The automation capabilities are the most valuable. I don't have to use CD-ROMs or anything like that to provision the servers. Plug in a server and give it a profile. The whole thing is automated.
It saves us a lot of time. Time is money. We mess around with servers all day. So, it's a huge time saver. It also helps us track our inventory better in terms of where things are. With one of these you can actually plan out your whole data center. Build out where the server physically is, and historically we've had trouble with that sometimes. People would ask, "Oh, where is server XYZ?" We had to look it up on a spreadsheet or some data base. Sometimes that's not always accurate. We were sort of roaming around the data center trying to find the server. So, this is just pretty cool.
I would like to see support for things that aren't in the current generation. We have a lot of 7th and 8th generation hardware.
In the 9th generation, we are looking at virtual connect. Virtual connect profiles, things like that. So, we have a bunch of old hardware that's not in virtual connect, there's no virtual connect profiles, and you can't really do anything with that stuff. You can see it but that's about it. It would be nice if they supported some of the older generation hardware.
Stability is pretty solid. I couldn't say I've really had any problems with it, aside from the upgrade to 3.0. There was a pretty nasty bug with the first release that they fixed within a week, fortunately. But that caught us and caused some problems. But, aside from that, it's been pretty stable.
We just installed one last year (2016), so we couldn't say we have a million servers in there. But I haven't had any performance issues with the amount of servers we have in it. And it seems to scale okay.
Technical support is pretty good. We haven't had many problems with it. The one time I did call support was for a known issue. There was a bug fix and they just pointed me to it.
I want to use the management platform for the entire infrastructure. I don't think you could really do anything without one unless you're into manual labor and you have a team of cheap people to do the work. But that doesn't really scale well. Automation is really where it's at.
OneView is an absolute requirement. Synergy has the appliance built into the box now. It's a critical component, so there's no getting around it. You need OneView.
We used HPE Systems Insight Manager previously, but nothing that could provision the way OneView works. There was Virtual Connect before OneView if you wanted to manage each individually as its own domain and get profiles that way. But, again, that doesn't scale. You can't have hundreds of closures and manage each one individually. You need something that can do it all in one place.
The number one question when looking for a vendor is, “does it meet the requirements?" If you go beyond meeting your requirements, then it's about service. It's about price. Issues like that.
I was involved in the setup. It was pretty straightforward. It's just an appliance. Just three clicks and you're done.
I didn't actually look for alternatives. I've been pretty happy with HPE and their solutions for a long time. But our prior leadership was looking at Cisco UCS, Dell, and Nutanix.
We have been an HPE shop for a very long time and we've been very satisfied with their solutions. So we didn't really have a problem we needed solving with HPE. Prior leadership wanted to look at other vendors, just for the sake of competition. You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. But, if you have the best upgrade solution, why would you look at an alternative?
If you're talking about a similar solution like a UCS, like Cisco, I would highly advise against Cisco UCS. Go HPE. Go OneView, for sure. The interface is a lot cleaner. It’s much better. I have colleagues that support both HPE and UCS and they would love to get rid of all their UCS and just go HPE. HPE is pretty much best upgrade.
