The Total Economic Impact™ Of Cisco Unified Computing System

Improved Reliability And Availability

Evidence and data. Interview evidence indicates that Cisco UCS and Intersight delivered material improvements in business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) by reducing recovery times, minimizing outage impact, and enabling consistent, automated recovery processes. According to the VP of technology, cloud compute engineering at a financial services firm, “Stability is our top priority, and Cisco UCS gives us a platform that’s reliable and scalable across the environment.”

• Across organizations, recovery and restoration times improved significantly due to stateless architecture and automation. The manager of VMware and X86 compute at a financial services firm reported server recovery taking 5 to 10 minutes versus hours or days previously, with operational tasks reduced from days to minutes. Their orchestration capabilities enabled controlled system recovery following a full DR site outage, with the manager stating, “It allowed us to orchestrate all of that power up sequence.” The two senior infrastructure domain architects at a healthcare company estimated that Cisco Intersight cut their MTTR by approximately 50%, thanks to features like automatic log uploads and proactive return material authorization. One recalled, “We wake up in the morning and someone’s knocking on the door to get into the data center with a part. We didn’t even know there was a problem yet.”

• Interviewees also said UCS reduced business disruption, even during planned infrastructure events. The lead engineer on the infrastructure team at a healthcare company reported: “In two days, we were able to do a whole [server refresh]. To the business, it was as though [we] were just doing a patch cycle. Users didn’t even notice. Without Cisco UCS, we’d have been doing it for months.”

• Interviewees found that being able to use policies to create templates and profiles enabled configuration consistency and drove improved resilience. Prior environments experienced configuration drift that led to outages when workloads moved across improperly configured systems. For instance, the lead engineer on the infrastructure team at a healthcare company described the following situation: “A virtual machine (VM) is running somewhere, and it happens to just migrate, which is something VMs do in virtual environments. And it would happen to move somewhere where the tech forgot to tag the network there. It would just not have networking — and boom, there would be an outage. We’d get all these random little outages like this.” They went on to explain that, using Cisco UCS’s centralized templates, “You make a template and you just make copies, so you know for sure that your stuff is provisioned and patched the way you expect.”

• The improved visibility and centralized control Intersight provided were also critical to enhancing resiliency for interviewees. The head of infrastructure and windows at a European IT consulting firm emphasized the value of managing all of their Cisco UCS domains from a single interface. They said: “We have everything in one view. We come to the dashboard first, and we can see immediately if everything is working fine or not.” This centralization also reduced the risk of oversight, such as missed updates or expired licenses, that could result in downtime. The same head of infrastructure added, “Now we see much earlier … if there is a certificate missing or a contract is running out.”

Overall, interviewees reported that Cisco UCS and Intersight improved business continuity and DR by enabling rapid recovery, reducing disruption, eliminating configuration-driven outages, and supporting automated, repeatable recovery processes at scale.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Before deploying Cisco UCS, the organization experiences 58 hours of unplanned downtime annually (approximately 3.5 minutes per server). (Note: this number reflects interviewee estimates from organizations replacing recent generation Cisco servers. For organizations replacing older or competitive hardware, the legacy downtime could be 20 minutes per server [300 hours total annually] or more.)²

• These outages cost the organization an average of $250,000 per hour.³

• After deploying Cisco UCS with Intersight, the organization cuts outage frequency and duration to 20 total hours annually.

• The organization recognizes this benefit at the rate it rolls in the Cisco UCS servers (50% in Year 1, 85% in Year 2, and 100% in Year 3).

• Note: Forrester used a conservative estimate for legacy downtime.

Risks. The risks that might impact the financial value of this benefit are related to:

• The frequency and type of unplanned outages an organization experiences before deploying Cisco UCS.

• The time it takes to identify and repair a breakdown and the cost to remediate damage from an unplanned outage.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $14.5 million.

Reduced Hardware-Related TCO

Evidence and data. Interviewees described meaningful reductions in hardware-related costs after adopting Cisco UCS, driven by needing fewer physical components (e.g., servers, cables, adapters), more efficient use of data center space, and the ability to extend hardware lifecycles. These savings reduced capex and ongoing opex, while also lowering the effort and risk associated with hardware refreshes and physical changes in the data center.

