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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 (8th), 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 20.9%, down 22.6% compared to last year.
HPE Synergy, on the other hand, focuses on Blade Servers, holds 9.7% mindshare, down 21.9% since last year.
Density Optimized Servers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HPE Apollo Systems20.9%
Dell PowerEdge C- Series20.9%
HPE Moonshot16.2%
Other42.0%
Density Optimized Servers
Blade Servers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HPE Synergy9.7%
Dell PowerEdge MX- Series9.6%
HPE BladeSystem8.6%
Other72.1%
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.
MR
Presales engineer and consultant at Hybrid Tech
Redundant components and single console management improve efficiency while high costs warrant attention
Regarding HPE Synergy, the most valuable feature is that the whole solution and the whole system operate in passive mode, and there are very few chances of downtime as all the components in HPE Synergy are redundant, including VC Flex modules and interconnect modules, as well as power supply and fan modules. Other networking and storage connectivity modules are also redundant, and we can mount the entire Synergy frame in a single rack. If we fully populate a Synergy frame with 12 servers, 12 physical machines could be mounted in one Synergy frame, mostly with redundant power supplies and networking ports along with SAN connectivity on a single console.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"HPE Apollo's support is the most valuable feature."
"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 this is a machine that should be considered instead of deploying multiple machines and multiple systems."
"Absolutely being able to mount into Omni-Path architecture, HFIs on those nodes, because we were the very first site in the world"
"It's going to meet our needs moving forward, it is scalable."
"HPE Apollo Systems is a good product because it has better support and best quality with integrity."
"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."
"It's pretty flexible."
"We're going to buy another Apollo 6500. We may configure it with half the number of GPUs because that may be all we need. In a sense, we can see the Apollo 6500 being so powerful that we only need half the GPU capability that we have now."
"The single pane of glass management is huge, because in all our previous systems, depending on what we were managing, we would go to a different management point. Being able to go to one spot to get everything is helpful. I find that server profile creation is a lot easier in OneView than it was previously. We are able to stay compliant with firmware and updates, because we are assigning server profiles and reapplying them when there are changes. This makes everything a lot simpler."
"This is above and beyond anything else any of the competitors have on the market."
"HPE Synergy has been dependable for the past 15 years."
"The solution is extremely scalable, it's one of the highlights of the product for us, and if a company needs to expand, it can do so with ease."
"It's a fully integrated solution with OneView."
"The solution helps us to implement new business requirements quickly, by using the Composer for efficiency. It has also improved the productivity of our development team due to the efficiency of being able to deploy via Composer."
"Scalability is one of the main advantages, as you can scale the different areas, like storage, compute, and memory, to your needs."
"The key advantage that we teach people is speed to market, or speed to productivity, thus, reducing the time it takes to provision business services."
 

Cons

"What's coming out in Gen 10 is very strong in terms of additional security."
"The support from HPE Apollo could be better, they are making knowledgeable."
"The support from HPE Apollo could be better, they are making knowledgeable."
"The technical support for HPE Apollo Systems could be improved."
"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."
"The solution could improve the hardware, such as the motherboard or servers. We have had hardware faults in the past."
"Big stability issues with the CPU on the first generation which made them virtually unusable."
"We are quite happy with it, but its price and storage density can be better."
"The initial setup was complex. We had a couple of bright engineers working on it, and they figured out a lot of things that they don't know... The problem was that they couldn't find documentation easily, to walk them through setup when they just didn't know the platform."
"Having a seamless DR implementation would help significantly."
"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 Synergy frame."
"I would like to see support for other vendors’ hardware."
"We haven't seen any ROI, and it hasn't reduced our cost of operations."
"Our IT infrastructure costs have gone up each year by 20 percent."
"They must improve the OneView tools."
"Continue the path of integrating OneView into a single product. A lot of different people have different OneView experiences based on which product they have used it for."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Obviously I would like to see the cost go down. That speaks for itself."
"There is an annual license required to use HPE Apollo."
"Compared to other products, HPE Apollo is not an expensive solution."
"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."
"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."
"The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs because we have had to buy less services than we used to."
"The cost is high and that is a drawback for some customers."
"We bought everything outright to start with. We don't do much consumption-based stuff."
"Nutanix was really hard to implement, and it was very pricey compared to what we get from Synergy."
"The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs by 50 percent."
"We do CAPEX."
"The platform that we run Synergy on is all virtualized. Our primary cost is likely VMware."
"There was at least about a 20 percent savings in cost over our purchase based on the purchase price of the compute modules themselves versus what we've had to pay before. It was significantly less."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

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: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.