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Cisco UCS B420 M3 Blade Server (Not a standalone SKU) - blade - Xeon E5-4650 2.7 GHz - 512 GB - no HDD

Mfg # UCS-SP7-SR-B420-V CDW # 3181913

Quick tech specs

  • Server
  • 4-way
  • RAM 512 GB
  • hot-swap 2.5" bay(s)
  • G200e
  • 10Gb FCoE
  • blade
  • 2 x Xeon E5-4650 / 2.7 GHz
  • SAS
  • no HDD
  • 10 GigE
  • monitor: none
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Know your gear

Designed for enterprise performance and scalability, the Cisco UCS B420 M3 Blade Server combines the advantage of four-socket computing with the cost-effective Intel Xeon processor E5-4600 product family, for demanding virtualization and database workloads. The UCS B420 M3 is a balanced, high performance platform that complements the UCS four socket blade server portfolio. It offers industry-leading computing density, I/O bandwidth, and memory footprint, the full-width UCS B420 M3 supports 1.5 TB of memory and takes full advantage UCS virtual interface card (VIC) technology for up to 160 Gbps aggregate I/O bandwidth.

This item was discontinued on October 06, 2022

Enhance your purchase

Cisco UCS B420 M3 Blade Server (Not a standalone SKU) - blade - Xeon E5-465 is rated 4.50 out of 5 by 17.
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Supports multiple hypervisors but needs to improve in the area of configuration What is our primary use case? Initially, Cisco UCS B-Series was part of Cisco's collaboration suite. As part of Cisco's collaboration suite, users used to run Cisco IP telephony solutions on Cisco UCS B-Series. Later, Cisco UCS B-Series came into the market as normal servers to meet the requirements of its users. Cisco UCS B-Series specifically does a good job for certain large or heavy workloads. For vertical scalability, Cisco UCS B-Series is ideally used in the banking and manufacturing sectors in some cases. What is most valuable? The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it is easily scalable. If you have a Cisco environment in your organization's setup, it becomes easier to position Cisco's products in an infrastructure that is as good as our company's clients. Cisco's brand name and the reliability aspect attached to it give a lot of positive vibes about the tool to the clients. What needs improvement? There are some shortcomings in the product when you look at it from the perspective of the area involving multiple configurations, making it an aspect where improvements are required. The server configuration, along with various other configurations, can be improved. From the product's console perspective, some improvement is needed. From a configuration perspective, the product should introduce the tool with more configurations in the market to suit the requirements of multiple customer bases. In the future, I want the tool to offer different flexibility for the configurations on the hardware front that can be incorporated into them. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for more than five years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It is a stable solution, considering that I haven't seen many challenges in the tool. Cisco has a good record from the support perspective, making it an area where I don't see any specific challenges. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? It is a scalable solution. Around three or four customers of my company work with the product. If I consider Cisco's collaboration suite, Cisco UCS B-Series is used by a lot of clients because most of the collaboration applications under the suite work. How are customer service and support? The solution's technical support has always been good, so things are okay till now. How was the initial setup? The product's initial setup phase was fair enough, but I wouldn't describe it as a completely straightforward process. The product's deployment is okay since I haven't seen any specific challenges in it. It is possible to deploy the product on the cloud and on the on-premises model. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? It is not a yearly subscription but a yearly support renewal that you need to do for Cisco UCS B-Series. What other advice do I have? Speaking about how the tool can improve computing efficiency in data centers, I feel that, ultimately, there are other kinds of hardware or servers that Cisco provides. From a management perspective, certain aspects can be incorporated to help users understand their current standing. It would be good if certain larger configurations could also be made suitable for the tool to suit the needs of multiple customer bases. For virtualization needs, the product works well. I have dealt with certain virtualization environments using - Cisco UCS B-Series. As of now, the tool is fine. Cisco UCS B-Series recently got registered with Nutanix, one of the market's HCI platforms. Nutanix can run on Cisco. Cisco UCS B-Series' direction is right. I don't think any further improvement is required in the tool right now. The integration capabilities of the product are okay. I haven't seen any challenges when installing the tool in an environment. I think that the tool supports multiple hypervisors. Speaking about the feature that has improved our company's data center operation, I would say that the Cisco brand name provides our organization with the benefits we need from the product. I believe that manageability is one crucial aspect of the tool, considering that it is pretty easy to manage. Performance-wise, some improvements have been introduced in Cisco UCS B-Series. Whenever somebody evaluates and goes ahead with some traditional setup in their environment, along with HP and Dell, they can also consider Cisco as a part of it because it has become more cost-effective and competitive presently. Networking-wise, the tool is pretty strong, and it operates as a brand that actually helps with the support offered to customers. The support offered by Cisco adds a lot of confidence for the clients. I feel that Cisco is doing a lot of innovation in order to offer scalability and flexibility to adopt future technologies. I believe Cisco users might see a lot more solutions that get introduced in the market that might become more and more compatible with many products in the future. In the future, I think that users will see AI and other related aspects run pretty well in a Cisco environment. I would say that the benefits and value of the use of the product stem from the brand name attached to Cisco products. Cisco's support when you use Cisco UCS B-Series is good. In the networking space, Cisco has been a leader for a very long time, and the same kind of credibility is what you can expect when you consider Cisco UCS B-Series. Considering the availability of the products from competitors, I rate the tool a seven out of ten. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? Hybrid Cloud Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Integrator
