My view of the Cisco subculture
November 03, 2021

My view of the Cisco subculture

Chethan Chandra | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco UCS Series

We used Cisco UCS B, C series blades in our Datacenters to host Database workloads both on bare metal and Xen.
  • Seamless to plug and play, be it for new blades or maintenance of existing blades.
  • Reliable, provides low or no latency High Availability.
  • Easy to scale out chassis & blades.
  • We couldn't rely on baremetal requirements with more than 1TB memory.
  • Hardware support handling was different by regions, some good some not so good.
  • Hosting small to medium scale SaaS solutions for our customers was easy, with HA we were able to deliver the highest availability on average.
  • With increasing customers, we had to add more chassis a couple of times in a year, making the managing, maintenance difficult.
  • For larger scale, we had to look for alternatives. Then the migration challenge.
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 almost all vendors. Cisco UCS [Series] can be easily integrated into an existing setup, performance for small workloads is highly efficient. Scalability is good too but depends on how your business evolves over time.

Do you think Cisco UCS Series delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco UCS Series's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco UCS Series live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Cisco UCS Series go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco UCS Series again?

Yes

We use [Cisco] UCS [Series] for bare-metal database workloads & Xen hypervisors. It handles the smaller workloads, up to 1TB of memory, the failover is fast and reliable. The smaller app servers are never to be worried about. In general, works well for hosting 1-2 large-scale solutions. For scenarios where the solutions need a larger scale (more databases, larger database, multiple solutions, multiple tiers), the "blade" concept will not work. This is where you should consider the 4U or 8U servers, to consolidate workloads spread across multiple chassis and smaller blades. This may be expensive but is much easily maintainable.