Our usage of Cisco UCS Manager is minimal. We're just using it as a telephony system.

Cisco tends to over complicate all of their solutions. Cisco UCS Manager is not that flexible. Cisco technologies are always cumbersome, and you need a specialist's skills to use their products. That's why we used an integrator to deploy it and couldn't do anything in-house. So, from that perspective, it limits flexibility.

Cisco UCS Manager virtually needs no maintenance. Since it's being deployed, it's pretty robust, which is typical for Cisco. If you implement it correctly, it is stable and resilient.

Before opting for Cisco UCS Manager, do your evaluation upfront properly, and make sure you understand your use case. Also, look at alternatives from the perspective of support and the complexity of deployment. Those were the key areas we probably didn't look at, and as the project went on, we discovered the pitfalls.

Overall, I rate Cisco UCS Manager a seven or eight out of ten.

My recommendation will depend on the nature of the business, the requirements, the full size or midsize of the setup, and the budget. If you have the physical space and data center for hardware deployment, then it involves managing physical hardware and a person for the physical environment. It also includes a layer of virtualization hypervisor, requiring personnel for that, and then network, firewall, and other resources. So, it depends on cost-effectiveness.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. It provides a robust solution for on-premises setups.

I rate Cisco UCS Manager seven out of 10. 

The solution's SDK and API can be integrated with ServiceNow for ticketing for any purpose. The solution's unified management interface is a central point of management that allows us to manage switches, blades, and storage connectors. One person is enough to maintain the solution.

The speed of the network interface has been 100 G since day one. The network is scalable, and GPU nodes can be added seamlessly. Cisco is claiming to support water cooling in the near future. The solution can be easily integrated with other tools and platforms.

Compared to Dell, Cisco UCS Manager provides straightforward configuration, reusable policies, and flexibility. Dell lacks a proper GUI for configuring everything. Cisco has only one GUI, which allows us to configure everything, including the network server and server profile. Before releasing each model, Cisco should conduct proper testing or engineering validation to ensure that the customer doesn't face any issues initially.

Overall, I rate Cisco UCS Manager a nine out of ten.

In my company, twenty people use Cisco UCS Manager. As it's a stable environment, whenever there's any maintenance, anyone available to take on the task will handle it. Maintenance is on an individual team basis.

My rating for Cisco UCS Manager is seven out of ten.

My company is a partner of Cisco UCS Manager.

I rate Cisco UCS Manager five out of 10. It's a good solution because it's unified. It's not separate components in the architecture. For example, in other solutions, we have a fabric connecting the LAN switches, a Zion input-output module, and other subscriptions between the chassis and the LAN switch.

I am very happy with Cisco UCS. If I had to choose between other submissions, I would choose the Cisco UCS every time.

It's a wonderful product.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

This solution is stable, agile, scalable, and Cisco provides good support.

My advice to somebody looking into this solution is to spend good time in designing the setup in terms of architecture. Have a good data center design architect to make sure they design a good solution. Take the setup slow because that's where you need to spend most of your time. When your setup is good and well-documented, it will make the admin's job easier.

I rate this solution as a seven out of ten.

We're using the on-premises deployment model.

It's a good solution, as long as you can maneuver admin paths and are competent in running the day to day support tasks.

The solution is a bit complicated and complex, but the trade-off is you have a lot of functionality.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. Regarding advice, It has easier deployment. You have support, a wide range of support engineers at Cisco that can help with either the Cisco UCS Manager isolated deployment, the HyperFlex or the ACI deployment.

I have recommended Cisco USC for multiple customers and in particular, one of them was a financial institution.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Cisco UCS Manager is that sizing is very important. Once you start thinking about it, you have to understand the requirements, and sizing is important in this regard. Once you understand the requirements, you have to select the right model.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Now people have many more options. If you're talking about HCI, Cisco has it. They have their own product called Cisco HyperFlex. Though if you are looking for a single short solution then you probably will not find it here.

On a scale from one to 10, I would rate Cisco UCS Manager a seven.

Cisco Infrastructure is one of the top vendors and no one can beat them in terms of switching and routing. They have a new solution called Cisco DNA where they have improved the security, OT environment, and IoT.

It is a good solution for WAN technology.

Cisco is on top of the infrastructure.

Cisco Wise Mail IT is now called Unified Messaging. The unity was the first introduction to Cisco for voice mail integrated with cross messaging and now they have a full collaboration solution in one box.

Cisco Tetration Technology has recently been introduced, but it has not yet matured in the market. We haven't used this solution yet as it is not mature yet. We saw a demo in Dubai, they showed us the functionalities.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this solution as an eight out of ten. I use the UCS Manager and I think it is a good solution.  

In terms of advice of how other users can implement the solution, I'd caution that it depends on what they like to use. If you need to have server usage, for example, for Oracle, for Microsoft Hyper V, VMware, or different solutions, then it's not the best.

For us, the complexity was too high especially when it comes to expanding it for other purposes.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I strongly recommend that you go with a Cisco UCS solution for a cloud business.

I would definitely recommend this product to others and my rating for it would be nine out of ten. The pricing can always be better, so I would like to see that being improved. 

I would rate Cisco UCS Manager a nine out of ten. It is a very useful product. 

We're not partners with Cisco. I'm a user of the solution and also a consultant.

We're currently using the latest version of the solution. I'm not sure of the exact version number, but it was updated recently.

I don't have specific advice to others considering implementing the product. I'd just say that it's important that they know the product before implementing it.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. You can do pretty much anything you need to on the product, but it's quite complex. If they were able to simplify both the configuration and the user interface, I'd probably give them full marks.