No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

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

"We usually use three blades for two-rack units, and with enough storage, it's really a small system with a powerful CPU, powerful hard drives, powerful disks."
"Taking into consideration the cost, HPE gave us the ability to actually do what we wanted to do."
"It's pretty flexible. You can choose how much storage you put on the server. You can have one to three nodes, depending on whether you want more CPU or storage."
"For us, the most valuable features are the price and density."
"It's very hard for a professor to amass the supercomputing resources, so I've been very fortunate to have that level of supercomputing at our disposal and that has really enabled us to do the world's leading superhuman AI research."
"When we moved to the Apollo and all flash drives, we gained a lot of performance on that."
"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."
"Stability has been extremely good."
"We were able to reduce our turnaround time on some of our projects, from upwards of three or four days down to a couple of hours."
"We like that the solution can be arranged for an all-in-one single pane of glass, something our customers find important."
"It allows for easy management."
"I love the satellite architecture for the Virtual Connect. I think this is great. I love the storage drawer, which you can present volumes to any compute node within the same frame."
"It gives us ease of use. It's nice because we don't have to mess with networking once it's set up. Once it's done, we just put another blade in and go from there. We don't have to go back in, run more cables, deal with more data center stuff. We stick a blade in, use the server profile template, build out a server profile from that, and it just goes."
"What I find most valuable about this product are the number of interface combinations made possible with a single computer node."
"The hyper-converged infrastructure where everything is stateless is valuable. Basically, you have your compute storage and networking management."
"There is no comparison between installing a server by hand versus having everything automated in place, which makes a big difference by averting human errors, making life easier, and making operations much easier."
 

Cons

"Big stability issues with the CPU on the first generation which made them virtually unusable."
"HPE Apollo's after-sales support and technical support should be improved."
"One drawback which I had: When I needed to expand storage on the Apollo, I had significant problems getting disks for it. It was a very long wait-time. So, if I were to give any advice in regards to improving this product, I would say make more of the 8TB disks available quicker."
"The licensing could be greatly improved, I think."
"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."
"OpenView is a new product which does not support older versions of the hardware."
"There is a shared battery for all cache controllers in the node. When you have to replace that element, you have to take down all three nodes and not just one."
"What's coming out in Gen 10 is very strong in terms of additional security."
"I would like the ability to take the storage tray that is in a chassis and share it out to multiple chassis, not just the servers within the same chassis. This would be more efficient with resources."
"They must improve the OneView tools."
"They were not so deep into integration with VMware."
"Having a seamless DR implementation would help significantly."
"After delivering the contract, they became a little less active. So, it needs some pushing from my side sometimes."
"A big thing for me is moving InfoSight for ProLiant into OneView, or at least connecting it. Today we have to use the iLO Amplifier Pack and that would require us to reconfigure iLO on every single one of the servers, independently, to get that data into InfoSight. We're really looking for a single control and management plane."
"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."
"There is always room for improvement. Based on our use cases, I don't believe there are any additional features required."
 

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 are satisfied with its price."
"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."
"The biggest cost is the VMware licensing."
"VMware is part of the cost. We bought the chassis, we bought the solution. The blades are roughly running us $60,000 a pop right now."
"When we made the purchase of the hardware, we added Professional Services to it."
"We do CAPEX."
"The platform that we run Synergy on is all virtualized. Our primary cost is likely VMware."
"In our whole environment, the cost is in the millions. On this particular chassis, the annual cost is 12 blades times approximately $40,000."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Density Optimized Servers solutions are best for your needs.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.