In reply to Another server guy.

I am Bill's colleague and must re-emphasize his comment, people buy Cisco UCS for the value it brings operationally. Most storage optimized servers are just sheet metal with a bunch of drives where vendors compete on lowest price. None offer this level of infrastructure management to make adds, moves and changes zero-touch using our embedded policy based automation framework with UCS Management.

Also keep in mind this is all done inband over data links "less cabling" via the top of rack switch. This TOR switch gives you a single point of management to any number of servers physically connected via a centralized GUI or programmatic API. When plugged in UCS servers are automatically recognized by the management system as additional resources whereas traditional servers are bricks requiring much more effort to stand them up and get them online and available for use.

This is the value of a unifying compute, storage, networking and management into a single stack. Check out this oldy but a goodie that covers this point much better than I can.