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HPE Apollo Systems vs HPE Synergy comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

HPE Apollo Systems
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Rack Servers (9th), Density Optimized Servers (2nd)
HPE Synergy
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Blade Servers (4th), Composable Infrastructure (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are IT Hardware and Infrastructure solutions, they serve different purposes. HPE Apollo Systems is designed for Density Optimized Servers and holds a mindshare of 21.4%, up 20.9% compared to last year.
HPE Synergy, on the other hand, focuses on Blade Servers, holds 8.8% mindshare, down 19.8% since last year.
Density Optimized Servers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HPE Apollo Systems21.4%
Dell PowerEdge C- Series19.3%
HPE Moonshot17.6%
Other41.699999999999996%
Density Optimized Servers
Blade Servers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HPE Synergy8.8%
Dell PowerEdge MX- Series8.6%
HPE BladeSystem8.1%
Other74.5%
Blade Servers
 

Featured Reviews

Gökhan  DURMAZ - PeerSpot reviewer
Account Manager at TD SYNNEX
High-quality integration and strong support have optimized our rack server operations
HPE Apollo Systems is a good product because it has better support and best quality with integrity. When I speak about integrity, I speak about GPU integration or other integrations such as GPU integration, backup software integration, and hypervisor integration. Regarding the integration of high-speed interconnectors in HPE Apollo Systems, they impact computational tasks because the high-speed interconnect affects performance. I don't remember the specifics. Regarding the cooling technologies, they help to reduce operational costs. The positive impact I see from HPE Apollo Systems is that support is good and quality is good. In general, HPE Apollo Systems appears to be for rack servers with some optimization capabilities.
MS
Works at Saudi Telecom Company
Manage servers efficiently with an integrated view while reducing downtime
My use case is to serve the complete IT environment of the telecom, including all cloud applications. I use HPE Synergy servers for my private cloud and for network management systems. 70% of my workload is running on HPE servers The integrated view, such as managing complete servers and…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Taking into consideration the cost, HPE gave us the ability to actually do what we wanted to do."
"The cost benefit of this solution is most valuable. It is quite effective for the work for which we are using it. We are mainly running video servers on these, and we are quite happy with the resilience, density storage, and streaming capacity of the system."
"It enables us to implement software defined solutions very easily, because Apollo servers are certified for use with Linux systems"
"Absolutely being able to mount into Omni-Path architecture, HFIs on those nodes, because we were the very first site in the world"
"We had a PoC, as I said, and we were happy with it and decided to implement it, as it satisfies all our needs and is the perfect solution."
"We previously used the DL380s; compared to those, Apollo has roughly four times the amount of space per server, which means we can really do a lot."
"With HPE Apollo, we can propose configurations with many hard drives, making it suitable for large storage needs."
"For us, the most valuable features are the price and density."
"It helps us manage our IT landscape because it is easy, standard, and very consolidated."
"It is a simple software to integrate with others."
"Where it used to take one week to re-image or upgrade our hosts, it can now take one day."
"The most valuable features of HPE Synergy are the two composers."
"Technical support is excellent. They are very helpful."
"There is no problem with the scalability."
"In today's world, there isn't a better solution to create a private cloud for them."
"The Synergy environment provides us with one view. We're able to manage the entire stack, top to bottom, from that single view."
 

