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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 21.0%, up 20.9% compared to last year.
HPE Synergy, on the other hand, focuses on Blade Servers, holds 9.0% mindshare, down 20.6% since last year.
Density Optimized Servers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HPE Apollo Systems21.0%
Dell PowerEdge C- Series20.3%
HPE Moonshot17.1%
Other41.6%
Density Optimized Servers
Blade Servers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HPE Synergy9.0%
Dell PowerEdge MX- Series8.9%
HPE BladeSystem8.2%
Other73.9%
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

"The cost benefit of this solution is most valuable."
"Absolutely being able to mount into Omni-Path architecture, HFIs on those nodes, because we were the very first site in the world"
"HPE Apollo's most valuable feature is the ability to expand our storage capacity."
"Not having to manage traditional NAS has made a big difference."
"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."
"Tech support has been outstanding."
"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."
"I believe, compared to the C7000, it delivers a significant amount of innovation and flexibility,"
"The most valuable features are the converged network adapters."
"If you can get it set up right and get a little bit of expertise in it, it's a wonderful platform."
"It allows for easy management."
"The solution has reduced our cost of operations and has also reduced our IT infrastructure costs."
"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."
"On the previous HPE platform, we struggled because everything was independent. We had to manage firmware on each server, storage and network configuration on each server. Synergy is template-driven so we can ensure consistency of all of those settings. It allows us to standardize configuration and ensure consistency across the board."
"Technical support has been knowledgeable."
 

Cons

"If there's anything that hasn't been that stable, then it is the Lustre file system."
"We are quite happy with it, but its price and storage density can be better."
"We are struggling a little bit with some of the configuration we need to do, particularly with write capability to drives."
"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."
"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."
"Lustre seems to be just a little bit unstable overall."
"HPE Apollo's after-sales support and technical support should be improved."
"If there could be some training for our team, we would be better equipped to promote and support HPE Apollo."
"I find the product documentation to be disorganized; it's not intuitive and the info required for checking a specific step-by-step configuration is buried under too much literature."
"I'd like to see the firmware updates, as well as the built-in OneView and imager in Composer, become a little more powerful and faster."
"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."
"After delivering the contract, they became a little less active. So, it needs some pushing from my side sometimes."
"Sometimes there are firmware or software difficulties when connecting between networks or with storage."
"The initial setup, because it was still in beta, was complex."
"In our case, it would not be an improvement over the way our company functions; we have unique scaling demands, and our storage demands scale very differently than our compute demand scales, so doing HCI anything doesn't really fit well with how we operate."
"The lowest echelon of HPE technical support is sadly uninformed, unknowledgeable, and dependent on wrote scripts. They won't answer a question without going through their script. It's not like you're actually talking to somebody who has any depth or time using any of the equipment."
 

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."
"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."
"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."
"We outright purchased Synergy."
"When we made the purchase of the hardware, we added Professional Services to it."
"The biggest cost is the VMware licensing."
"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."
"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."
"We bought everything outright to start with. We don't do much consumption-based stuff."
"The solution can be expensive because it requires both hardware and software purchases."
"The price point is a little high. We were able to get a good deal on a promotion, to go with it. It would be nice to see the prices come down a little bit."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

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: June 2026.
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