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HPE Apollo Systems vs HPE Synergy comparison

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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 (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 20.9%, up 19.2% compared to last year.
HPE Synergy, on the other hand, focuses on Blade Servers, holds 8.5% mindshare, down 18.9% since last year.
Density Optimized Servers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HPE Apollo Systems20.9%
Dell PowerEdge C- Series19.4%
HPE Moonshot17.3%
Other42.400000000000006%
Density Optimized Servers
Blade Servers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HPE Synergy8.5%
Dell PowerEdge MX- Series8.2%
HPE BladeSystem8.0%
Other75.3%
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

"HPE Apollo's most valuable feature is the ability to expand our storage capacity."
"We are running Apollo with SL-series servers and the best thing about them is the density of the storage area available."
"The most valuable feature is the amount of programming storage available."
"It enables us to implement software defined solutions very easily, because Apollo servers are certified for use with Linux systems"
"It's allowed us to compete with cloud storage providers like AWS to put together a scalable on-premises solution of more than 20PB at a similar pricepoint."
"When we moved to the Apollo and all flash drives, we gained a lot of performance on that."
"The technical support from HPE has always been good in my experience."
"The solution is well documented in a data sheet."
"The solution has decreased our deployment time by 10 to 20 percent."
"As a result of the solution, our IT infrastructure is about 60 percent more efficient than it used to be."
"The stability is very good. We haven't had any outages."
"The solution helps us to implement new business requirements quickly with some app deployments."
"Synergy is first in class for composable infrastructure; it has the scalability that meets our future needs and the automation that builds into something that we are really looking forward to using."
"The Synergy environment provides us with one view. We're able to manage the entire stack, top to bottom, from that single view."
"Support is very helpful."
"Technical support is excellent. They are very helpful."
 

Cons

"We are quite happy with it, but its price and storage density can be better."
"Our first batch of Apollo servers that we got were so new that it was just hard to know kind of what to expect from HPE and what they wanted to deliver to us."
"We would like to see SimpliVity on top of the Apollo."
"OpenView is a new product which does not support older versions of the hardware."
"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."
"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."
"Big stability issues with the CPU on the first generation which made them virtually unusable."
"The licensing could be greatly improved, I think."
"The stability is poor. It's a relatively young product and the management solution that drives the product shows its signs of immaturity."
"The initial setup was complex. From what I was told, there were issues initially with getting the SFPs on the floor for our data center and something with the image, but I think that was on our service provider' side. They couldn't get the image to deploy with the right drivers and stuff."
"I would like to see better integration with other products."
"If it would be possible to connect clusters of five with other clusters, so that they could all share resources, that would change the game for us. It would make it a viable solution for us."
"Sometimes there are firmware or software difficulties when connecting between networks or with storage."
"I would like to see support for other vendors’ hardware."
"The performance could be better. The converged network cards initially didn't work. However, later on in the newer version, they came up with 50 GB network cards to replace the 20 GB ones, and it's perfectly fine now. At times, it could also be more stable."
"We'd like to see faster networking in the back-end."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Obviously I would like to see the cost go down. That speaks for itself."
"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."
"There is an annual license required to use HPE Apollo."
"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."
"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."
"We pay about £500 for the solution."
"In our whole environment, the cost is in the millions. On this particular chassis, the annual cost is 12 blades times approximately $40,000."
"There is a perpetual license given when you purchase HPE Synergy."
"We outright purchased Synergy."
"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."
"The Nutanix platform came in a little more expensive than the Synergy."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare 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: October 2026.
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