Cisco UCS Servers are TOO DAMN EXPENSIVE!
We are a FlexPod shop and last year we were looking for rack servers with high density storage for our Exchange upgrade project--taking Exchange back to physical servers per Microsoft Best Practices. We got server quotes from Cisco, Dell, and HP. Our initial thoughts were that we'd go with Cisco rack servers to keep our management within the Cisco UCS Manager.
Dell's quote was extremely aggressive--looking to take business away from Cisco was my guess--and HP didn't seem to be very interested in our business at that time. The Cisco quote was about 50% higher than the Dell quote. We informed Cisco that we'd like to stay with them, but their server quote was too damn high!
Cisco made ZERO effort to work with us to lower the price or otherwise incentivize our purchase from them.
We bought the Dell servers, which have worked wonderfully.
The cancellation of a major project left us with excess Cisco UCS blade compute resources, so I don't see us making any additional Cisco UCS blade purchases anytime soon. The news in this article only compounds that idea.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