Date published: 2024-04-02T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Has the ability to reuse or divide the networking, making it a flexible networking environment What is our primary use case? We use Cisco UCS B-Series as a central computing environment. What is most valuable? The solution has the ability to reuse or divide the networking, making it a flexible networking environment. We have a virtual network interface, which means that we can easily reconfigure the machines according to our needs. What needs improvement? Cisco UCS B-Series is a pretty complex environment to manage, and it's not very simple. The solution’s technical support could be better. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for more than ten years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Cisco UCS B-Series is a scalable solution with a fairly advanced environment that can scale easily. It is not cheap, but it provides the ability to scale up in terms of computing, networking, and memory. Around 2,000 people are using the solution as our central computing. In terms of management, we're a small team of ten people working with the solution. The solution is being used daily in our organization. I rate the solution ten out of ten for scalability. How are customer service and support? The technical support team takes some time to resolve our problems. It took them some time to ship us a spare part when we had a problem. For a big organization like Cisco, technical support is not straightforward and could be better. How would you rate customer service and support? Neutral Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We previously used HPE and Cisco. We switched to Cisco UCS B-Series because we learned to trust Cisco. Cisco UCS B-Series was a very stable and good solution. When we bought it last time, we managed to use it for many years. How was the initial setup? The solution’s initial setup wasn’t easy. What about the implementation team? We implemented the solution through an in-house team. The solution was deployed by two people in a few days. On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution's initial setup a four out of ten. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? 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. What other advice do I have? Cisco UCS B-Series is part of our VMware environment. The Unified Architecture is one of the unique features of the solution that is very usable for us. With the feature, we can immediately understand that we need to configure a separate environment and easily configure networking to allow us to distribute the environment. The solution is deployed on-premises, but it's managed by the cloud environment. The solution’s maintenance is done by one person. I would recommend the solution to other users. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2024-02-22T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from A scalable, stable solution with no license required to utilize distribution and access code What is our primary use case? We use it as a stand-alone for computing only in HyperFlex. Using multiple projects and VDI projects, you can utilize distribution and access codes to find the storage that works for various solutions and scenarios. What is most valuable? They have management on the enterprise side. So, we manage directly through Fabric internet or the rack-mounted directly, whether on-premise, on the cloud, or private. The most significant benefit of the blade itself is its stethoscope-like functionality. You can remove and reinsert the blade and attach the service profile if any hardware is damaged. This is the main objective of the solution. Additionally, we can leverage it in a hybrid infrastructure. We are also authorized to integrate the solution with other vendors. They have a wide range of offerings, and we integrate HyperFlex, which is merged with fabric and implemented with the ACI or Application Centric Infrastructure, to advance software defense solutions. What needs improvement? The price of the solution can be improved. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using the solution for ten years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The solution is stable. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The solution is scalable. We have more than 52,000 customers using this solution. We have it installed in banking, government entities, and private sectors. How was the initial setup? The initial setup is not easy. You should know or understand the data center, particularly when integrating with SAN, NAS storage, or NFS. It generally takes 30 minutes to an hour for basic tasks. However, it may take several days to involve blade integration and integration with other systems. The project's timeline depends on various factors, such as integration requirements, scope, and configuration tasks. Based on these considerations, we can estimate the number of days required for integrating the object. First of all, we gather information from the customer regarding the project's purpose. The project has multiple components, such as configuring IBM Athena for management, aligning with the latest stable software, and configuring service profiles based on the project scope. Once we complete these tasks, we will move on to system administration, which includes providing a visual interface and configuring the operating system. Depending on the scenario, we will decide whether to install a hypervisor or directly install the working system on the server. This decision will be based on the sandbox environment we have. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? 