HPE BladeSystem Reviews

The longevity and modular factors allow for upgrading and continued usage. It also has a pretty solid design and management.

Getting more out of what you purchased. Like the virtualization of the product and especially the virtual connects allows for better efficiency in usage. There is also easy management and easy upgrades.

It is nearing the end of its development, so I think the question is a moot point. HPE has a replacement system called Synergy, though it’s a more high-end system than the old C7000.

We have been using this solution since the beginning of 2007.

Generally there are no problems with stability. However, updating firmware in the virtual connect in the older days caused issues. But they have been fixed for a while.

There were no scalability issues. When upgrading to higher speeds, the backplane could be problematic. For example, when going to 16Gb fibre and 40Gb LAN requires one to go from the G1 and G2 to the later G3. Upgrading to the new 32 and 128Gb SAN is not possible.

Technical support is good to excellent. It is a solid product with a lot of years behind it and a BIG install base.

in the old days, HPE had a horrifying type blade system. (I guess they were all horrible before this blade.) That was a long time ago. The C7000 set the bar for blade systems when it came out.

The setup was quite easy to get going, although the virtual connects were a bit more problematic in the beginning.

Add OneView and ILO advanced to the base product. Don’t adjust the price, but just include them.

You have to look at the newer options now, especially Synergy. Keep in mind that existing servers cannot be used in the new model since it’s a completely new type of product redesigned from the bottom up with new case and everything. If you are adding servers to an existing Blade System, go for that solution since it is cheaper and still allows you to utilize your assuages.

If you are looking for a new system and do not have one in place, see the new products like Synergy.

It allows immediate access to the server management and immediate detection of the access logs.

It provides a secure access to the console and reliable administration.

Having implemented this solution, it has enabled to have remote management of the equipment problems, to identify the power for reviewing the status of errors without having to be on-site, but remotely from anywhere required.

I would prefer to have changes in the compatibility of the blade servers with the new ones designed by HPE, as the top team's version does not have it.

I have used this solution for seven years. I have used the following versions of the solution:

• HPE BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure Onboard Administrator Tray 1.7
• HPE ProLiant BL680c server blade G5 2.12 July 16, 2012
• HPE ProLiant BL680c server blade G5 2.06 May 31, 2011
• HPE ProLiant BL460c server blade Gen8 1.20 Feb 01, 2013
• HPE ProLiant BL460c server blade Gen8 1.20 Feb 01, 2013
• HPE ProLiant BL460c server blade Gen8 1.30 July 18, 2013
• HPE ProLiant BL460c server blade G7 1.20 March 14, 2011
• HPE ProLiant BL460c server blade G1 2.23 Nov 05, 2013
• HPE ProLiant BL460c server blade Gen8 1.20 Feb 01, 2013
• HPE ProLiant BL460c server blade Gen8 1.20 Feb 01, 2013
• HPE ProLiant BL460c server blade Gen8 1.30 July 18, 2013
• HPE ProLiant BL460c server blade G7 1.65 Nov 08, 2013
• HPE ProLiant BL460c server blade G1 2.06 May 31, 2011

We have not had any problems with the implementation.

The technical support team has very good answers to our concerns and when cases are opened, escalations are done in a timely manner.

I have not used a different solution.

The solution was implemented by the provider, as indicated it was in a simple way.

I'm the infrastructure manager; with regards to the prices, they need to adapt to the current needs of the country. Licensing has always been timely and it is a prompt solution.

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 HPE BladeSystem is a very stable system. We use them in our data centres for the design and development our systems. We're talking about hundreds of BladeSystems we have in place.

It is very convenient that we can assemble them like building blocks. We can just buy them and put them in the system. They are standard building blocks.

We would like to see faster processing and more memory.

BladeSystems are very stable.

Scalability is perfect.

We use technical support every now and then when we have some hardware problems and I think it's fine. Depending if it's a reseller or HPE itself. I would say in general it's okay.

We have been using BladeSystems for almost six years now. We didn’t really have a previous solution.

There's always a learning curve when you start with a new product. When you past the learning curve, then it's straightforward.

Have a serious look at this. It brings a lot of value for us. That tells enough. Our company is doing very well.

When selecting a vendor, the pricing must be okay. But next to the pricing, I want to see a long term road map and know that they will be a trusted partner.

We have a "super contract" with HP, which combines HP hardware, HP service, and HP maintenance. It's all combined, making it easier for me to manage the system and network team.

I have bunch of parts and a local team from HP sitting five meters away from me. All the relevant people are there -- support, outreach, etc. It's very easy to have one interface that covers a very wide scope.

