TrustRadius Insights for Cisco UCS X-Series are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Centralized Information Management: Users have found the central management feature of the Cisco Intersight Managed system valuable for consolidating all data in one convenient location. This centralized approach streamlines operations and enhances overall efficiency by providing a unified view of critical information.
Simplified Deployment Process: Reviewers appreciate the straightforward deployment process, especially when overseeing multiple domains across diverse datacenters. The ease of deployment saves time and resources, allowing users to efficiently manage their infrastructure with minimal effort.
Scalability and Flexibility: Customers value the system's ability to scale storage and compute capacity, providing flexibility for future growth and resource needs. The expandability ensures that businesses can adapt to changing demands easily while maintaining optimal performance levels.
Cisco UCS X-Series is our primary platform for compute which has allowed us to better consolidate our server footprint while providing increased performance and the ability to have GPUs. The ability to have GPUs associated with the blades has allowed us to reduce the amount of C-series servers needed and the associated port count allowing for increased ROI during our refresh.
Pros
Management via Intersight
GPUs for blades
Increased bandwidth
Cons
Additional cooling options to reduce the noise level
Increased fiber channel speed above 32 Gbps
Likelihood to Recommend
The Cisco UCS X-Series is well suited for anyone who currently is using UCS. While the recommended management via Intersight takes time to get used to it is a vast improvement over UCSM in terms of complexity. The ability to pair GPUs with blades now also helps to reduce the requirement for rack servers and their associated switch ports helping to increase ROI.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (201-500 employees)
Currently, we are using UCS across the board for ESX hosts, VDI for virtual machines, windows machines, Linux machines, and OpenShift. We haven't had a ton of opportunities with it. Some hardware, mostly RAM dim replacements, a couple nicks, general hardware things, nothing too serious. The benefits of UCS is that if you have an issue with a blade, you just simple profile move usually 30-45 minutes of downtime. The customers that we support internally seem to like that a whole lot, so even if we have to do some sort of maintenance, the business is also a big fan of it. So when we're doing things like firmware or there is a hardware failure and downtime, it's pretty quick to move a profile and get back up and running. Granted, this is specific to the UCSX, but that is across both the older versions and current UCSX platforms.
Pros
The profiles, the ability to take a down server, move the profile and get it back up and running as quickly as possible. Generally to a business is the cherry on top. They like to hear things that are going to be back up and running as quickly as possible because if you're not running, you're not making money.
Cons
If you're setting it up from scratch, there's some daunting tasks, but there's a plethora of guides that are available if you can find them and you're willing to read. That would be the biggest. As someone who really likes pictures and likes things to just kind of work and that is a flaw that I will admit. Once you get over the hurdle, things just kind of seem to run from there on forward. Little tweaks here and there. Like I said, once you're up and running, it's pretty easy to maintain and it's good to go.
Likelihood to Recommend
Best use case if you asked me, would be doing ESX or virtualization in general, just because the ability to move them around. Like I said, if one goes down, you just kind of move a profile or just swapping blades from chassis to chassis. From a hardware standpoint, the biggest issue we saw because of constraints, we do claims processing, so it's pretty intense on hardware. Doing a Linux machine that requires a lot of horsepower, we saw some downsides there. That's a very, very specific situation that most companies won't run into. But from our background, that was kind of the only con that we really saw.
Nice options for chassis. However, we have several quality issues with brand new M-7 blades that have many part failures or even DOA after only a few days of use or less. But with the ones that are working, they do seem to work pretty well. The management of the chassis is much better than the M5 series.
Pros
Options
Management
Cons
Quality control
Likelihood to Recommend
Overall good but there are some quality control issues.
We use Cisco UCS X-Series as a refresh to enterprise servers. It solves the applications need on the latest technology available for security, compliance. The scope is to refresh the physical server to a modular server and virtualize all incoming application host. Also with the intersight, provide a single management for all ther servers and can be managed in the cloud.
Pros
Modular server
Unified management
Adaptibilty to customer requirement
cloud management access
Cons
Config on the hardware specification of each server. E.g. bios, cpu power etc.
FI edit of configuration can't be done
Minimum # of psu
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco UCS X-Series is the modern server today. It provides the adaptability and modularity of a server in the modern data center era. Replacing your traditional server, converting into a virtualized environment, integrating a storage servers to build a converged infrastructure is some of the well suited scenarios that Cisco UCS X-Series can be used. It could be less appropriate to small businesses or companies with small requirement of hardware resources since you need the whole chassis whether you need single server.
For our ESXi implementation. Virtual Servers for our hospital, research, education
Pros
central management
ease of deployment
consistency of configuration of multiple domains in multiple datacenters
Cons
performance monitoring is lacking
no export of configuration details to confirm settings
Likelihood to Recommend
we have multiple UCS domains in 2 datacenters, and we are migrating to UCS x-series in intersight managed mode as we purchase new equipment, and as we retire old equipment. having a central point of management with Intersight helps us, as having multiple isolated UCS managed domains we not as easy to manage consistently.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
Cisco UCS X-Series is a modular system that is designed to help organizations address the challenges of modern data center environments, which require greater flexibility, scalability, and agility. The product provides a unified platform for computing, networking, and storage that can be managed through a single interface, making it easier for IT teams to provision, deploy, and manage infrastructure resources.
Pros
Cisco Intersight Managed
Cisco 5108 Chasis
Cisco UCS m6 blade
Cons
Cost
Complexity
Integration with cloud services
Likelihood to Recommend
Based on my exp during deployment, it is suited for hardware refresh of the m5 blades server and chassis 5108 v2 , the scenarios where less appropriate are the migration because too complicated if we migrate to lots of configurations that should be checked and also test we did migration but before we end so smooth and wrong it takes a lot of time for testing the service profile
I use Cisco UCS X-Series to host all of my VMs for my environment. The power to Rack Unit ratio is so great. It allows for me to pack a ton of compute into a small amount of space. It draws a lot of power, but it doesn't take up my entire Datacenter. Adding on Intersight for management across all of my Chassis is just icing on the cake.
Pros
Centralized Management
Automation
Scalability
Cons
Full featured Intersight
1 slot, 4 socket blades.
OS deployment without a license
Likelihood to Recommend
If you need a large quantity of compute and memory, as well as centralized management of all systems, Cisco UCS X-Series is definitely the way to go. If you have a smaller environment and don't need to rapidly scale, Cisco UCS X-Series is likely overkill for your application. The centralized management and automation is a killer feature, I just wish they didn't lock everything behind a paywall.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)
Cisco UCS X-Series we used in our project to manage the better network connectivity in our different site across the world. Cisco provide the better centralized management to manage all site connectivity.
Pros
Cisco Provide the Centralized management to collect all information.
Easy User Interface to use and execute the daily routine operation.
Performance and stability are much better.
Cons
We did not face any major concern and issue with Cisco devices in our project.
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco UCS X-Series is well suited to manage and provide a better network connection in different sites across the world. We can integrate N-number of devices via Virtual LAN. It easily manages the workload, reliable and fast failover. The firmware upgrade process is very easy.