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. What other advice do I have? It integrates with all other solutions, including building and internal solutions. Overall, I rate the solution nine out of ten. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2023-06-16T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Is easy to scale, and the servers have reduced complexity What is our primary use case? We use it primarily for computing purposes. What is most valuable? The complexity is reduced by having one blade with four servers and half-blade servers. The server profile makes it easier to deploy and to manage with Cisco UCS Manager. Cisco provides good flexibility to choose different products or different equipment within the blade servers, like CPU memory, logic board, etc., to make your own server. Other vendors don't have this option. What needs improvement? If a customer is moving towards a UCS-only solution, then it would be great if storage could be provided with it. Compared to the deployment of servers such as Dell XCDs, the deployment of UCS servers is more complex. They take longer to deploy. For how long have I used the solution? I have used Cisco UCS B-Series for around two to three years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? These are not stable servers because we have seen some cases where the servers have gone down when there were power fluctuations. Though the servers came with in-built batteries and in-built SPS, the blade servers were not accessible. They're designed to have one blade not dependent on another blade, but they still went down. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The scalability is good because it comes with Fabric Interconnects, and you can directly add more blades as you go. Therefore, scalability is not a problem. How are customer service and support? I have not had any issues with technical support. Because the solution has been in the market for 15 years now, the support is mature. I'd give technical support a rating of nine out of ten. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive How was the initial setup? As a partner who has deployed multiple servers, I found the initial deployment to be okay. However, it was not the easiest process. From a customer's perspective, the initial deployment can be a challenge. The customer could do something unknowingly that could make the whole system go down. Because we need to create server profiles, etc., I would rate the initial setup at three out of five. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? 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. What other advice do I have? On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Cisco UCS B-Series at eight. Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner
Date published: 2022-11-29T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Highly stable, good performance, and easy to deploy What is our primary use case? We use the solution to help manage our data centers. What is most valuable? Stateless Blade is the best feature. If we have a blade go down we find that the server continues to work well. What needs improvement? The technical support is sometimes delayed and has room for improvement. The cost of the solution has room for improvement. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using the solution for ten years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? Cisco UCS B-Series is stable. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The solution is scalable by adding additional hardware. How are customer service and support? The technical support is good but can sometimes be delayed. How would you rate customer service and support? Positive Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? We use HPE BladeSystem and Cisco UCS B-Series but we are going to replace them both with the Cisco X210c M6 series because of the high performance. How was the initial setup? The initial setup is straightforward. The configuration is also simple. What about the implementation team? The implementation is completed in-house. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The cost of the Cisco UCS B-Series is comparable to HP solutions but higher than Dell solutions. What other advice do I have? I give the solution a nine out of ten. Around ten administrators are required to manage the solution. I recommend the solution to others because it has good performance and is highly stable with little downtime. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner
Date published: 2023-04-09T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Modular, extendable, and high-density What is our primary use case? We've used blades and hyperflex. It's for data center refreshes and greenfield solutions. We've done a lot of HCI Solutions. We're basically taking old three-tier storage, no compute, networking solutions and then pulled into an ACI solution hyperflex or blades. I've worked on both the UCSX series and also the B series. M6, M7, and M5, and with a lot of fabric interconnects - just pretty much anything and everything for UCF. How has it helped my organization? Over the years, it's been it's come a long way from going from UCS manager to intersite managed solution. So we're doing a lot of cloud type management where we've been able to use that as which are like tenant managed services solutions with Cisco UCS and Hyperflex. We have managed services. Engineers that do manage all the customer's inter-site portal configurations, and then also we manage all the deployments, and pretty much we build run books and everything for them so that they know how to customers know how to how to work with their the hard new hardware for the hyperflex environments. Overall infrastructure-wise, we manage that for them, and they just manage internally. What is most valuable? It's modular. You can get higher-density blades within the 5108 chassis and the 9508 chassis. With the X series, it's even better, as you can add bigger blades and more processing and memory. It is a lot more resource-intensive and scalable. The solution is stable. The setup is straightforward. What needs improvement? InterSite is still working on a lot of bugs. Specifically, going from UCF's manager to all strictly interstate-managed environments, there have been a lot of challenges. It is a challenging