HPE BladeSystem Reviews

Its ease of management, consolidation, connectivity, power, and cooling are the most valuable features.

• Ease of Management: It provides a simple way to access and manage the whole blade infrastructure through the onboard administrator GUI, where you can deploy the blades and handle the initial configuration (IPs, firmware for ROM, iLO management).

• Consolidation: It puts all the elements of the modern data center such as power, cooling, connectivity, redundancy, security, compute, and storage into a modular, right-sized and self-optimizing unit with agile intelligence. It includes redundancy for every component and connection inside it, for no single point of failure.

• Connectivity: The simplicity and flexibility in managing the SAN/LAN configuration from a single management interface (HPE Virtual Connect).

• Power and Cooling: It consolidates tremendous power capacity that adapts and optimizes itself, to the most efficient level for any solution. It includes more cooling capacity as well as monitoring and control, that adapt regardless of the performance and density that are thrown at it.

The HPE BladeSystem delivers a modular infrastructure for the data center. The main critical applications and virtualization farm were running on the BladeSystem with great performance and reliability.

It provides a higher connectivity throughput with the new releases.

There is better integration with the third-party solutions and products.

I have used these solutions for around three to four years. We use the following HPE products:

• HPE c7000 Blade Enclosure
• HPE BL460c Gen8 Server Blade
• HPE Virtual Connect of the following:
  
  • HPE VC Flex-10 Ethernet Module
  • HPE VC FlexFabric 10Gb/24-port Module
  • HPE VC 8Gb 24-port Fibre Channel Module

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

I would give the technical support a 8/10 rating, although, most of the critical cases are handled by the specialized technical experts.

Initially, we were using the Cisco UCS Blade Server Enclosures. We switched to this product due to the integration with the Cisco Fabric Interconnects and to experience a new technology.

The initial setup for the HPE BladeSystem Enclosure is straightforward and you don't need to be an expert in data center infrastructure.

The prices for the HPE Virtual Connect Modules are expensive compared to other I/O Modules available. It's better to size the solution accurately and identify which I/O Module is needed for your environment (for example, the HPE FlexFabric or HPE Flex-10).

We evaluated other solutions such as Oracle's Sun Blade and Dell's PowerEdge blades.

The implementation and deployment are easy and straightforward for engineers of basic IT knowledge. However, you need extra information and awareness, when configuring the HPE Virtual Connect as they require networking background (such as VLAN configuration and SAN connectivity).

For us, the best feature of the BladeSystems is the plug-and-play capability. We are able to replace one quickly; everything's hot-pluggable. The enclosures are well made. The way we manage our enclosures, everything's done through one iLO. It's really easy to keep on top of things. They are what they are. They do the job they're designed to do.

When we initially went with blade servers, our footprint in the datacentre went down. We still have to use large ProLiant servers. We mainly use it in a Citrix environment, so we use each blade as a Xen host. Although we might have about 400 blades, we've then got four VMs running off that, whereas in the past, we would have had thousands of servers all stacked up on top of each other.

We have a niggle with the iLO connection. Sometimes you can go from one PC to another and how the iLO reacts depends on the web browser setup. I'd like to see something like HTML5 setup for iLO, so you don't need to install any Java or any of the plug-ins; so it's completely universal.

It’s a great system, but it’s not perfect yet.

We've had blade servers for about 10 years.

We don't have any real issues with stability.

We have a HPE support contract. If anything does go wrong, it's just, swap it out, put it back in. I'll be careful what I mention, but sometimes the technical support online isn't great. You're often dealing with people who just ask you basic questions and ask you to check things that you've already checked. You know the fault's there; you wouldn't be logging the call if the fault wasn't there. But the engineers that come on-site are great.

Initially, we were using Compaq equipment. Then Compaq and HP merged. We did do trials with IBM, but we found it to be a bit of a step back in that the kit just wasn't quite as high tech. It just seemed at the time it was a massive step back in the way we were working. HP seemed like it was a step ahead.

My advice is to invest early dollars on higher capacity. In the early stages, we didn't put enough high power kit in and we ended up upgrading all the time, especially on the memory side. I think we went in quite low with RAM and we went through a massive process of upgrading all that.

The blades have been reliable. They are powerful and flexible. Those are the key features for me.

Reliability means more uptime. We don't get so much dysfunction in the business. Flexibility and memory are good. Managing has been fairly straightforward. It's got a good interface to manage. I don’t have anything bad to say.