Cons

"OpenView is a new product which does not support older versions of the hardware."
"We are quite happy with it, but its price and storage density can be better."
"If there's anything that hasn't been that stable, then it is the Lustre file system."
"I would want to see the flexibility of being able to run various network protocols including InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, as well as iSCSI, with iSCSI going up to 100 gigabytes per second - that would be outstanding."
"Lustre seems to be just a little bit unstable overall."
"Connectivity to the outside of the server needs to be improved at the same time the network is improving."
"We have tried to used standardization using Ubuntu Linux and it's been hard. They had some difficulties getting the RAID configuration up and running because there are no drivers for it. It's not supported by HPE."
"We would like to see improved cooling because that is quite an issue. If you put that much compute power into a single rack, cooling really becomes an issue. And there is room for improvement there."
"The solution should support Cisco or other vendor interconnect models."
"It would be nice if the updates were not accompanied by downtime."
"The stability is not good right now. We have had a couple of outages where we have receive very good support from HPE. However, we have not been able to come up with cut and dried reasons for why the outages have occurred. They have not been able to be reproduced, so it has been difficult getting our trust back."
"We've had quite a few issues with stability on this system, with the Gen10 blades - with memory specifically. It's been problematic."
"I would be more comfortable if Ansible actually rolled back the data used for automating platforms. If it could be communicated to the upstream Ansible, I wouldn't need to go back and forth and validate the libraries as we upgrade the Ansible version."
"The post-sales activity needs improvement. There is some sort of convoluted spreadsheet that you have to fill in prior to the platform being delivered. It seems a little bit out-of-date and inefficient. Surely, there is some sort of web page configuration tool online that a customer could use. Then, it could be validated by somebody else, like a partner or HPE technical resource, then that would be a lot more efficient."
"The only issue that we had was our rack was too small. The product is heavy, so it took a lot to get it in there."
"A faster Composer module would be a good inclusion for the next release of this solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Compared to other products, HPE Apollo is not an expensive solution."
"There is an annual license required to use HPE Apollo."
"The price of the solution is more expensive than Dell which is their main competitor. However, there are times we have managed to receive a comparable price."
"Obviously I would like to see the cost go down. That speaks for itself."
"It is an expensive solution but it is worth the money. The standard licensing cost is for the GPU and the features that someone is using. There are additional charges but they depend on the solution."
"We have already paid once. It is just the price for the permit and its use. It seems you don't have to keep paying for it, but I am not sure."
"The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs because we have had to buy less services than we used to."
"For me, the scalability is how much money that I need to spend on switches for how many frames, which ultimately means servers. To get the best bandwidth before the most recent product announcement, I have buy new switches every three frames. The competition is shipping a product right now where I only need switches every ten frames."
"We pay for licensing on the fibre channel uplinks, on the Virtual Connect, which is an add-on."
"We do a biannual renewal. I know how much that renewal is, but I don't know how much it breaks down to be just Synergy, since we have our VMware, all of our physical equipment, etc. all rolled up into one renewal, which is a little over $300,000 every two years. However, only a subset of that is the Synergy product."
"The biggest cost is the VMware licensing."
"We do CAPEX."
"We outright purchased Synergy."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise56
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with HPE Apollo?
It is too early to say what improvements HPE Apollo Systems could implement because the report still needs to come out and the customer needs to properly evaluate the solution.
What is your primary use case for HPE Apollo?
My main use case for HPE Apollo Systems is replacing many of the servers and storage boxes at one of the customer's sites to achieve workload optimization and optimized solutions. Additionally, whe...
What advice do you have for others considering HPE Apollo?
My advice for someone considering HPE Apollo Systems is that if they are looking for consolidation and their workload involves high availability requirements, or if they want to utilize GPUs, then ...
How would you choose between HPE's Bladesystem and Synergy?
For me, choosing between HPE’s Bladesystem and Synergy came down to which solution was more powerful, reliable, and stable. It turns out Bladesystem was the winner. Bladesystem is excellent because...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE Synergy?
As far as the prices are concerned, rack mount solutions are less expensive than HPE Synergy prices; however, HPE Synergy prices are higher but justify themselves as the solution accommodates all t...
What needs improvement with HPE Synergy?
In my opinion, for future improvements in HPE Synergy, there should be better management of power consumption complexity as well as an increase in the number of servers that can fit in a single Syn...
 

Also Known As

HP Apollo Systems, HP ProLiant SL, HP Apollo
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Weta Digital
HudsonAlpha, Virgin Media, EMIS, United
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco and others in Density Optimized Servers. Updated: July 2026.
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