It is expensive.

The solution is pricey, and Cisco's prices change every month - or, at least, it seems that way. It's a constant challenge for our customers. However, we work with account executives at Cisco and work to get discounts. 

The price is competitive. It's not too expensive, it's good, and it's worth the price.

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.

It is not a yearly subscription but a yearly support renewal that you need to do for Cisco UCS B-Series.

We have to pay a monthly licensing fee for the solution.

Cisco UCS does not require a license. However, this license is not specific to users. In collaboration with the tech team, it also controls and stores other components, such as hypervisors, JES control, technology integration, and analytics.

The product is expensive. We encounter a licensing issue as well. It could be subscription-based.

The solution is definitely expensive. Compared to the more in-demand hyper-converged environments such as Nutanix or DVX rail, Cisco UCS B-Series is even more costly due to the expensive fabric interconnects. The only benefit we will get when adding more chassis to the two fabrics is the ability to scale up. Therefore, if we are only using two, three, or four chassis, the cost is high.

The licensing cost is a little bit expensive because by default, it depends on your fabric interconnect model. Most of the time, however, Cisco provides a lot of promotions to the customers, so the cost can be waived for many projects. The price of the chassis itself is fair.

I was not involved with the specific pricing agreement, so I don't know. However, I am familiar with some of the aspects.

Generally, the cheaper, the better. I believe that this is part of the procurement management that must be involved with requirements. Pricing will be based on your requirements so it is important to plan, engage, and negotiate directly with the Cisco Account Manager.

I have an excellent relationship and experience with them. They are accommodating in all areas such as reaching out, checking and engaging in setup and configuration of equipment that has arrived, training, help in designing, consulting, pricing, and licensing.

Price wise, Cisco B-series was better. 

The cost of the Cisco UCS B-Series is comparable to HP solutions but higher than Dell solutions.

Although I was not completely involved in the pricing or licensing costs, I do have to monitor licensing allocation of VMware CPU licenses.

I know that Cisco licenses the number of ports and uplinks on various interfaces inside the Vblock. However, we have not done any upgrades beyond our initial purchase of the replacement Vblocks to run into any new licensing additions.

This is a premium device and our clients are not as concerned about the reasonableness of the price compared to satisfaction with their productivity.

There is a need to pay towards the licensing costs of the solution on a yearly basis. Price-wise, it is an expensive product.

There is an additional cost consisting of the modules a person wants to use, apart from the standard licensing costs of the solution.

It is expensive, which is why limited customers utilize it. However, it is enterprise-class, reliable, stable, and fast. In the past eight years, I have never had any bad experiences with Cisco UCS or faced any outages.

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.

Cisco UCS B-Series is not a cheap solution.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing ten out of ten.

Cisco UCS B-Series is an expensive solution.

The price of this solution is a little bit higher, but given that this system is Cisco, it feels more secure and dependable.

Obviously, the worst-kept secret with all vendors is to negotiate as close to fiscal year-end as possible. For Cisco, the year-end is July 31st, so they are well positioned for organizations deploying summer projects. The other issue is the move to bundle licenses. That is great for highly dense environments like a data center, but it makes much more sense for individual licenses for distributed environments like hundreds of storefronts or clinics distributed across a wide geographic area.

In my opinion, everything related to the product is very expensive right now. Every three years, I need to renew my license and support the product. I don't have to pay any extra costs in addition to the standard licensing charges attached to the product. Every time I have to opt for the renewal of the license, I am shocked to learn about the increase in the price of the product. If you purchase a solution for a particular amount, and then during the renewal process, you learn that you need to pay double the amount of what you had paid previously, you will definitely feel that you are paying a lot of money.

The solution can be quite expensive and is a bit of a higher cost when compared to others on the market.

The price of this solution compared to others is fair.

Cisco products are at the high end in terms of cost, but everything is included with the licensing fees. The only thing that we pay for separately is VMware.

Plan carefully and purchase adequate licenses with the initial purchase for better pricing.

You can typically get reasonable pricing on the solution. The hardware itself, however, isn't the biggest cost. The biggest cost is licensing, and that can be quite expensive.

The Cisco UCS solution is more expensive in price comparisons with other similar solutions. You will be very happy to have had spent the money upfront and you will look like a rock star to your management and customer base by choosing Cisco UCS blade server system for your infrastructure needs. The pricing and licensing of the Cisco UCS system is comparable to other systems. Overall, your licensing and pricing costs will decrease exponentially over time in comparison to the other vendor branded blade server systems. I would recommend you at least allow yourselves the opportunity to review the Cisco UCS offerings and schedule a demo from your local Cisco UCS product vendor.

Cisco UCS B-Series is highly-priced. It is suited for medium and large enterprises.

UCS is expensive, and we will be migrating to the cheaper HP servers.

Nothing shocking. Very straightforward. Make sure you work with a vendor partner than can get you a substantial discount off of list pricing.

I don't have any visibility on the licensing setup. That's managed by procurement, actually. I don't have any information about it.

The solution is quite expensive. It's pretty high, especially when you compare it against the offerings of other vendors. They need to be more competitive in terms of pricing.

It is expensive (like all converged platforms). From a cost perspective, UCS must be evaluated seriously in order to determine if the company requirements justify the acquisition. It is important to take into account that UCS is an end-to-end solution. Integration with Cisco Nexus is a must.

I'd recommend that you create a "turn Key" solution pack, including both hardware and platform licensing, and guest licensing. You could also get this by implementing it through re-sellers.

The pricing for Cisco products is always high.

Pricing with Cisco is very high.

The price is very inefficient.

Pricing and licensing depend upon the requirements of the clients, but the recommended ones are to go with some Ethernet and Fabric ports mix.

Cisco UCS B-Series is an expensive solution.