There is nothing much to improve, so long as they carry on with the basics of user views and reliability. There have been steady improvements, but not drastic ones. We have seen steady improvements which have been good for us.

All good.

All good.

I have used it occasionally. It's “okay-ish”. It's always a pain going through the first line of support, particularly when you know what the problem is. You still have to go through all the formalities. I get the answers I need eventually. Sometimes it takes a bit longer, or you have to go through more steps than you hoped for. In the end, they get to it. It probably has a few more layers than other technical support I’ve used. I have been able to get to engineers faster and more directly with other vendors.

I was involved in the setup. It was good. We had someone from HPE come in to help us and that was useful. You have to learn the product and use it. It was a straightforward installation.

We've got Dell blades. I'm a little bit more biased because I've used them and I'm more familiar with them. I still prefer the HPE blades. We chose HPE over Dell because the interface manager seemed more intuitive with HPE. Dell didn't seem to put it together as well.

For what we use blades for, it was, and still is, the best solution. Although this is a great solution, you still need to look at the rest of the infrastructure to make the most of it. It's not just blades. You have to look at networking. You have to look at your storage in order to make the most use of it. It's taken us a more time to realize this. You want a whole solution. You have to look at it from end-to-end.

• The ability to add a lot of processing capacity and memory into a small form factor.
• Consuming less rack space and being able to quickly change components in and out as things break without disruption of the network.

We were growing beyond our data center rack spaces with our 1U2U rack mount servers. We had a lot of them. We had a lot of HP DL360 and 380 servers and we were burning rack after rack after rack. When we consolidated to blades we were able to reduce our footprint in the data center.

They probably already have a lot of the features introduced, I just don't know about them yet. I'm looking forward to using the Security Central console, which I know you do have to manage. It's a console to manage Aruba stuff, all your switches, ProCurve lines, blades, and chassis, all in one single pane of glass. I'll be able to look at all those components and how they're all working in and amongst each other.

I've used it for seven or eight years.

It has been very stable.

We use about half of each chassis that we have in place and we have redundant chassis just in case a chassis should go down. It has never happened but from a scalability stand-point we continue to increase the amount of blades we use in each of those racks, each of those chassis.

I actually haven't had to call them a lot. A lot of the information and issues that I have I've found solutions to online. It seems to be when I have called them and it wasn't about the chassis and the pro-curbs, or the switch line it seemed like they had information. The only downside was when I was looking to do an IOS upgrade, or a firmware upgrade, on the switch the way we had it set up was in a virtual stack and they were supposed to upgrade individually and the tech guy at this time gave me bad information and said they were only supposed to reboot one at a time as each switch upgraded. They all rebooted at the same time and caused an outage, which was unfortunate.

The price is acceptable.

I'd recommend it. But weigh the pros and cons of the points of failure. Because there are single points of failure unless you have two chassis in place. Also the power and the cooling consumption. Blades in the chassis seem to consume a lot of energy. We use co-location facilities so we don't have to think a lot about how much power and energy we are consuming because we don't owe the data center. It's just a fixed price for the rack. But if you own your own data center and you have to pay for the power and the cooling, blades and the chassis if you have them filled and racked and stacked, they can consume a lot of energy.

I think the most valuable feature for us is probably the ability to expand and change, such as adding servers. If anything goes down, they can be changed out quite easily, which to me is a very, very good thing. It's easy to install, maintain, and expand.

We work with the NHS and we had a big system disaster one time when a system threatened to go down. With the BladeSystem, we were able to move everything quickly from one blade to another. It was fantastic and we averted a crisis.

I'm relatively new to my role, so I've seen the BladeSystem up to a point. I've not seen anything in it that we don't already have.

However, the installation probably could have gone even quicker except that we realized we didn't have enough RAM with just 512Mb. In this regard, the installation and setup wasn't as straightforward as it could have been because of the database appliance involved.

Deployment has been no problem.

Stability has been very good, probably 98% uptime, I think.

We have about 70 users per site and we have 700 sites. It's scaled nicely for us.

I don't have an awful lot to compare it to. I've worked with some other systems such as the Oracle DB appliance in another role elsewhere.

The initial setup took about an hour-and-a-half from start to finish, including taking it out of the box. But we did an awful lot of pre-implementation work that wasn't necessarily perfect, though at the end, we had a usable system in under two hours.

Make sure your network is set up correctly -- DNS, all the manual steps, etc. We had to rebuild a system because the DNS was wrong. Check all your cabling and other aspects of your installation process.

