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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 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."
"HPE Apollo's support is the most valuable feature."
"With HPE Apollo, we can propose configurations with many hard drives, making it suitable for large storage needs."
"Taking into consideration the cost, HPE gave us the ability to actually do what we wanted to do."
"Tech support has been outstanding."
"The technical support from HPE has always been good in my experience."
"Apollo Systems provide stuff that standard services do not. More HTDs, more compute power, at very reasonable pricing."
"The cost benefit of this solution is most valuable."
"HPE Synergy has been dependable for the past 15 years."
"We bought it with the intent to replace the c7000 workstation blades, and it is bigger than the workstation blades in core count, memory, and graphical capabilities, so it has broadened us in that regard, and we have more capabilities."
"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."
"In terms of the productivity of our deployment team, the amount of time has been decreased a lot. In the past, to deploy one c7000 chassis with 15 or 16 blades, we literally used to spend two to three weeks. But with a Synergy, it's very quick. Within three days we can do the deployment."
"It helps us manage our IT landscape because it is easy, standard, and very consolidated."
"We have seen a huge ROI: instead of having to buy 50 workstations - and we didn't have room for them, where we would need another classroom or another area - we didn't have to invest in any of that."
"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 single pane of glass management is huge, because in all our previous systems, depending on what we were managing, we would go to a different management point. Being able to go to one spot to get everything is helpful. I find that server profile creation is a lot easier in OneView than it was previously. We are able to stay compliant with firmware and updates, because we are assigning server profiles and reapplying them when there are changes. This makes everything a lot simpler."
 

Cons

"The technical support for HPE Apollo Systems could be improved."
"The licensing could be greatly improved, I think."
"We are struggling a little bit with some of the configuration we need to do, particularly with write capability to drives."
"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."
"If the workload is not purely sequential, then performance in the IO is less than optimal because it's optimized for streaming processing."
"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."
"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."
"I've found the user experience to not be that great."
"A faster Composer module would be a good inclusion for the next release of this solution."
"It has affected the productivity of our development team in a bad way."
"We haven't seen any ROI, and it hasn't reduced our cost of operations."
"Synergy could probably do some code enhancements to simplify the deployment a bit more."
"I would be more comfortable if Ansible actually rolled back the data used for automating platforms. If it could be communicated to the upstream Ansible, I wouldn't need to go back and forth and validate the libraries as we upgrade the Ansible version."
"The initial setup was complex. It was slow and just didn't work. Even HPE couldn't make it work for 45 days."
"In the Generation 10 modules, we have observed that very often the server has hardware issues."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is an annual license required to use HPE Apollo."
"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 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."
"The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs because we have had to buy less services than we used to."
"We do CAPEX."
"When we made the purchase of the hardware, we added Professional Services to it."
"Nutanix was really hard to implement, and it was very pricey compared to what we get from Synergy."
"The cost is high and that is a drawback for some customers."
"We do a biannual renewal. I know how much that renewal is, but I don't know how much it breaks down to be just Synergy, since we have our VMware, all of our physical equipment, etc. all rolled up into one renewal, which is a little over $300,000 every two years. However, only a subset of that is the Synergy product."
"We pay for licensing on the fibre channel uplinks, on the Virtual Connect, which is an add-on."
"We have already paid once. It is just the price for the permit and its use. It seems you don't have to keep paying for it, but I am not sure."
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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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