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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 21.4%, up 20.9% compared to last year.
HPE Synergy, on the other hand, focuses on Blade Servers, holds 8.8% mindshare, down 19.8% since last year.
Density Optimized Servers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HPE Apollo Systems21.4%
Dell PowerEdge C- Series19.3%
HPE Moonshot17.6%
Other41.699999999999996%
Density Optimized Servers
Blade Servers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HPE Synergy8.8%
Dell PowerEdge MX- Series8.6%
HPE BladeSystem8.1%
Other74.5%
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

"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."
"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 pretty flexible."
"We had a PoC, as I said, and we were happy with it and decided to implement it, as it satisfies all our needs and is the perfect solution."
"Not having to manage traditional NAS has made a big difference."
"It's pretty flexible. You can choose how much storage you put on the server. You can have one to three nodes, depending on whether you want more CPU or storage."
"Tech support has been outstanding."
"HPE Apollo's support is the most valuable feature."
"HPE Synergy has been dependable for the past 15 years."
"The solution has decreased our deployment time by 10 to 20 percent."
"In terms of our cost of operations, given the reduction of our deployment times, down to 20 percent of the time it used to take, we are definitely saving time, and that is time our engineers can spend doing other things, working on other projects and priorities."
"OneView, as a single point, a single management tool, it makes me delirious. It's really nice."
"Technical support has been knowledgeable."
"Technical support has been great."
"We're able to provision different applications, different demonstrations, add cloud-like speeds on-prem, which is unheard of in the industry."
"It's a fully integrated solution with OneView."
 

Cons

"We would like to see SimpliVity on top of the Apollo."
"Big stability issues with the CPU on the first generation which made them virtually unusable."
"HPE Apollo's after-sales support and technical support should be improved."
"HPE Apollo Systems is a bit expensive, and there are some issues with scalability."
"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."
"One drawback which I had: When I needed to expand storage on the Apollo, I had significant problems getting disks for it. It was a very long wait-time. So, if I were to give any advice in regards to improving this product, I would say make more of the 8TB disks available quicker."
"What's coming out in Gen 10 is very strong in terms of additional security."
"If the workload is not purely sequential, then performance in the IO is less than optimal because it's optimized for streaming processing."
"HPE Synergy could improve its remote support."
"I think that they can improve the update because the update is problematic now. When you want to update the firmware, or when you want to update software on Composer, it takes a lot of time."
"I would like the ability to take the storage tray that is in a chassis and share it out to multiple chassis, not just the servers within the same chassis. This would be more efficient with resources."
"I would definitely like to see them fix the firmware updates on all the blades. No matter what operating system it is running on, make sure I can do the firmware as well as the software for those firmware components at the same time. I don't want to have to rely on an external product. Let's bring that product inside the menu so that I have a better experience with updates."
"HPE Synergy could improve by developing the chassis to allow for more drives or disks. Currently, it supports only two drives in the blade server, which can be limiting."
"The pricing can be improved as it is a costly solution due to sanctions in Iran."
"It has affected the productivity of our development team in a bad way. When we first stood the hardware up 18 months ago, the image streaming capacity and capability were not very good at all. We had hoped that it would allow us to be more composable and be able to switch over from one version of an operating system to another version of an operating system. However, it wasn't ready for prime time yet. Therefore, we had to go back to a deployment of bare metal install. We are still waiting and trying to figure out how we can do the composable infrastructure."
"The technical support was about the only negative experience that I had. It was a mixed bag when we were first standing it up."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is an annual license required to use HPE Apollo."
"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."
"Compared to other products, HPE Apollo is not an expensive 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."
"It costs us around $60,000 a year."
"There is a perpetual license given when you purchase HPE Synergy."
"The cost is high and that is a drawback for some customers."
"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 platform that we run Synergy on is all virtualized. Our primary cost is likely VMware."
"Our IT infrastructure costs have gone up each year by 20 percent."
"For temporal use, when you throw on the fact that you're essentially doubling your capacity, right there you could claim a 50 percent TCO reduction."
"The biggest cost is the VMware licensing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
 

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
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