The ability to configure it in a highly reliable fashion.

We don’t have to worry about manufacturing it ourselves. We can take advantage of HP’s scale to achieve much shorter delivery cycles.

We’re just introducing it in the middle of this year, so in my labs I’ve got about 200 blades in many different chassis.

We’ve placed another order for a 20-blade system, and I expect by next year we’ll have hundreds of blades.

I would like to see them support G10 blades on the C7000.

It’s been very stable for us. We’re using KVM on top of the hardware, and it’s been very good and has done everything we need it to do thus far.

It’s scalable enough for our purposes.

We can put 2 chassis together in a rack, 16 blades per chassis. With this scalability, we can see that it provides all the capacity we envision needing for the foreseeable future. We’re also evolving our software to take further advantage of this platform's scalability (part of 4G LTE systems).

There are different kinds of technical support. The kinds of things we need in R&D are answers to fairly arcane questions regarding the product, and support has been so-so. It takes a long time to find the right guy.

We were using expensive, in-house-developed hardware. From an R&D perspective, there was not enough critical mass to keep the investment going. In addition to the expense, order to delivery was six months for our in-house solution. In contrast, HP can turn around in two weeks, which is a huge advantage for us.

Setup was fine. The installers didn’t complain.

It was a decision between the internally-developed product or HP. There was a synergy with other products already using HP, so we went with HP.

You need to look for high reliability, duplex power servers, and networking. If you’re looking for carrier grade reliability, the C7000 is an excellent choice.

In my company, they tried to convert to hyper-converter due to the fact that the on-premise server is still a low demand. Some workloads we have moved to public CoW. We tried to reduce our footprint, our data center, to use only hyper-converged. It's good for that purpose.

The solution is very easy to use. It's not overly complex. I'd describe it as a user-friendly product.

The solution is stable. The performance is good.

The solution can scale to a certain extent.

It's an old-fashioned technology now. 

I'm not sure precisely what should be improved. I can't recall any missing features.

If the hardware offered higher efficiency, that would be an ideal situation for our company.

I have ten years of experience with this solution. It's been about a decade. I've used it for quite a while.

The solution is very stable. We find it to be quite reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. Its performance is very good.

While the solution is pretty scalable, every company has its own context. Therefore, the scaling process might be different. In my future plans, for example, it's hard to reduce my footprint, as the workload has moved to CoW. Something that's based on-premise has limited parameters. That's why I'm trying to use the totally hyper-converged system. 

I don't really have any direct experience with support from HPE, however, when they had the reports about the system, I would say the review was that they were okay. There have been no complaints. We're satisfied with the level of service, from what I can tell. I have heard nothing negative about the level of service.

I'm not an operations person. I can't speak to how easy or difficult it is to implement the solution. It's not an aspect I worried about or specifically had to deal with.

As I wasn't a part of the implementation process, I cannot speak to if there was any assistance with the process. 

We are simply a customer and an end-user. We don't have a professional relationship with HPE.

I'd rate the solution, on a scale from one to ten, at a nine. We've mostly been quite pleased with the product and its capabilities. 

I would recommend the solution to other users, companies, and organizations. 

We are running a biometric solution. This is the main solution for which we use HPE BladeSystem.

HPE keeps on releasing new BladeSystems. We started with G4 and have used G5, G6, G7, G8, servers. We find these upgrades very useful. As our business volume grows, we're able to find an appropriate HPE server to use.

They are reliable, and they hardly break down. They are fast, and they serve us very well.

For me, the product is okay, but I would probably suggest improvement in their services or technical support. They need to work harder in the preventative maintenance of the system. They need to improve in terms of how quickly can we get attention and how quickly problems are resolved. 

Its price could also be lower.

I have been using this solution for seven years.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. The entire banking industry in Nigeria is connected to this solution. Everybody in the industry uses this solution. We intend to grow and increase its usage.

Technical support is my main concern. They need to improve in terms of how quickly can we get attention and how quickly problems are resolved.

Its initial setup is very easy.

We used resellers.

It is expensive. There are no additional costs. We are able to get good discounts anyway from HPE, but if the price can come down, we'll be happy.

We considered IBM. We made a choice for HPE, and it has been working well for us.

My main advice would be to ensure that your technical staff is well trained by HPE and the technical staff receives HPE technical training because the support that you want may not come from HPE. If you have your in-house team properly trained, it should be fine.

I would rate HPE BladeSystem an eight out of ten.