Cisco UCS Series vs Lenovo Flex System Blade Servers

• Cisco UCS servers are really excellent hypervisor hosts. They were built for it and one can tell that they were. They also have nice add-on features that you can buy when you first get them, but you can also add a lot of features later on.
• Cisco USC servers, exactly like their HP analogues, HP ProLiant servers, are very robust, extremely reliable and have really excellent management tools. You don't have to pay or an iLo subscription on UCS servers like you do on HP ProLiants, however. A USC server comes with the "CIMC" or "Cisco Integrated Management Controller" which is obviously pretty much exactly the same thing as an iLo.
• You can get parts for Cisco UCS server super fast (depending on your SmartNet plan type) and the support (through TAC) is unbeatable.

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• Physical disks management
• Integration with VM
• Ethernet scalability without any lost compression.

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• Price - typically a little higher priced compared to similar hardware.
• This product could be improved if it allowed other memory choices besides Cisco memory. You cannot simply add more memory that is not from Cisco. You have to purchase their memory which is more expensive than other memory choices.
• Setup is a little complicated at first. Once set up and running there isn't much to configure later.

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• We purchased the BladeCenter with the expectation of using it for many years, and only replacing the servers when they got older. IBM/Lenovo technology has changed and we can no longer purchase servers that are compatible with our BladeCenter. We got a lot of good use from it, and are still using it. However, our future purchases will not be blade center servers because we will either have to buy another BladeCenter or regular rack mounted servers. I wish we could have gotten more use out of this BladeCenter because it makes IT live much simpler.
• Sometimes the BladeCenter's web interface for the management module has trouble switching between areas. I use IE and it could just be a browser issue. I just have to click and wait sometimes before the screen updates and changes so I can perform certain tasks.
• It would be nice to have a text option for alerts. You can configure email and "IBM Director" alerts, and tell it which types of alerts you want and if you just want information, warnings, or critical alerts. We don't use IBM Director so I'm not familiar with the features. That may have more options. With just purchasing the management modules I can only receive emails. If there is a critical alert at night, email is not going to get my attention; a text would.

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• Our facilities have thanked us, as the HVAC associated with Cisco Blade Chassis cut our power footprint almost in half. Of course, we still had some standard servers with the HP Blades when we moved to UCS.
• On the server team one person now does what we had 3 doing for upgrades.

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• BladeCenter servers are about half the cost of standard servers. To get true cost savings you must calculate the cost of the actual BladeCenter which may appear to be cost prohibitive, but it does have other benefits. We received ROI after purchasing 7 servers in a BladeCenter that could hold 14.
• Our budget allowed us to purchase twice as many servers as planned because the cost of each server went down after investing in a BladeCenter. It was easer to get approval for purchases and do what we needed as an IT department.

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