One way to improve would be in the monitoring and reporting. We get one report per server and it's ten pages long. But at the end, there's no aggregate showing the order of the infrastructure. So, I have no idea how large a percentage of my CPU is used overall in the infrastructure. I'd like reporting that takes into account all the servers.

There are also some tools missing. We started with the basics and moved up to more high-capacity resource management. The existing tools will help with this, but if we wanted to get more complex, we'll need some tools it just doesn't have yet.

I regularly get emails about incidents, disc replacements, etc., but so far we haven't seen any bug issues with the Blades. It's very stable.

We have a thousand servers and five thousand users, so in terms of scalability, yes, it's been scalable and we're able to expand more if necessary.

Most of the time they're responsive, we have a service contract that covers all areas. There's no ping-pong between service providers.

It's quite straightforward. This is also outsourced to HP, so we just send the requirements; we want this kind of server, it is to be installed in that place, and then it's all processed by HP.

If you have a big company, big enough to get these kinds of contracts, it saves a lot of time and a lot of money because it's all outsourced to HP. It's very practical.

The manageability of the BladeSystem is its most valuable feature for us. Within a single blade enclosure, we can manage all of our infrastructure.

It's saved space and, I suppose, cost. There's less maintenance, less wires, and smaller footprint by quite a lot. There's also virtual management as opposed to physically plugging things in.

Although we can manage from a single blade enclosure, the interface is usable for the CPU and memory aspects, the storage goes to our 3PAR, and that requires learning a different tool. We want to be able to use the same tool to provision storage from our blade management application.

Also, I'm concerned that the chassis will only last so long. New blades will comes out at some point and the chassis won't be compatible anymore. We can upgrade it, but it's easier to change the blades than it is to change the chassis.

I can't remember the exact model of the blades, but we have full-height blades and half-height blades. We've had them for four years.

We've had no deployment issues with them.

They've been stable.

We went from 60 physical servers to 10 blades. We've been able to add more blades in our recent projects as well as to upgrade them. So, no, there have been no scalability issues.

I haven't really had to use technical support.

We trust the solution. We've used HP physical servers for 10 years, and never had any issues. We looked at different storage vendors, but in terms of servers it was the reliability of the HP products that led us to these blades as well.

The initial setup was quite straightforward.

I've worked with other vendors in the past, but not in a recent project.

Plan ahead. If you zone your network for active-active, you're going to get more throughput.

Among the most important features, is the possibility to manage all the systems from a single web UI, the ease of working with networks through the Virtual Connect devices, and finally the huge information offered in relation to the monitoring of the different elements and alarm systems

The scalability of these solutions and its great adaptation to existing software models has allowed our cloud environment to grow easily. The physical volumes with data combined with its performance, has enabled us to reduce our pool of conventional equipment, and converge High Availability solutions in our cloud environment with powerful hardware.

We expected more processing power, with more CPU cores and a greater number of cores per CPU.

Our company currently uses hardware solutions from different manufacturers. In relation to the HP Proliant products used for our cloud environment, these are primarily equipment BL and ML generations G4, G5, G6, G7 and G8. Our cloud environments also feature HP 3PAR storage solutions. The HP Proliant solutions have been used in our cloud environment for over five years. It was the best option available on the market, and we believe that it now enjoys the best reputation for such solutions.

The only problems encountered in the implementation of these products is that there are always more updated versions of the firmware supplied with the products, which requires revision and updating equipment before putting into production. Some versions of HP Blade require additional drivers for installation or special software distributions designed for these products.

Our satisfaction with the Customer Service is high, both the attention and availability as the solutions offered have always met our expectations.

The service availability of technical support gives us great peace of mind because their response times are minimal.

We actually had different solutions, and still do. Solutions such as Cisco UCS, which has a very similar philosophy, beaome more complex and less effective. Solutions from manufacturers such as Supermicro, and Dell do not reach the expectations, and require more supervision and maintenance by our technicians.

The installation was easy. It's usually quite intuitive since their operations team, and our team both have extensive experience in this type of facility, so that did not involve a special effort.

I can not evaluate the return on investment, as I don't work in accounts, but I understand that if we continue to invest in these solutions, we will get good economic results.

I really value the FlexFabric interconnects.

HPE BladeSystem was introduced by me as an architect to boost the performance/server footprint, especially with VMware virtualization.

The storage blades could be improved.

I have used it for eleven years.

There were stability issues in the early versions, Blades G1.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10.

We used rack mounted servers.

The initial setup was straightforward using a wizard.

The customer has to decide and evaluate the tradeoff between CAPEX and OPEX.

We evaluated the IBM Blades System.

Examine your infrastructure KPIs. This will typically include analyzing a reduction in OPEX, ease of operation, ease of troubleshoot, decreasing cabling, and increasing footprint performance.