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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 21.0%, up 20.9% compared to last year.
HPE Synergy, on the other hand, focuses on Blade Servers, holds 9.0% mindshare, down 20.6% since last year.
Density Optimized Servers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HPE Apollo Systems21.0%
Dell PowerEdge C- Series20.3%
HPE Moonshot17.1%
Other41.6%
Density Optimized Servers
Blade Servers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HPE Synergy9.0%
Dell PowerEdge MX- Series8.9%
HPE BladeSystem8.2%
Other73.9%
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

"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."
"For us, the most valuable features are the price and density."
"Not having to manage traditional NAS has made a big difference."
"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."
"The solution is well documented in a data sheet."
"Stability has been extremely good."
"The technical support from HPE has always been good in my experience."
"The Online firmware update for the virtual connects has minimized our downtime windows."
"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."
"Technical support has been knowledgeable."
"The most valuable feature is its composable infrastructure. Everything I need is in the box. Manageability is through OneView, so I can get all the information about the box itself at any time I want."
"We needed to move forward, so we could have a platform that we could rely on for the next ten or so years, something that we could go and deploy, taking advantage of all the functions that it has."
"The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs by at least 30 percent, mainly because of the density compared to our former infrastructure."
"The centralized management of HPE Synergy is beneficial because it is easy to manage and administer."
"HPE has proven track records worldwide delivering superb support on hard- and software."
 

Cons

"HPE Apollo's after-sales support and technical support should be improved."
"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."
"We are struggling a little bit with some of the configuration we need to do, particularly with write capability to drives."
"If there's anything that hasn't been that stable, then it is the Lustre file system."
"If the workload is not purely sequential, then performance in the IO is less than optimal because it's optimized for streaming processing."
"The technical support for HPE Apollo Systems could be improved."
"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."
"Big stability issues with the CPU on the first generation which made them virtually unusable."
"The price point is a little high."
"Our IT infrastructure costs have gone up each year by 20 percent."
"The stability is not good right now. We have had a couple of outages where we have receive very good support from HPE. However, we have not been able to come up with cut and dried reasons for why the outages have occurred. They have not been able to be reproduced, so it has been difficult getting our trust back."
"In the past, I have had issues with configurations."
"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."
"Changes to the solution are quite complex."
"HPE Synergy could improve its remote support."
"I think we were promised a little more than we were given. It's true, they are working very hard to try to help remedy that."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is an annual license required to use HPE Apollo."
"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."
"Obviously I would like to see the cost go down. That speaks for itself."
"The biggest cost is the VMware licensing."
"We pay for licensing on the fibre channel uplinks, on the Virtual Connect, which is an add-on."
"The solution has reduced our IT infrastructure costs because we have had to buy less services than we used to."
"We pay about £500 for the solution."
"Synergy has lowered our total cost of ownership significantly. I would say ballpark around 25 percent, maybe more."
"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."
"We outright purchased Synergy."
"The platform that we run Synergy on is all virtualized. Our primary cost is likely VMware."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Construction 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
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