The Cisco UCS X-Series is a modular system designed for adaptability to simplify IT processes and speed innovation. The system provides users with the right-size infrastructure for the workload and enables operations with the efficiency and predictable TCO needed.
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HPE ProLiant DL
Score 8.4 out of 10
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HPE ProLiant DL is a rack server, from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.
I have experienced great services from this platform in both cloud and on-premise. It has streamlined technology in all our cloud servers providing operational centre for any kind of data. It has enhanced effective networking program that controls workflows in the entire organization. The modular system gives predictive insights that helps us to prepare for future and avoid any risks that can lead to drawback.
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.
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.
Cisco UCS X is designed to have a simplified management especially using Cisco Intersight. Having a single pane of glass GUI platform to manage every servers on your chassis across multiple data center globally. The modularity allows users to easily incorporate future technologies (like new compute nodes or I/O modules) to adapt to changing workload needs, preserving the initial investment and reducing total cost of ownership. The system is highly flexible, supporting a wide range of workloads including traditional enterprise applications.
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.
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.
There are good use cases for both technologies, and each will have its place, UCS X-Series is good when looking at additional or external Storage solutions, and scalable computing performance in a compact form factor. Cisco HX is good for incorporating Compute and Storage in single ease of use form factor.
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.
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.