The largest impact resulted from replacing legacy (primarily rack) servers with denser and longer-lasting UCS blade servers. The move allowed interviewees’ organizations to replace at least three legacy servers with two UCS servers. Even though the Cisco UCS servers were slightly more expensive per server, the three-for-two exchange saved these organizations money up front.

Furthermore, the lead engineer on the infrastructure team at a healthcare company explained: “Blade servers are just more densely packed into the physical casing versus a traditional rack mount server. Blade servers usually also don’t have fans.” As a result, interviewees told Forrester they were able to shrink their infrastructure footprint significantly. The same lead engineer stated: “We used to have two giant data centers filled with equipment. Now we’re down to one [smaller] site.” By shrinking their footprint, interviewees explained that their colocation fees (i.e., the cost of owning and maintaining their own data centers) also shrank.

Interviewees highlighted substantial reductions in cabling, small form-factor pluggables, and network ports due to Cisco UCS modular architecture and fabric interconnects. Cisco UCS blade chassis are cabled at the chassis level rather than per server, which interviewees said dramatically reduced the number of cables and ports they needed to purchase, install, and maintain. As the lead engineer at the healthcare company explained: “With a blade server, you only cable the chassis part. A [Cisco UCS] chassis will have eight cables versus eight servers, each needing eight cables.”

While not quantified in this study, some interviewees also noted that deploying Cisco UCS servers allowed them to use a simplified rack design, which saved them the expense and lead times involved in specifying the custom racks they used in their legacy environments.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Before deploying Cisco UCS, the organization uses 1,500 competitive servers in its legacy environment. It refreshes these servers on a rolling basis (300 per year) over a five-year lifecycle.

• Each server costs approximately $16,000.⁴

• The reduction from 1,500 servers to 1,000 servers allows the organization to eliminate 17 racks annually, which reduces its footprint and thus its colocation costs by $204,000 per year (at a rate of $12,000 per rack).

• Because Cisco UCS’s modular architecture reduces the number of cables required per server, the organization avoids the cost of refreshing them every five years. It replaces all its legacy copper cabling with fewer fiber optic cables, which are initially more expensive but are also more reliable.

• Finally, the reduced cabling is associated with fewer ports per server. The 620 UCS blade servers and 380 UCS rack servers now require only 1,072 ports (as opposed to the 7,500 ports on the legacy servers). At an average cost of $760 per port, this saves the organization more than $1 million per year once UCS deployment is complete in Year 3.

• The composite organization recognizes all these hardware cost savings as the new servers roll in at the rate of 50% in Year 1, 35% in Year 2, and the final 15% in Year 3.

Risks. The risks that might impact the financial value of this benefit are related to:

• The number of servers an organization uses before and after deploying Cisco UCS.

• The average cost of servers, cables, and ports before Cisco UCS.

• The refresh rate/lifecycle an organization experiences before installing Cisco UCS.

• The colocation fees or physical data center maintenance costs an organization incurs in its legacy environment.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $5.6 million.

Redeployed IT Labor

Evidence and data. Interviewees reported that Cisco UCS and Intersight materially increased IT team productivity by automating routine tasks, standardizing configurations, and enabling centralized management across compute, network, network operations center (NOC), and support teams. These capabilities not only reduced manual effort and allowed teams to scale operations without proportional increases in staffing but they also enabled redeployment of scarce IT resources to accelerate the accomplishment of strategic priorities for the business.

• Across compute teams, Cisco UCS accelerated provisioning and lifecycle management. Before Cisco UCS, server deployment was highly manual and time-intensive, requiring one to two days per server and creating multiyear workloads at scale. In contrast, Cisco UCS reduced provisioning to less than one day per server, with interviewees noting that full environment refreshes were completed in days. The manager of VMware and X86 compute at a financial services firm reported: “We were able to transition all of those domains without rebuilding anything and that saved us — I couldn’t even begin to tell you — tons and tons of engineering hours because … we were able to upgrade in situ. That’s more engineering time for me and my team to look more toward the future.” At enterprise scale, provisioning times decreased from six to eight weeks per blade to approximately 2.5 hours, with the ability to deploy dozens of systems in parallel. The same manager told Forrester: “If I need to replace a server, I just associate the server profile and I’m done. I don’t have to rebuild anything.”