environment as far as migration from UCS manager director to strictly an inter-site managed in the cloud. Cisco's still working out those bugs. We've been doing a lot of troubleshooting. I would like to see more density within the blades compared to HPE and other Dell blades. They do have more slots available. However, the UCSX series that's going to be a game-changer. I'm going through advanced architect training for that engineering training for that product as well. I foresee that X is probably going to replace the C or B series blades since you'll be able to get more density. In the end, you may be able to get double the nodes per slot. The solution is expensive. Sometimes, support isn't as fast or knowledgeable as customers need them to be. For how long have I used the solution? I've used the solution for probably over ten years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It's pretty stable. I'd rate the reliability eight out of ten. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The B series is pretty scalable. You can have several chassis within an FI pair. Then you could have multiple UCS domains. Now, with the InterSite, you can have multiple configurations more so than the UCSB series with the InterSite managed solutions where you can have B series and you can have both UCS manager and InterSite yet you can't have both. With the UCS X series available, that's another game change. Our customer base definitely intends to increase usage. How are customer service and support? From a partner perspective, we pretty much can troubleshoot more in-depth than some of the tech engineers. We've had a lot of tech engineer engagements with our large customers, and wasn't that I wasn't that impressed. They just seemed not to have a full understanding of what the customer issues were, and that took a long time to sort out. They also had multiple tech engineers involved. That prolonged the overall support for the customer. We jumped in and had more expertise, and we were able to help solve the issue before the tech in a lot of cases. How would you rate customer service and support? Neutral How was the initial setup? The initial setup was straightforward. You can deploy on-premises. We've also worked with customers in remote installations where they would rack a stack, and then we would do a remote configuration on everything if it's through either a VPN or a Webex session, a Cisco secure Webex session. If it's InterSite, we can pretty much do it remotely. There's no UCS manager available to support that now, and everything's pretty much in the cloud managed, which is nice. What was our ROI? I typically note a three-year ROI. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? 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. What other advice do I have? New users need to definitely understand how the UCF manager works. They need to understand InterSites, fabric interconnects, and how everything connects both up links to the northbound core switches and make sure all the connectivity is correct. Connectivity is a big issue. If you don't have the right connectivity configured specifically for the UCS manager with the FIs and also the fabric modules coming off the chassis, there will be a lot of issues. I've seen a lot of attack-related issues going forward. Users need to make sure that they have everything configured correctly. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2023-04-05T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Robust hardware and efficient management of hardware, creating group policies, such as scrub policies and maintenance policies What is our primary use case? We use them for a virtualization environment with VMware ESXi version 7.0, update 3. We have B200 M4 blades in a Cisco chassis connected to Fabric Interconnect switches 6632 with Tracy number 5108. The Fabric Interconnects are integrated with IBM V7000 storage through a Fabric Extender to connect to the IBM SAN storage, V7000. We deploy VMs for the banking sector, such as credit union companies. Sometimes, the VMs hosting all the on-premises systems for disaster recovery (DR) purposes are shifted to the Azure cloud. This is a hybrid cloud environment. What is most valuable? The most beneficial feature is UCS Manager. It's the best way to manage hardware, creating group policies, like scrub policies and maintenance policies. It is managed through UCS Manager, creating WLAN numbers and MAC address policies. Making a profile and assigning it through Cisco UCS Manager for each blade is an easy task. In case of any outage, just replace the physical host, attach the profile from Cisco UCS Manager, and it will test the original one. So, UCS Manager is the best thing I'm using in Cisco UCS. What needs improvement? From a physical hardware point of view, it's excellent compared to Dell and HP, but from Cisco UCS Manager, it should be more user-friendly. There are certain things not described in the UCS Manager, like changing or editing profiles. It should be more user-friendly. In future releases, I would like to see an automated setup process. For how long have I used the solution? I've been using Cisco UCS B200 M4 blades for the last ten years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It is stable. It is much more stable than other hardware, like Dell and HP. During the upgrade earlier, it was recommended to upgrade from south to northbound, upgrade Viccars, then blade, then IO, then SaaS, then click interconnects, Site A, and then come to Site B. Now, we have an opportunity to automate the upgrade activity. However, during our upgrades, when we did the entire infrastructure for FIA and FIB, during the reboot, FI failed very frequently. FIA or FIB failed in approximately six to seven situations out of ten upgrades. The replacement of FI took much more time than if we had a business hour for four hours; it took approximately one or two days. Running the entire infrastructure on FIB or a single FI is really risky. That is a main area of improvement for Cisco UCS. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? From a scalability point of view, it is good. We did an upgrade for the memory, and it is stable and easy. We added some hosts in a cluster at the desk level. Scalability is fine. I have been using it for the last ten years. In my current company, there are around 5,000 end users. But now, the users really want to move out of this solution. It's more difficult from a manageable point of view. We need a specific person with expertise to administer the environment. It totally depends on the cost. The users want to save costs, so they want to move to the cloud, either IBM cloud or Orange cloud. They want to move out; they don't want to expand further. How are customer service and support? I contacted support for Cisco HyperFlex. There was some expansion for the desk. Desk expansion in Cisco HyperFlex, so I did upgrade the disk in a three-node HyperFlex cluster. In two hosts, the disk was identified and acknowledged. In one of the hosts, it was not acknowledged. So Cisco Tech told me I needed to expand the disk simultaneously on each node. I have a three-node cluster, so I need to expand the disk on slot number seven on host one, slot number seven on host two, and slot number seven on host three. Once all the disks are acknowledged in three nodes, then it will balance the data in the cluster. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? My company was using the HPE legacy. How was the initial setup? The initial setup is easy, but it should be automated through JSON, Python, and more user-friendly. If someone asks me to deploy ESXi from Cisco UCS, attaching the hardware profile is easy. Still, for overall deployment, it's a bit lengthy. I want it to be automated, similar to the deployment for vXL through a portal, providing configuration in a JSON file and deploying approximately 50 hosts within half an hour. It will configure the entire configuration through a JSON file. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? It is expensive. What other advice do I have? My recommendation and advice in this matter totally depend upon the requirement and the nature of the business. For example, in the banking sector, with a heavy data workload on the premises and a need for high availability, I would definitely recommend Cisco for an on-premises environment. I might have the option with Dell, but I would compare Dell and Cisco. Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten because the hardware is much more robust. But they have not expanded as per the user requirement. Firstly, it should be more user-friendly. Secondly, it should move to automation from the user's manager's point of view. It should be more user-friendly, and deployment should be easily done through automation. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:
Date published: 2023-10-14T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from A highly stable and secure solution that has a straightforward setup What is our primary use case? We are running many applications for a logistics provider. We do the storing of goods for our partners and transport and so on. What is most valuable? The most valuable features of the solution are stability and security. What needs improvement? The solution’s pricing could be improved and made cheaper. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for five to six years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? We haven’t faced any issues with the solution’s stability so far. I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? We haven’t faced any issues with the solution’s scalability. Around 1,000 to 2,000 users are using the solution in our organization, and we may plan to increase the usage. How was the initial setup? The solution’s initial setup is straightforward. What about the implementation team? We implemented the solution through an in-house team. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? We have to pay a monthly licensing fee for the solution. What other advice do I have? We have a team of around 50 people to deploy and maintain the solution. I would recommend the solution to other users. Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2023-10-20T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Has rock-solid performance and is easy to deploy What is most valuable? Cisco UCS B-Series's most beneficial feature is agent management for print. Its performance is rock solid, and its servers are excellent. What needs improvement? The cost of the product is its biggest weakness. It is more expensive than the competitors. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for 15 years. I have also worked with Cisco UCS C-Series and Cisco UCS X-Series. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? We use Cisco UCS B-Series predominantly and have 50 end users in our organization. How was the initial setup? It is easy and less time-consuming to deploy the software. The time taken for the process usually depends on the size of the installation. We had a team of around ten administrators for the implementation. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Cisco UCS B-Series is highly-priced. It is suited for medium and large enterprises. What other advice do I have? It is a good tool. I would rate it a nine out of ten. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? Hybrid Cloud Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner
Date published: 2023-07-19T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from An expensive solution that is not intuitive What needs improvement? Cisco is expensive and difficult to manage. The product is not intuitive. It also needs to improve storage management and upgrades. For how long have I used the solution? I have been working with the product for one year. What do I think about the stability of the solution? I would rate the product's stability a seven out of ten since we encountered bugs during the upgrade. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The product is scalable and my company has 5000 users for the solution. How are customer service and support? The product's tech support has good people. However, the people in level 1 support do not know what they are talking about. Level 3 support is good. How would you rate customer service and support? Neutral What other advice do I have? I would rate the product a seven out of ten. We have two administrators for the product. The tool is a good product but maintenance is not easy. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2023-06-03T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Has an efficient KVM Launch Manager feature, but its stability could be better compared to other vendors What is most valuable? The solution's most valuable feature is KVM Launch Manager. What needs improvement? The solution's console could be easier for accessing and managing internal help documents. For how long have I used the solution? We have been using the solution for 15 years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The solution's stability is good. Although, it is much more complicated regarding usage or management compared to other vendors. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? I rate the solution's scalability a seven out of ten. It could be improved. At present, we have implemented it on Hyper V clusters. We have eight blades on two clusters and six blades on one cluster. In total, we have 250 servers installed from those clusters. How was the initial setup? The solution's initial setup process works fine. Which other solutions did I evaluate? The solution is a little more complicated compared to HP and PowerEdge configurations. Also, its KVM manager could be more straightforward similar to other vendors. What other advice do I have? I rate the solution a seven out of ten. It should have KVM connectivity similar to Dell and HP. Also, HP has a storage blade that helps connect monitors in case of network issues. We can plug in and access the keyboard and mouse to start with the task. It is not possible with Cisco Infrastructure. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:
Date published: 2023-07-16T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Easy to set up, stable, and scalable What is our primary use case? We use the solution to host all of our USX. The solution was deployed for the hypervisor. What is most valuable? The most valuable feature is definitely the service profile. I feel it provides a more stable environment, with very few issues with the hardware or fabric. These issues are rare and usually minor. What needs improvement? The cost is expensive and has room for improvement. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using the solution for almost eight years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The solution is stable. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The solution is scalable. How are customer service and support? The technical support was excellent; it was professional and very effective. The support I received was satisfactory, although it may have been due to the fact that my issue was not particularly significant. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was straightforward and we have not encountered any issues in a very long time. I believe the FCOE protocol has been improved since we first used it, as the IQ N number was not generated automatically. This was the only issue I have encountered with Cisco UCS, but since then it has been quite stable and robust. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? 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. What other advice do I have? I give the solution a ten out of ten. We have four people that use the solution and one person who is primarily responsible for any related UCS. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2023-03-08T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Simple deployment, reliable, and excellent support What is our primary use case? Cisco UCS B-Series are the Blade servers where we have installed VMware. What needs improvement? The price of the solution could improve. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using Cisco UCS B-Series for approximately eight years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The stability of the Cisco UCS B-Series has been good. We have not had a problem. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Cisco UCS B-Series is scalable. I rate the scalability of the Cisco UCS B-Series a ten out of ten. How was the initial setup? The initial setup of the Cisco UCS B-Series is not a problem. This solution is deployed in India and it is being used all over. We do not have plans to increase usage. What about the implementation team? We use a few people for the deployment of the solution. What was our ROI? We have received a strong return on investment. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? Cisco UCS B-Series is an expensive solution. What other advice do I have? We plan to upgrade the Cisco UCS B-Series in 2024. I recommend this solution to others. I rate Cisco UCS B-Series a ten out of ten. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2023-01-26T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from A great solution with high availability, reliability and a low cost of ownership What is our primary use case? We use it for our digital adjustment. It's a technology that allows you to unify all the major components you need. You have the networking component, and your servers are connected too. We have an established enterprise system for data, and we do not use the historical component of the use case. We only use the networking and the server component. It is a very robust and reliable solution. What is most valuable? It has reliability, high availability, and a low total cost of ownership. Your servers stand a better chance of having data available because the total cost of ownership is very low. Once you buy it, you can almost afford to go to the last, because you don't need to buy another one. What needs improvement? The upgrades could be improved because the software needs various upgrades to be safeguarded against liability. Cisco should be very close to the customer to tell them if they need a new upgrade. In addition, they should include other features to make it useful for public cloud computing. For how long have I used the solution? We have been using this solution since 2014, deployed on-premises. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It is stable and one of the most reliable systems I've ever encountered. You won't regret going for Cisco UCS B-Series because it is very good. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? It's already made to scale, so you don't need to buy add-ons. In addition, you can use it to restore almost all your needs, not just for Cisco UCS B-Series. We have over 50,000 jobs running on our servers, which is valuable to our whole organization. How are customer service and support? There is wide support. Anytime we have some FDN issues that we cannot fix, we get help from Cisco support. The technical support is very reliable, but you must buy it when buying the service. How was the initial setup? The deployment was easy, but you must be skilled to complete it. It requires two engineers to deploy and takes a minimum of five days. Regarding maintenance, you get everything from Cisco and have to follow the guides. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The price is competitive. It's not too expensive, it's good, and it's worth the price. What other advice do I have? I rate this solution a ten out of ten. I recommend the solution to others because they will gain from using it, and it is very reliable. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2023-01-21T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from An enterprise-class, reliable, stable, and fast solution that has great uptime What is our primary use case? This is an on-premises enterprise solution that is primarily used for Microsoft, Linux, and Oracle workloads which require intensive computing for hosting/running clustered and standalone applications. What is most valuable? The solution is very reliable in comparison to the other brands. Additionally, the uptime is very good, and they ensure 99.9% of uptime. What needs improvement? The configuration could be simplified as the initial setup process is complex. For how long have I used the solution? We have been using this solution for eight years for multi-organizations. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The scalability is very portable and swappable. So we can add and expand resources easily. Dozens of people are using the solution in our organization, and six are responsible for managing the infrastructure as administrators. How are customer service and support? We have had experience with the customer service and support team multiple times when there is a hardware failure, and we requested an RMA for the replacement. How was the initial setup? The initial setup is difficult as it is a Unified Computing System, and expertise is required to configure it. Implementation normally takes more than two hours to initialize a new blade, or DC server and initialize a new chassis. However, this solution requires days because the cable installation, uplink planning, deployment, and everything is included. So we need to create a complete project plan for the technical side to deploy this equipment. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? 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. What other advice do I have? I rate the solution a nine out of ten because it is a tricky piece of equipment with state-of-the-art technology, reliable parts, good stability, and robust features. When you need to compute, it will provide you with speed. However, the solution can be improved by simplifying the configuration. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from Provides easy integration and valuable monitoring features What is most valuable? The platform has valuable features for management and good monitoring tools. It provides efficient insights. What needs improvement? There is a delay in the product's reporting and the rebooting system compared to servers from other vendors like Dell and HP. For how long have I used the solution? We have been using the Cisco UCS B-Series for two years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? It is a stable platform. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? Organizations can purchase extra devices or appliances and integrate them easily with Cisco UCS B-Series. It has good scalability. We have more than 3000 end users for it, and we plan to gradually increase the number of users. How are customer service and support? Sometimes, the technical support team delays the responses, and the connection works slowly. They could respond faster. Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? I have worked with HPE, Palo Alto, and Juniper before. How was the initial setup? We do not encounter any complexity while deploying the software as we have worked with it twice or thrice. I have 29 technical engineers in my team working on the implementation. What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? The product is expensive. We encounter a licensing issue as well. It could be subscription-based. What other advice do I have? Cisco UCS B-Series enables easy integration with existing infrastructure. The deployment process is well organized, including the basic foundation and design. It has very good management capabilities. Integrating iOS and firmware management and comprehensive inventory tracking allows us to check and log the information through a single dashboard. There is no need to purchase any external software for insights. It is a good solution. I rate it an eight out of ten. Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2024-02-04T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of 5 by from A scalable and user-friendly product that is easy to use and provides fast technical support What is our primary use case? We use the solution for our network system. What is most valuable? The product is easy to use. It's user-friendly. What needs improvement? The product could be made more secure. For how long have I used the solution? I have been using the solution for approximately three or four years. What do I think about the stability of the solution? The tool is stable. I rate the stability a nine or ten out of ten. What do I think about the scalability of the solution? The tool is scalable. We have 30,000 users. How are customer service and support? The technical support is fast. How was the initial setup? The initial setup was easy. Our IT department deployed the solution in our organization. What other advice do I have? We use Cisco because of its VPN. I will recommend the product to others. It is easy to use and easy to connect. Overall, I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten. Which deployment model are you using for this solution? On-premises Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2024-01-10T00:00:00-05:00

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