Item: Cisco UCS Series
Rating: 8
Author: Andrew Ong

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco UCS Series

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It's a compute platform, so we need to run applications in our data centers and essentially what my team does is we built the infrastructure underneath that. So Cisco UCS, the compute platform. We built that and we give a platform for all the application teams to build the apps on.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It's very customizable. It's customizable as in you have a chassis, but you could pick and choose the size of your blades puff with full width depending on what your workloads are. So in a way, you're not locked in. It's not like you buy a chassis and you're stuck into one thing could go and put, you need something that's storage intensive or maybe you've got more graphics intensive workload. You could choose and mix and match in the same.

Cons

Look, what it was 10 years ago, this is what it is today is drastically different. So I think it addressed most of the problems that we've seen. The only thing that's a pain point is trying to upgrade the product, trying to upgrade the firmware. It's still a little bit clunky, it kind of works, but the user experience, the way way it's laid out, it can be a little bit rough sometimes, but it's improving.

Return on Investment

The apps that sit on this that we provide would generate revenue for the company. So there is a return on investment there. But on the flip side, to be perfectly honest, it's still pretty expensive. If you compare site by site, Cisco UCS to other competitors like Lenovo or HP or such, you find that there's about a 20 to 30% markup in price, but the quality of the product overall kind of makes up for that. So there's a whole ecosystem involved. It's not just one thing in there about Cisco ECS it's because we've invested in Cisco Networking kit as well, so it all fits in really easily.

Productivity

You could manage many servers and many chassis in a single pane of glass so that you log in at a glance, you could see where your trouble spots are for the day. So proactively it will tell you if something is off and it'll raise an incident to the technical assistance team.

Configuration

Yes, we are satisfied because we've got a lot of Cisco networking along with our Cisco service. So the whole ecosystem fits together pretty easily.

Key Insights

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco UCS Series go as expected?

Would you buy Cisco UCS Series again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

You could use it in a small office scenario, remote office, small office. I've implemented that. Or you could use it in a big data center type footprint. So I wouldn't say that's any scenario where it's not usable, it's not suitable. It all depends on how you designed it and what bits you choose or you build it. So it's modular like Lego blocks essentially. If you need a small house, small Lego blocks, if you need a big house, it's like a block.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

Cisco UCS Series Review