• Automation and orchestration also enabled leaner staffing models. The manager of VMware and X86 engineering at a financial services firm with 3,000 servers said they use a team of nine to manage all the physical hosts. Without Cisco UCS automation, they estimated needing 12 to 15 staff to do so. This productivity gain allowed their engineers to shift focus away from repetitive execution toward higher-value work. The lead engineer on the infrastructure team at a healthcare organization echoed: “Once it’s running, it just runs. We don’t spend much time in the data center anymore.”

• Network teams similarly benefited from Cisco UCS’s unified fabric and simplified architecture. By consolidating connectivity at the chassis level, Cisco UCS dramatically reduced cabling and configuration effort. As the lead engineer on the infrastructure team at a healthcare company described, “We have about 100 hypervisors and about 4,000 virtual machines, and the network team has to configure a grand total of eight network ports.” The SME for server hardware in financial services relayed a similar experience, “If there are fewer network cables to plug in, there are fewer network ports for the network team to have to configure, so it’s saving them time.” This consolidation reduced manual configuration steps, lowered error rates, and accelerated deployment of network resources.

• For operations teams, standardized templates and centralized management reduced incident volume and troubleshooting time. In pre- Cisco UCS environments, inconsistent configurations frequently caused outages when workloads moved between servers. With Cisco UCS policies and templates, teams reported predictable, uniform configurations. Routine operations were also streamlined, with activities such as patching reduced to approximately 3 hours per quarter and executed centrally.

• Support teams experienced additional productivity gains through automation, proactive monitoring, and simplified lifecycle management. Cisco UCS’s stateless compute infrastructure, delivered via templated server profiles, created portability across physical hardware. According to the lead engineer on the infrastructure team at a healthcare company: “In the olden days, if you bought a server and you needed more network cards in it later, you would have to physically buy those parts and stick them in your server. With Cisco UCS, you can just change a setting and you have those things. Even if they weren’t very expensive, there was just the sheer bureaucracy and paperwork involved in purchasing those supplies.”

• Finally, centralized management enhanced cross-team collaboration and reduced duplication of effort. Interviewees said that previously, their teams maintained multiple independent environments and replicated configurations manually; with Cisco Intersight, templates and policies were applied across domains from a single control plane, improving consistency and reducing administrative overhead. This further contributed to their organizations’ ability to scale operations and support growth without increasing operational complexity or staffing proportionally. The VP of technology, cloud compute engineering at a financial services firm reported, “We have around a thousand physical servers … and there are only two full‑time employees managing the full lifecycle.”

Overall, the evidence shows that Cisco UCS and Intersight improved IT team productivity by compressing provisioning timelines (from weeks or months to hours or days), reducing operational effort through automation and standardization, simplifying network and infrastructure management, and enabling teams to manage significantly larger environments with the same or fewer resources.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Before deploying Cisco UCS, the organization employs six compute team members. With Cisco UCS in place, IT management redeploys 4.5 compute team members by Year 3.

  • These team members are redeployed to advance other compute function projects (such as building and improving automation frameworks, taking on more advanced infrastructure optimization, and exploring new architectural capabilities and innovations), thus accelerating the time to value for those critical projects.
  • The compute labor productivity improvements take place over the course of the three years in keeping with the rate of Cisco UCS deployment.
  • The average fully burdened annual salary for a compute team member is $135,542.⁵

• Similarly, the reduced complexity of the networking requirements for Cisco UCS allow the networking team of 12 employees to redeploy 2.5 FTEs by Year 3.

  • This time is applied toward completing higher-value networking projects on accelerated timelines.
  • The networking labor productivity improvements take place over the course of the three years in keeping with the rate of Cisco UCS deployment.
  • The average fully burdened annual salary for a networking team member is $135,542.⁶

• The team of 10 support and overhead employees who work on hardware-related tickets save 10% of their time supporting Cisco UCS rather than the legacy estate by Year 3. These savings are recognized at the rate of 5%/8.5%/10% in keeping with the roll-in rate of the Cisco UCS hardware.

  • Forrester assumes a productivity recapture rate of 50% for the support and overhead team.
  • The average fully burdened annual salary for a support and overhead team member is $121,500.⁷

Risks. The risks that might impact the financial value of this benefit are related to:

• The number of employees on an organization’s compute, networking, and support teams.

