I recently read a claim that Cisco UCS cost two times as much as the next vendor which made me laugh. I work routinely with account teams on competitive deals and this isn’t my experience. And I doubt anybody would buy UCS if this were truly the case. As one of my coworkers put it, “customers aren’t stupid when they purchase Cisco servers.”
What if were true? Would customers still be better off with UCS from a TCO/ROI perspective instead of just looking at acquisition cost? After all, acquisition cost is around 20% of the lifetime cost of a server.
I’ve been blogging about the economic benefits of UCS since 2012. And in these five plus years, the savings customers realize has been remarkably consistent. Based on our published customer case studies, customers see:
- 83% reduction in provisioning times
- 62% reduction of ongoing administrative/management costs
- 78% reduction in cabling
- 52% reduction in power and cooling costs
The how and the why around these figures are in my Changing the Economics of the Data Center presentation which can be found here.
I’ve also done some TCO work on UCS vs. the public cloud (here and here). While there are very real reasons you may want to use the public cloud, cost really isn’t one of them.
I would also quickly point out all of these benefits apply to Cisco HyperFlex which is based on UCS.
How much could you save by switching to Cisco UCS? Our Public TCO Tool can give you guidance. I would highly encourage you to get a detailed analysis specific to your exact environment and needs by contacting your Cisco account team or partner.
Bill is 100% right – and most people realize it because they look at the big picture, all costs over the lifetime of a server. This is absolutely true for SAP workloads, where the benefits and advantages of UCS (the most preferred server for SAP HANA according to an independent IDC survey of SAP HANA users) clearly make a difference REDUCING costs and COMPLEXITY associated with deploying, managing and securing these mission critical company backbones.
Great article and factual details. Two Thumbs Up.
Thanks for the article and in addition to what Brian has quoted… same with Big Data Analytics on UCS – IDC The Business Value of Cisco UCS for Big Data and Analytics: 426% five-year ROI, 51% lower cost of operations, 9 months to breakeven, 40% more efficient to manage, 96% less unplanned downtime, 51% faster to run queries and finally 38% lower hardware costs!!! https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center-virtualization/big-data/ucs-exec-sum.pdf
awesome ……
where the benefits and advantages of UCS (the most preferred server for SAP HANA according to an independent IDC survey of SAP HANA users) clearly make a difference REDUCING costs and