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 #2 in DOS , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 21.2% mindshare in the category. HPE Synergy is ranked #5 in Blade Servers , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 8.6% 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

3,294 Views
626 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

HPE Synergy

Read 91 HPE Synergy reviews

5,914 Views
4,022 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, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco and others in Density Optimized Servers.

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

Buyer's Guide

Density Optimized Servers

August 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 914,351 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 (9th), Density Optimized Servers (2nd)

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 21.2%, up 19.3% compared to last year.
HPE Synergy, on the other hand, focuses on Blade Servers, holds 8.6% mindshare, down 19.5% since last year.

Density Optimized Servers Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
HPE Apollo Systems	21.2%
Dell PowerEdge C- Series	19.0%
HPE Moonshot	17.6%
Other	42.199999999999996%

Density Optimized Servers

Blade Servers Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
HPE Synergy	8.6%
Dell PowerEdge MX- Series	8.4%
HPE BladeSystem	8.0%
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 most valuable feature is the amount of programming storage available."

"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."

"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."

"Not having to manage traditional NAS has made a big difference."

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

"It enables us to implement software defined solutions very easily, because Apollo servers are certified for use with Linux systems"

"It is a stable product; very reliable."

"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."

More HPE Apollo Systems pros

"The price is reasonable, and the stability and scalability are okay. We bought the solution because it suits our needs."

"We have been able to give the deployment team what they request more quickly. We are able to quickly deploy what is being asked of us. If the development team needs a platform of 20 servers to run a particular platform, we can give that to them within a day or two."

"It gives us a lot more flexibility for spinning up new hypervisors, compared to the c7000."

"Orchestrating automations is great because you can connect to other tools with the REST API and automate components."

"This is above and beyond anything else any of the competitors have on the market. If you're researching this, you're going down the right path."

"Everything is combined in one chassis, you have storage, compute, networking. So you save a lot of space in the datacenter."

"The solution help us to implement new business requirements quickly, since it is easy and quick to upgrade our capacity."

"In today's world, there isn't a better solution to create a private cloud for them."

More HPE Synergy pros

Cons

"Lustre seems to be just a little bit unstable overall."

"The support from HPE Apollo could be better, they are making knowledgeable."

"If the workload is not purely sequential, then performance in the IO is less than optimal because it's optimized for streaming processing."

"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."

"The solution could improve the hardware, such as the motherboard or servers. We have had hardware faults in the past."

"What's coming out in Gen 10 is very strong in terms of additional security."

"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."

"We are quite happy with it, but its price and storage density can be better."

More HPE Apollo Systems cons

"One of the things that I would like to see, and could be in their road map, is getting virtual connect to 100 Gig throughput."

"The technical support was about the only negative experience that I had. It was a mixed bag when we were first standing it up. We had some requirements from our information security department, and technical support wasn't able to give me immediate answers. They had to engage engineering, which they did, then they got me the answers. However, it took a week of back and forth conversations and phone calls to get it all worked out."

"The stability is poor. It's a relatively young product and the management solution that drives the product shows its signs of immaturity."

"The speed in OneView and how it updates the entire configuration needs improvement. If they can do that, and it could be a little more clear on what impact different actions will have for certain things, that would be good."

"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."

"The initial setup was quite complex and it is being done by the HPE support department."

"It would be nice if the updates were not accompanied by downtime."

"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."

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."

"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."

"The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs by 50 percent."

"We pay for licensing on the fibre channel uplinks, on the Virtual Connect, which is an add-on."

"Nutanix was really hard to implement, and it was very pricey compared to what we get from Synergy."

"The solution can be expensive because it requires both hardware and software purchases."

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

"The Nutanix platform came in a little more expensive than the Synergy."

"We pay about £500 for the solution."

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

914,351 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Outsourcing Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

Outsourcing Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Construction 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, whe...

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

HPE ProLiant DL Servers vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 11% of the time

Dell PowerEdge R-Series vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Moonshot vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerEdge XE-Series 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 ProLiant DL Servers vs HPE Synergy

Compared 10% of the time

Dell PowerEdge MX- Series vs HPE Synergy

Compared 9% of the time

HPE BladeSystem vs HPE Synergy

Compared 9% of the time

Lenovo ThinkAgile CP Series vs HPE Synergy

Compared 8% of the time

Supermicro SuperBlade vs HPE Synergy

Compared 3% of the time

More HPE Synergy Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HPE Apollo Systems

September 2026

Download HPE Apollo Systems product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE Synergy

September 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

August 2026

Download Free Report

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

DOWNLOAD NOW

914,351 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.