HPE Apollo Systems vs HPE Synergy comparison

Why PeerSpot?

The compared HPE Apollo Systems and HPE Synergy solutions aren't in the same category. HPE Apollo Systems is ranked #3 in DOS , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 20.6% mindshare in the category. HPE Synergy is ranked #5 in Blade Servers , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 8.5% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of HPE Apollo Systems users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of HPE Synergy users who would recommend it.

HPE Apollo Systems

Read 25 HPE Apollo Systems reviews

3,785 Views
719 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

HPE Synergy

Read 91 HPE Synergy reviews

6,539 Views
4,643 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

HPE Apollo Systems

HPE Synergy

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between HPE Apollo Systems and HPE Synergy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in Density Optimized Servers.

To learn more, read our detailed Density Optimized Servers Report (Updated: November 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Density Optimized Servers

November 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 921,665 peers since 2012

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

Ranking in other categories

Rack Servers (10th), Density Optimized Servers (3rd)

HPE Synergy

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Blade Servers (5th), 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 20.6%, up 17.8% compared to last year.
HPE Synergy, on the other hand, focuses on Blade Servers, holds 8.5% mindshare, down 17.3% since last year.

Density Optimized Servers Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
HPE Apollo Systems	20.6%
Dell PowerEdge C- Series	19.7%
HPE Moonshot	17.8%
Other	41.900000000000006%

Density Optimized Servers

Blade Servers Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
HPE Synergy	8.5%
Dell PowerEdge MX- Series	8.3%
HPE BladeSystem	8.2%
Other	75.0%

Blade Servers

Featured Reviews

Gökhan DURMAZ

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.

Read full review

Msheroz S

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…

Read full review

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. 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."

"Apollo Systems provide stuff that standard services do not. More HTDs, more compute power, at very reasonable pricing."

"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."

"It's very reliable, I haven't had a single failure at all in the year and a half; not the slightest problem with it, and it's been a pretty good product so far."

"It's going to meet our needs moving forward, it is scalable."

"Absolutely being able to mount into Omni-Path architecture, HFIs on those nodes, because we were the very first site in the world"

"Stability has been extremely good."

"With HPE Apollo, we can propose configurations with many hard drives, making it suitable for large storage needs."

More HPE Apollo Systems pros

"The solution is built very well. It's very robust and durable."

"Great data storage and very good for software defined solutions."

"If you can get it set up right and get a little bit of expertise in it, it's a wonderful platform."

"The solution has decreased the deployment time for a new blade, saving us three hours."

"This solution has greatly increased the efficiency of our IT infrastructure teams."

"It's very scalable. We like the idea that we can put four chassis in one of our racks, and we can connect up to 25 chassis, so the scalability to us, and being able to sync all those into one management portal, is unheard of. You can't really sync that many blades and chassis together in any other platform."

"As a result of the solution, our IT infrastructure is about 60 percent more efficient than it used to be."

"What does it not have? That's the harder question."

More HPE Synergy pros

Cons

"HPE Apollo Systems is a bit expensive, and there are some issues with scalability."

"We would like to see SimpliVity on top of the Apollo."

"We could, perhaps, use more GPUs in the future, go from eight to 16 GPUs per instance. That could run head-to-head against the DGX-1, the DGX-2 that NVIDIA has developed in their own chassis. That would be interesting to see."

"If there's anything that hasn't been that stable, then it is the Lustre file system."

"We are struggling a little bit with some of the configuration we need to do, particularly with write capability to drives."

"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."

"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."

More HPE Apollo Systems cons

"It has affected the productivity of our development team in a bad way."

"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."

"Operationally, it is a little bit challenging to manage at this point. When you add onto it, you have to be very aware of where you are in the frame, on your count, and what components."

"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."

"We have flaky things, like a lot of bad fans."

"The Synergy platform is HPE-specific and more for on-premises. You're kind of locked in with VMware and the HPE with the VMs. The Nutanix offering is a bit more flexible."

"One of the issues that we that we have been having is with the firmware baselining. So, we need to just making sure that we get that working. However, we are in the early stages. It may well be that we just tweak a few things."

"I've found the user experience to not be that great."

More HPE Synergy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Obviously I would like to see the cost go down. That speaks for itself."

"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."

"Compared to other products, HPE Apollo is not an expensive solution."

"There is an annual license required to use HPE Apollo."

"It costs us around $60,000 a year."

"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 bought everything outright to start with. We don't do much consumption-based stuff."

"The platform that we run Synergy on is all virtualized. Our primary cost is likely VMware."

"We do CAPEX."

"We are satisfied with its price."

"In our whole environment, the cost is in the millions. On this particular chassis, the annual cost is 12 blades times approximately $40,000."

