HPE BladeSystem Reviews

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.

I am using the HPE BladeSystem for Hyper-V servers.

The most valuable feature of the HPE BladeSystem is the ease of management and the robust design.

I have used HPE BladeSystem for approximately five years.

The stability of the HPE BladeSystem is good.

The HPE BladeSystem can scale very well.

We have approximately 2,000 users using the HPE BladeSystem. We have many students and professors using it.

We are using HPE BladeSystem on a daily basis.

We have not needed to contact support because we have not had an issue. However, the partner support we had could improve. There are some disadvantages compared to Dell. The questions that are asked from the support are too lengthy, this causes a delay in support.

The initial HPE BladeSystem was easy.

We have the engineers from HPE set up the HPE BladeSystem for us.

There is a one-time purchase for the HPE BladeSystem.

We evaluated Dell before choosing HPE HPE BladeSystem. They were very similar solutions. However, after the negotiation by our commercial team, they choose BladeSystem based on price.

I rate HPE BladeSystem a nine out of ten.

BladeSystem was done really well.

I like the stability.

I would like to see the upgrade path a little bit smoother. We can't pull the servers from the current Blade, over to the NonStop system because of the different connectors.

I feel that it is a waste of money. I invested in it and I can't port it over.

The back of the blade system from their older generations will not connect to the new chassis. You will need buy new servers to the NonStop chassis.

HPE BladeSystem is a stable product.

We are a small-sized company.

We use only HP products. 

Every generation of NonStop is just an upgrade from their BladeSystem. They could have let be known that it was BladeSystem two, but they just gave it a different name.

The initial setup is complex. You need the help of a consultant.

We have two people to deploy and maintain this solution.

BladeSystem is a little bit cheaper.

I would rate HPE BladeSystem a nine out of ten.

We use BladeSystem is something that we use simply as hardware that is very reliable.  

The most valuable thing about BladeSystem is just like the purpose of the product: it is reliable hardware.  

What we want to improve would be to add more management capability for BladeSystem to be integrated with a cloud platform in a hybrid model.  

Another point to improve. There are sometimes problems with laptops having issues in connecting with virtual connections to the database. The virtual connections can be improved.  

We have been using HPE BladeSystem for a long time. We have always worked with HP it has been between five to ten years working with their products.  

BladeSystem is a very stable solution.  

As it is the hardware that all the applications are running on, it is not like software. You know what you are using and the capacity, it is not like scaling the number of users. The capability of the hardware can be upgraded and more blades can be added. So it is scalable. We are definitely going to continue to use this product and we will scale it as needed.  

The technical support is very good. Generally, we use a subcontractor to do a lot of the things that we require. If they need to, they can contact HPE and work with them. There do not seem to be any issues working this way.  

I have used a lot of products so, I would have to make a long list of products here. It is probably good enough to know that from all of them, we have chosen to work with HPE. We feel it is the best fit and the most reliable product that we can use and it is a reasonable price.  

The installation is very straight forward. We set up the hardware and there is nothing unique or complicated.  

The amount of time the deployment takes depends on the number of servers that need to be deployed. For the typical deployment, we have an HPE engineer on site. For each server it is very quick, let's say one week. The complexity is not very high.  

Ordinarily, we work with a general contractor such as an integrator of a consultant, but that is assuming we have a new deployment.  

It is not expensive, really, in this class of server products, but as a customer, we always hope that the pricing could be lower.  

I would recommend this product for other users who wants to start using it. On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate HPE BladeSystem as an eight-out-of-ten.  

The product can be improved and earn a higher rating by improving virtual connection integration, maybe lowering the cost (without degrading the quality of the product), and having a dedicated contact with HP for some critical issues if they arise.  

The product's stability, robustness, and support for Integrity blades were valuable because we ran 24x7x365 operations.

The product allowed us to save physical space and energy. Initially, we only bought this product to use Integrity blades. Eventually we used the vacant slots for HP x86 blades, which we used for Vsphere. This decision allowed us to save even more physical space.

I have used this solution for 11 years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

In general, I did not encounter any issues with scalability. Though we did run into incompatibility issues with a recent blade purchase that was incompatible with our existing fiber channel ports.

Technical support is great pre-sales. Technical support is also great for troubleshooting post-sales, but only if you speak with a high-level tech support professional. Their first-level tech support professionals are not great.

I did not previously use a different solution.

The initial setup was a turn-key installation.

We did not evaluate other options for the blade system. However we did evaluate other options/vendors for the storage system.

The x86 blades and Vsphere implementation is relatively easy. The C7000 supports newer HP blades. The product is very robust and we have not experienced downtime within the last 11 years of use.

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).

We're using different blades for different load purposes. We can decide if we want to use storage blades for storage or we can use compute modes for compute performance, and you can also upsize them. You can even combine different blades servers for greater effectiveness.

We're very satisfied with the system. I'm a Linux administrator and we quite enjoy the flexibility of the blade system.

I suppose new chips would be an improvement, but they do get new Intel chips every year. This provides better throughput on CPU workloads. 

Additionally, our network is constantly getting saturated, so I would suggest also a faster network of fabrics as another improvement.

We've been running the system for three years.

It's very stable. We haven't had any network issues on the flexed fabric ends.

You can get a blade that uses two slots instead of one. You can even put Integrity blade systems on the chassis as well, or the old Titanium systems. They can use up to four slots, actually. It's quite scalable.

We've been an HP shop for so long and that's why we stick with them. We previously used EMC.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

Go for it, you'll be happy. If you're a technical person, it's quite easy to manage and operate.

Their reliability and their integration. I’ve been working with HP solutions since the 90s, and they’re great.

They do what they’re supposed to do. They’re very flexible.

In the future, I'd like to see more manageability. They keep adding features which are nice, so I can’t think of anything else.

Relatively stable and reliable for the amount that we have. I’ve been working with HP hardware for decades, and as with all hardware there’s always problems, but for the years that I’ve been working with them they’re always been very reliable.

We haven’t really had to scale, but we can provision them usually from the get-go for what we do.

It’s okay. Working in support myself, their response times for us (we have a couple thousand servers) didn’t seem to be great. A lot of the time, there’s no concessions for response times not being met.

They’ve had servers forever, and we’ve always had HP. So we just continued using the existing solution.

They’re pretty straightforward. It’s all automated so that their tools are deployed for us.

We’ve been with HP forever, so I don’t think so.

I’m pretty opinionated, but first look at pricing and see which option is right for you. HP is a good bet, but it really depends. I can only speak about HP, but they’ve been very good.