The initial setup could be easier.

If you ask anyone, they would say the product is pretty expensive, making it an area of shortcoming where improvements are required.

As a partner of Cisco involved in the positioning of rack servers alone, I can say that it will never be a winning proposition for my company in the long run. There is always a need to make it a part of a bigger project in our company to make the product more sellable. Rack servers alone are very expensive. When it becomes part of an overall solution, Cisco provides customers with good discounts, making it a competitive product in the market. There is always a break-even point, so only after a certain amount of value is invested and derived does the value of the discount on the product start to kick in, making it an easily sellable product.

In the future, high-density servers can become very important, meaning Cisco should introduce four or eight CPU socket solutions that can really help. Cisco should start building reference architectures with the likes of Schlumberger, not only with just another oil and gas application vendor but with all application vendors. Once you have reference architecture, the customer always reaches out to the product that offers something Schlumberger likes and other application vendors. If Schlumberger recommends Cisco to others, then it becomes easy to sell it, and it gives confidence to the customers since the application vendor supports products from Cisco.

The scalability of the product is an area of concern where Cisco needs to focus on making some improvements.

Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers can improve by providing customization features to allow us to deploy them on the cloud. For example, we need VMware to allow us to accomplish a cloud deployment.

Other solutions such as HP, Dell, and Samsung, are using VMware at a low cost. However, in Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers we are bound to use the Ninite software.

There is room for better integration with other brands. We encountered some issues when integrating with other platforms on Cisco. For example, we had a Dell EMC and it experienced difficulties at times. The connection would often drop speed and other issues. Cisco expects us to purchase all of its products, so anything from an outside source tends to cause problems.

The price has room for improvement.

The product is losing ground to the competition, such as Nutanix.

It's not a scalable product.

The pricing is too high and higher discounts should be available for our country.

We'd like the solution to have integration with HCI software. As per my knowledge, Cisco doesn't have any HCI software.

The solution could improve the password reset and recovery procedure.

The improvement should be done as per customer requirements. 

For the Cisco side, improvements could be made in terms of scalability, costing, available capabilities, or support for multiple types of hard drives. 

Cisco currently supports a limited range of hard drives, so if possible, they can maintain further overhead rates and broaden support for various types of hard drives.

Another areas of improvement include pricing and scalability. 

Something about the storage is somewhat lacking. They should work to improve and expand it. I almost prefer EMC's setup more.

Technical support could be more responsive. 

Generally, the solution performs well, but some customers have complained about delivery time. So, the main weakness is the lead time.

The product must add customer-friendly monitoring features.

Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers could improve by adding a wider portfolio because they only have two main categories, the C-220 and 240. There is no wide range of options as other solutions have, such as Dell. Additionally, if it was more flexible with the configuration it would be good.

The capacity is quite small, so I need the CPU performance to be a bit higher. The memory is also limited, and we cannot upgrade more. The solution needs more capacity and more scalability. 

The solution can be improved by adjusting the cost.

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.

If you buy a Dell server, you want Dell storage, if you want HPE, you want HPE storage. Other suppliers sell compatible Cisco storage but not one made by Cisco.

Its accessibility and manageability can be improved. Currently, we have to visit the office to manage it. It should be manageable outside our network. I would like it to be on the cloud.

Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers could improve integration with third-party solutions.

The product's stability and delivery time could be better. 

The price of the solution is problematic, not the solution itself. It could be less expensive. 

The warranty and support periods should be extended. One of the things that we like about Dell and HPE is the longer duration of support.

What we would really like to see is more years of extended support. If somebody wants to extend it to five years or seven years, this should be possible because some of our customers really want it.

In terms of what could be improved, they could add their SSD drives instead of the normal, disc drives. That's the one thing.

The hard drive of Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers is not very good. I have already replaced three of them.

The only thing I would change is to provide more proactive support. I would like to try to shift away from reactive support and toward a more proactive support model. The alerting and the system beginning to alert us when it is outside of normal parameters is adequate, but I believe it can do more in terms of support.

I'm not sure if they do this at the moment, but I would like to see support for NVMe over Fabrics. NVMe over Fabric is used so that the entire solution can communicate NVMe over Fabric between the servers and the storage. It's doing exactly what we need right now, and the performance is excellent. But in two years, we'll be looking for the next thing.

On the contact center and video conferencing, I would definitely like to see more AI features. The AI features are key for us. You will find a lot of them in the cloud-based solution, but in the on-premises solution, they're hardly there. I would like to see the same AI features that are there in the cloud-based Cisco UC.

Not sure about the newest UCS Manager.

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.

Definitely the support area needs improving. Especially the time response in case of hardware failure.

I would like to see a little more integration with VMware. They used to have a plugin, but it was recently removed.