"The licensing is more around the software for RGS, because we are deploying bare metal installs. It is mainly the operating system and any lights-out management. So, licensing is minimum. We are licensing it annually."

More HPE Synergy pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Density Optimized Servers solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

921,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Outsourcing Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Outsourcing Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	15

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	31
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	56

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.

See all answers

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,...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerEdge R-Series vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 12% of the time

HPE ProLiant DL Servers vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Moonshot vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 8% of the time

IBM Power Systems vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 7% of the time

Intel Server System vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 4% of the time

More HPE Apollo Systems Competitors

HPE BladeSystem vs HPE Synergy

Compared 10% of the time

Dell PowerEdge MX- Series vs HPE Synergy

Compared 9% of the time

HPE ProLiant DL Servers vs HPE Synergy

Compared 9% of the time

Dell PowerEdge R-Series vs HPE Synergy

Compared 8% of the time

More HPE Synergy Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HPE Apollo Systems

October 2026

Download HPE Apollo Systems product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE Synergy

October 2026

Download HPE Synergy product report

Also Known As

HP Apollo Systems, HP ProLiant SL, HP Apollo

No data available

Overview

HPE Apollo Systems deliver high compute and storage density, scalability, and environmental efficiency with exceptional performance for AI initiatives and data capturing across diverse applications.

HPE Apollo Systems are characterized by their dense compute and storage capabilities, offering flexibility in configurations to meet the demands of AI, deep learning, and high-performance computing. Their management software simplifies deployment, ensuring effective performance across tasks that require significant storage. While Apollo Systems are designed for efficiency and scalability, improvements can be made in security, tech support, and integration with hypervisors and backup solutions. Enhancing cooling and licensing processes, connectivity, and faster drive writing capabilities are also areas for growth.

What are the key features of HPE Apollo Systems?

High Compute Density: Supports intense processing needs efficiently.
Scalability: Easily adaptable to growing data demands.
Environmental Efficiency: Minimizes energy consumption, enhancing sustainability.
Flexible Configurations: Caters to a range of applications from AI to data storage.
Reliable Performance: Consistently delivers under various workloads.

What benefits or ROI should users look for?

Cost Effectiveness: Reduces expenditure with its efficient design.
Integration Capabilities: Seamlessly fits into diverse IT environments.
Performance Enhancement: Boosts operational efficiency and output.
Easy Deployment: Streamlines the setup process for quick operation.

HPE Apollo Systems find extensive use in sectors such as telecom, supporting high-performance computing and AI workloads. They optimize Linux servers, replace legacy systems, and serve as storage solutions across industries. Their applications span from big data management in Splunk clusters to backup solutions in medical faculties, enhancing compute power and storage within compact racks.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

HPE Synergy offers a composable infrastructure enabling hardware reuse and automation, appreciated for manageability through OneView, which simplifies configuration and deployment.

HPE Synergy's strengths include flexibility, scalability, and a modular design that integrates with existing IT infrastructure for improved performance and manageability. It excels in high-density virtualization tasks and is especially suited to VMware and Hyper-V environments, SQL and Oracle databases, and large-scale data centers. Though users note challenges such as complex management interfaces and integration issues with non-HPE systems, its ability to replace aging systems like C7000 and facilitate hybrid cloud transformation is significant. Requirements for streamlined firmware updates, better storage integration, faster deployment, enhanced support, and documentation are acknowledged.

What are the most important features of HPE Synergy?

Composable Infrastructure: Enables hardware re-utilization and automation.
OneView: Simplifies configuration and reduces deployment time.
Image Streamer: Enhances flexibility and ease of use in configuration management.
Converged Network Management: Streamlines network operations.
Modular Design: Ensures compatibility and scalability.

What benefits and ROI should be evaluated?

Ease of Administration: Centralized management reduces complexity.
Diverse Workload Handling: Efficiently manages virtualization, databases, and cloud environments.
Performance Enhancement: Integrates effectively with existing infrastructure.
Reduced Power Consumption: Users seek more efficiency in energy use.
Comprehensive Integration: Desirable improvements in OneView integration benefit operations.

HPE Synergy is widely implemented across industries focusing on virtualization and cloud transformation, providing enhanced compute power and flexibility to companies transitioning from older systems. It supports hybrid cloud infrastructure management and handles the demands of large-scale data centers efficiently.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Sample Customers

Weta Digital

HudsonAlpha, Virgin Media, EMIS, United

Buyer's Guide

Density Optimized Servers

November 2026

Download Free Report

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in Density Optimized Servers. Updated: November 2026.

DOWNLOAD NOW

921,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.

We monitor all Density Optimized Servers reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.