Cisco UCS Series vs. HPE ProLiant DL

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco UCS Series
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
The Cisco UCS Series is a modular, high-density, high-availability, dual-node storage- optimized server suited for service providers, enterprises, and industry-specific environments. It provides dense, cost-effective storage to address your ever-growing data needs. Designed for a new class of data-intensive workloads, it is simple to deploy and excellent for applications for big data, data protection, software-defined storage environments, scale-out unstructured data repositories, media…N/A
HPE ProLiant DL
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
HPE ProLiant DL is a rack server, from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.N/A
Pricing
Cisco UCS SeriesHPE ProLiant DL
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco UCS SeriesHPE ProLiant DL
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco UCS SeriesHPE ProLiant DL
Considered Both Products
Cisco UCS Series
Chose Cisco UCS Series
I think that the Cisco UCS Series of servers probably compare fairly evenly with the HPE ProLiant DL series, as both will have similar compute resources in the same size package. The advantage of the Cisco UCS Series for us is that we wanted to use them for Cisco virtual …
Chose Cisco UCS Series
We started hosting for our SaaS offering using [Cisco] UCS [Series] and at some point, we wanted to scale up and out. This is where we looked for alternatives. This also gave rise to our multi-vendor strategy. Today we have more than 2,000 servers in our datacenters, a mix of …
Chose Cisco UCS Series
As we went to hyper-converged we decided to go for Cisco UCS Series and now we are only going with Cisco UCS Series to have all servers from one vendor. This way we do not have to have experience with many different techniques or partners.
HPE ProLiant DL
Chose HPE ProLiant DL
Cisco UCS Series is an enterprise-grade rack server offering from Cisco. It is a very reliable product and backed by Cisco's global support as well as a warranty. However, it is an expensive solution and not in the budget of many small to medium organizations. In these …
Chose HPE ProLiant DL
We had a POC on a Cisco UCS Blade system. We found that for our purposes, it required too much power. The particular system we had as POC required 4 x 30Amp circuits. We were going to use it to set up a VMWare ESXi cluster. In comparison, if we had used four HPE Proliant DL380 …
Chose HPE ProLiant DL
Cisco does not have a range of UCS equipment for small businesses at affordable costs, this is what makes it important and strong in these types of sectors or growing fields or small businesses. Additionally, the cheaper Cisco equipment does not compare in price with HPE …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Cisco UCS SeriesHPE ProLiant DL
Small Businesses
Dell PowerEdge R
Dell PowerEdge R
Score 8.5 out of 10
Dell PowerEdge R
Dell PowerEdge R
Score 8.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
HPE ProLiant DL
HPE ProLiant DL
Score 7.5 out of 10
IBM Power servers
IBM Power servers
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Z
IBM Z
Score 9.3 out of 10
IBM Z
IBM Z
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cisco UCS SeriesHPE ProLiant DL
Likelihood to Recommend
7.8
(46 ratings)
10.0
(14 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
7.8
(7 ratings)
9.3
(10 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(10 ratings)
9.3
(10 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco UCS SeriesHPE ProLiant DL
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
Cisco UCS blades are very well suited if you want to have dense and easily managed environment that is flexible (server profiles). its perfect if you have a need for business critical applications that requires whole blade to run. in case of any hardware failure you can simply swap its profile with standby node and power your application server back up very quickly, not something you could do with a standard rackmount
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Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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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Pros
Cisco
  • When used with VMWare, firmware changes cause minimal disruption.
  • Simple system software updates using all-inclusive firmware bundles covering the individual parts.
  • UCS, in contrast to other Cisco products, is stable and reliable, with relatively few hardware failures during its lengthy lifespan.
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Hewlett Packard Enterprise
  • 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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Cons
Cisco
  • Some issues with the operating system were present in Memory's memory for some time. A few DIMMS had to be replaced before the current firmware stabilized the problem
  • Although some of the templating is a little difficult to understand, this is typical of most Cisco products
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Hewlett Packard Enterprise
  • 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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Likelihood to Renew
Cisco
We are All satisfied with the value and Performance of the UCS servers
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Hewlett Packard Enterprise
No answers on this topic
Usability
Cisco
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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Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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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Support Rating
Cisco
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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Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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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Alternatives Considered
Cisco
Easier to integrate and to use after that. It gives a better feeling as a server and it is better in performance also it is more durable. Offers a variety of use cases and also it is a very scalable server. Offers a great redundancy (has already [been] integrated) and also [gives] you easy access from terminal or GUI.
Read full review
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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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Return on Investment
Cisco
  • Life cycle of new hardware. We were able to refresh 40 existing servers with new ones in under a day
  • When having to move chassis around, having to only move 4 cables instead of the 16 that would have been required for rack-mount servers
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Hewlett Packard Enterprise
  • 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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