• The average fully burdened annual salaries for the involved employees.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.6 million.

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

• IT team satisfaction and retention. Interviewees described a clear but largely unquantified benefit of improved IT team satisfaction, engagement, and retention from eliminating repetitive, manual work and gaining the ability to focus on higher-value activities. Before Cisco UCS, engineers often spent significant time performing monotonous, manual tasks, such as provisioning hundreds of servers individually. The lead engineer on the infrastructure team at a healthcare company characterized this type of work: “The team was doing the same repetitive task over and over. I would go crazy doing that.” With Cisco UCS’s automation and template-based provisioning, these tasks were largely removed. The manager of VMware and X86 compute at a financial services firm explained that this allowed teams to avoid “exhausting themselves, taking the same command a thousand times,” and to instead “think about some new thing that is going to help us accelerate and track even greater growth.”
  Interviewees emphasized that this shift not only reduced burnout but also made roles more intellectually engaging, enabling staff to develop new skills and contribute strategically rather than operationally. Additionally, the lead engineer on the infrastructure team at a healthcare company pointed out that the specialized nature of Cisco UCS expertise was professionally valuable, saying, “It’s kind of a rare skill set,” further reinforcing retention by increasing career opportunities and job satisfaction. Collectively, these factors point to a qualitative but meaningful improvement in workforce morale and stability, as teams transitioned from labor-intensive maintenance toward more rewarding, forward-looking engineering work.

• Cleaner physical architecture. Interviewees also described a meaningful qualitative benefit of Cisco UCS as creating a cleaner and more orderly physical architecture within the data center, driven primarily by reduced cabling, simplified layouts, and standardized rack designs. By leveraging blade chassis and fabric interconnects, their organizations dramatically decreased the volume and complexity of connections. The lead engineer on the architecture team at a healthcare company explained that instead of managing 10 cables for every server, Cisco UCS allows consolidation so that “a chassis will have far fewer cables.”
  The manager of VMware and X86 compute at a financial services company highlighted that UCS enabled “very little extra cabling inside of our racks” and eliminated the need for copper in favor of fiber connections. They noted, “I got away from any copper, which was a big concern for us.” Interviewees emphasized that beyond aesthetics, this cleaner architecture improved manageability, made it easier to understand and troubleshoot environments, and reduced the operational friction associated with dense, tangled cabling and ad hoc hardware additions.

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Cisco UCS and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Strategic agility and scalability. Interviewees consistently described Cisco UCS as enabling significant strategic flexibility and scalability, allowing their organizations to adapt infrastructure rapidly in response to growth, changing business requirements, and future technology demands. This flexibility was achieved through a combination of profile-based provisioning, centralized orchestration, and modular architecture, which together decoupled workloads from specific hardware and reduced the operational constraints typically associated with scaling environments.
  A core enabler of this agility was Cisco UCS’s ability to treat compute resources as interchangeable, standardized components. Interviewees emphasized that servers no longer needed to be configured individually but could instead be rapidly provisioned or reconfigured using templates and server profiles, supporting planned growth and time-sensitive initiatives.
  Organizations also gained agility from being able to easily adapt infrastructure to evolving workload requirements. Cisco UCS enabled dynamic reconfiguration of network, compute, and storage characteristics through software-defined policies, avoiding the need for hardware changes. One interviewee said that capabilities such as adjusting network interface allocations could be achieved through configuration rather than physical upgrades, eliminating delays associated with procurement and installation. This allowed their organization to respond more quickly to changing application needs, new technologies, and emerging workloads such as AI.
  Additionally, interviewees highlighted Cisco UCS’s role in enabling long-term scalability through modular design and forward planning. Their organizations prebuilt capacity into their environments — such as deploying additional chassis and cabling in advance — and then populated them incrementally as demand increased. As a result, scaling became a predictable, low-friction exercise rather than a disruptive project.

Interviewees emphasized the future-facing benefits of this flexibility. By reducing dependency on manual processes and rigid hardware configurations, Cisco UCS positions their organizations to support continued growth, increasing regulatory demands, and evolving architectural models (e.g., hybrid cloud and high-performance workloads). Teams that previously would have needed to expand staffing were able to scale infrastructure without proportional increases in headcount, enabling them to pursue new initiatives and innovations rather than being constrained by operational overhead.

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).