Cisco UCS Manager supports the entire Cisco UCS server and Cisco HyperFlex Series hyperconverged infrastructure portfolios. It enables server, fabric, and storage provisioning as well as, device discovery, inventory, configuration, diagnostics, monitoring, fault detection, auditing, and statistics collection.
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Dell PowerFlex
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Dell PowerFlex (formerly VxFlex) software-defined storage solutions aim to enable transformational agility for organizations looking to modernize their datacenter operations. The vendor states PowerFlex enables extreme flexibility, massive scalability, and enterprise-class performance and resiliency while simplifying infrastructure management and operations.
It [Cisco UCS Manager] is extremely well suited to large virtual infrastructure environments with resource dense blades. This solution is also great if you want to consolidate a large number of servers (if they are servers that need to stay physical, but can fit in the profile of a blade) - this would reduce data center space utilization as well as power and cooling. Cisco UCS Manager is also great if you're looking for centralized management of a larger number of servers. This would not be a great solution if you have a very small shop - it's not cheap and probably wouldn't give you a ROI if you only have a couple dozen servers total. I'd say it would be overkill for small shops, but if you have the money and don't care, you'll still like it.
Definitely would recommend this unit or this family of units into most peoples organizations. Especially if you're starting fresh with a whole dedicated SAN and dont have to move a ton of data over to these (though that is possible, it is very messy). If you're moving from existing storage, then you will have to be prepared for some sore spots!
Cisco UCS Manager allows for integrated management of all UCS components, streamlining processes like server provisioning, networking, and storage configuration
The automation capabilities of Cisco UCS Manager help streamline tasks such as provisioning, configuration, and monitoring, leading to increased efficiency
Cisco UCSM Support has been very quick to reply and address our concerns, issues, and questions. We have found that Cisco's documentation is clear and concise and fairly easy to find. With Cisco support's help, we are able to quickly and safely meet the demands of our end-users, consistently.
I think UCS Manager would be able very comparable to other vendors offerings when it comes to server configuration. I think Cisco did a good job in giving you full access to many options that you might not see with Dell or HPE. Every manufacturer would need a similar tool to control their server environment, but I think what Cisco has built into their Manager is a little better than others I've used. You can just see and change so many settings. I would say that is also a bit of a negative by a little bit because sometimes it is hard to dig in and find what you need to change and often might need to reach out to TAC or take a training course to understand all of the interface.
