Cisco UCS Series vs. HPE ProLiant DL

Cisco UCS Series is well suited for Enterprise data centers, offering centralized management of server profiles and policies. 2-Enterprise data center, wherein rack space, cooling, and power are a challenge. 3- Mission-critical application, Cisco UCS Series is well suited, Cisco UCS Series is less appropriate in the following situations: 1. Small SMB (high upfront cost and complexity may be overkill). 2. Expensive solution for a small business. Most cost-effective to use traditional rack servers.

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It's well suited for a VMWare Esxi cluster setup. You are guaranteed to have the same CPU chipset to ensure the servers on the cluster are compatible with each other. We've had to stagger the purchase of systems by six months and have had compatibility issues. It's also well suited for I/O such as MS SQL or Oracle databases, Exchange servers, domain controllers. Pretty much any server setup will work with no issues on the HPE Proliant DL line. It's less appropriate as a NAS server, we had purchased one that ran on Windows Storage. Since it was more or less running Windows as a single controller, we had issues where it has locked up and caused an outage.

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• It's very customizable. It's customizable as in you have a chassis, but you could pick and choose the size of your blades puff with full width depending on what your workloads are. So in a way, you're not locked in. It's not like you buy a chassis and you're stuck into one thing could go and put, you need something that's storage intensive or maybe you've got more graphics intensive workload. You could choose and mix and match in the same.

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• Highly reliable. We've never had one go down unexpectedly in 11 years.
• High performance. Current 380 G10s are configured with 1.5TB of RAM, always the shortest commodity in virtual environments.
• Great manageability: iLO boards allow us to run headless without the Advanced license even.

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• Continue on development of platform management. Cisco has been notorious for terrible web applications but the functionality of this product is getting to where it is expected to be.
• Recognition of this being a product in a competitive market. When I think of servers I do not think of Cisco. Cisco = Networking Dell,HP=Servers
• 3rd party interoperability. I love Cisco but being tied to proprietary hardware/software is not a functionality that the end user or customer benefits from.

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• iLO Advanced - I feel like this is just a money grab. Give me the remote features, at least the remote console, with the purchase. I'd be OK with paying for the advanced license for more centralized functionality, but straight remote sessions? That should just be there.
• Software entitlements and online interaction are a little wanting. This isn't the hardware per se, but enterprise products are often heavily tied to online services and tools and that could be a lot better.

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Cisco UCS has been a highly reliable compute platform for our workloads, handling MSSQL, SSIS, virtualization (VMware vSphere), and analytics workloads with low latency and high efficiency. UCS Service Profiles and centralized management (UCS Manager, Intersight) make it easy to provision, scale, and manage compute resources efficiently across production and non-production environments. Our UCS setup integrates well with Pure Storage and Nimble HF40, delivering high IOPS, low latency, and fast throughput for data-intensive workloads. Cisco UCS hardware and licensing can be expensive compared to some alternative compute platforms, especially when considering cloud-based or hyperconverged options. While UCS can work in a hybrid cloud setup, it doesn’t natively integrate as seamlessly with public cloud providers like Azure or AWS compared to some newer solutions. We may need to evaluate Azure Stack HCI or AWS Outposts for future flexibility.

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While Cisco's hardware is solid and long running, their software is usually the weak point. I will say that they are getting better with each release but if I had to find a problem with usability that would be it. Overall usability is good when you can work around software issues.

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We have been using these servers for many years now and we have used different generations of this product line. We have never faced a catastrophic issue using these and even the smaller issues that we have faced have been dealt with by the technical support team of HP. They have been a reliable partner in our data center.

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The platform’s redundant fabric interconnects, power supplies, and built-in high-availability features ensure that systems remain online even during hardware failures or maintenance. Unplanned outages are rare, and when combined with proactive monitoring, UCS provides a very reliable environment for critical workloads.

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The system performs exceptionally well in terms of speed and efficiency, with pages loading quickly, and reports completing in a reasonable time frame, even with complex configurations. The integration of UCS with other systems, such as VMware vSphere and storage solutions, has generally not caused noticeable performance degradation. The scalability of UCS allows it to handle growing workloads without significant slowdowns. However, the performance could be slightly impacted during hardware or firmware upgrades, but these instances have been rare and well-managed. Overall, the performance has met our expectations and continues to provide reliable results.

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Cisco TAC is simply unbeatable and that goes for Cisco UCS server support just as well as it does for Cisco CUCM software. TAC has a well-deserved, excellent reputation and I do not hesitate to call them or open a ticket online, because I always know that I will get the help that I need and get it quickly

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Overall, HPE support meets our requirements. They offer handy 24x7 phone support with clear case resolution interface. Engineers from HPE know their hardware and software. They are polite and help to find quick solutions for their customers. We don't need to prioritize our service requests to account managers to find how to fix or improve our service support.

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I would rate the in-person training as excellent. The sessions were well-structured, hands-on, and delivered by knowledgeable instructors who made UCS concepts easy to understand. It greatly improved our team’s confidence in managing the platform.

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The training materials provided were generally informative and covered the essential aspects of the UCS platform, such as UCS Manager, Service Profiles, and integration with other systems. However, some of the training modules could benefit from being more hands-on and interactive. Additionally, certain advanced topics, like complex network configurations or troubleshooting hardware issues, were not covered in as much depth. Overall, while the training was useful, there’s room for improvement in terms of depth and practical application for more advanced users.

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We were very satisfied with the implementation of Cisco UCS Series. The deployment was well-structured, Cisco’s support team was highly responsive, and the solution integrated smoothly with our existing infrastructure. The project was completed on time with minimal disruption to operations.

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The Cisco UCS Series systems have far fewer hardware issues than the competition and seem to run longer than what we would be able to. They are also easier to manage from an admin perspective with easy to use tools, the right diagnostic and alerting and remote administration capabilities. They are a great product.

I've used Dell poweredge servers and they were great too, but I found remotely deploying HPE hardware was significantly easier and faster. One thing I love about HPE is when i got to deploy an OS remotely via iLO I can utilize the virtual media URL as opposed to mounting an iso. these eliminates the SSL overhead and the OS can be deployed in under an hour. Mounting an ISO has proven reliable but due to the SSL overhead it can take hours. In addition i found im able to register my HPE hardware with HPE and they provide me a clean IT dashboard of all of my hardware and they give me alerts as to expiring support coverage, if a server is down or reporting an error. its a very solid and reliable solution all around.

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Cisco UCS Series provides a highly flexible architecture with service profiles, fabric interconnects, and modular blades/rack servers, allowing organizations to scale compute and network resources across multiple departments and sites efficiently. The only minor limitation is that careful planning is required to maintain consistency at very large scales.

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• I'm going to start with the negative impact. Maybe in order to have the ease of use, you have to get some time to prepare correctly and to correctly to design the correct design. But now that you've done this time, you don't have to take that to get back to this configuration. You are all free. And this is the positive side, it's that when everything is prepared correctly, everything is smooth. So the use of the profiles, the connection of new servers, the decommissioning and the adding of new servers, the modification of configuration, everything is more easy to use and the less we interrupt user access to our service, the more the hospital is working fine and we can achieve a better support to our end users. And then to the patients.

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• Allowed us to move forward with running web-based applications and to scale them as needed.
• The lack of future driver support has made it difficult to consider upgrades, we may need to go with more expensive hardware in the future to be able to maintain upgrades.
• While we have not realized all the business growth benefits we expected from this investment, we have had much more flexibility and options when we need to change our environment to meet the business needs.

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