review »
WK
reviewer1390341
IT Infrastructure Engineer at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees
it_user334806
System Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The UCS Manager is written in Java and has many problems after the new Java releases. It should be rewritten in HTML5.
View full review »it_user229368
Sr. Network Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
GUI had some trouble before with Java updates, but that is fixed now.
View full review »it_user229479
Senior Network Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Perfect device, but only if the GUI is made .NET-based, it will be more great.
View full review »it_user402516
System Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Cooling. It is hotter than HP blade servers.
View full review »it_user909
Owner at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Very tightly integrated, so once you are all in, you are likely to be there for a long time.
View full review »
JC
reviewer1790682
GM at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Cisco UCS B-Series competitors have similar features as they do, Cisco needs to make some changes to make their offering better.
The integration and support could improve, there are some challenges. Additionally, the competitor has its own storage in its portfolio, Cisco should have the option as well.
View full review »CC
technica379896
Technical Head at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Power Options for setting up Grid needs to have further customization.
N+1 for power supply is not applicable in some data centers
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Cisco UCS B-Series
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Cisco UCS B-Series. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
767,319 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Cisco UCS B-Series Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros
sharing their opinions.
Updated: April 2024
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