HPE BladeSystem Reviews

To us, the most valuable feature is space. It's the much smaller footprint of having eight, 10, or 12 blade servers, as opposed to having 10 bigger servers in place. There is also a power savings.

• It enables us to expand easily. The whole blade center's a very plug-and-play type system so we can expand rapidly and increase our farms easily.
• There are performance benefits to it as well. We've moved up generations of servers with the blade environment.
• It's very flexible.

We know that the blade centers probably have a limited life span now. It probably has five years left. Having invested in it, we would like to be able to keep it with new generations of servers, new generations of blades, faster processors, and so on.

The next real release of the solution has been replaced by Synergy in pretty much every scenario. It's the composable workspace, which is part of the environment in which you can actually make resources available at the touch of a hat; and automatically spin up more disks and more servers. This is currently available, but it's kind of like a next-generation product. I don’t think it will ever make it into a this-generation product, but it would be nice.

So far, I've had no real stability problems, so it's been good for us. We renewed our licenses about two years ago. I don't think I've ever seen a single error since.

It is excellent on scalability.

We used technical support on one or two of the upgrades we did. The technical support was very good.

HPE was in the company when I joined them; but I've used HPE in multiple different companies over many years now.

We were previously using HPE DL380s, but it was as standalone servers. We managed to take out about 10 or 12 standalone servers, and replace them with eight blades. It took up less than half the rack space.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I've done most of the design work and specifications, but we actually brought in a third-party company to actually do the installation, and worked with them to do it. That all went nice and smoothly.

We didn’t really look at other vendors. We did briefly look at Dell, and some others, but HPE being HPE, it was a “no choice” scenario. It is a really, really good solution.

From my experience with HPE and the BladeSystem, I could obviously recommend it. We’ve had no problems or issues.

The absolute number one thing that is the most valuable to me with all my HP products, BladeSystem included, is stability. They're all very stable. Secondly, HP offers excellent support.

It takes away our employees' worries about having to disconnect. We don't use HP's services, but in terms of hardware, we're happy with it.

I'd love to see more collaboration between HP, Cisco, and Microsoft. Those are the big names to us in the market. I'd like to see them work together and not compete and be nasty.

We've been HP customers for 15 years now.

Deployment has been fine for us.

We've had no issues with stability.

Scalability comes without saying. HP has scalable storage and I'd like to thank them for requisitioning 3PAR as that's actually added good technology. They worked with us to migrate from old systems.

Support is excellent and I can see a natural growth in their product. There is no decrease in quality from when we first used it 10 years ago to now. Everything is naturally growing up. Their features and return of the features and also accommodation of new accounts. That's something that they do.

HP has a heritage you know. As I say, we love their solution. We trust their capabilities to innovate.

HP appreciates discussions. Whenever we've started new projects, they bring the sales guy, engineers, and senior solutions specialist. We sit and talk and we set objectives and accordingly we define the projects to execute and monitor.

I don't think that there is anything else that's better.

My company is working in media and we offer a solution for TV channels. We use HPE for classic IT usage but also for broadcast systems, to transport and deliver the signals to the TV channel. We use a BladeSystem for TV channel transcoding.

The benefit is the density and the capability for global harmonization on the hardware, because all the hardware chassis are the same. We can also purchase the same network cards too, chassis by chassis, so it gives us a global solution.

The density. It's good to have a sixteen-server chassis.

I'm not thinking about what kind of new services we could have in the HPE C7000 because I have made the decision to go to HPE Synergy or Dynamic.

The stability is good. We have used it for more than ten years now, and it has been a very good product.

The scalability is limited because you only have a 16-server by chassis, so you have to add more chassis, and you can't have a domain fabric like HPE Synergy, for example. You would need to have a taskforce behind the chassis to make the network possible, between the chassis, rather than a solution which is fully integrated via a domain fabric network solution.

Behind a domain fabric, you can connect something like 20 chassis. With this technology, we will have a real scale-out possibility, rather than the C7000 chassis which does not scale out.

We have contract support with HPE.

It was not complex for us. We built our server installation.

I would recommend HPE BladeSystem.

I'm satisfied with HPE BladeSystem at the moment but we can imagine consuming Blade servers, metal-as-a-service. We have an entire environment refresh coming up at the moment. We need to make provisions for metal-as-a-service because we have a huge machine. We cannot re-authorize this machine, and we need to make the right provisioning for metal-as-a-service.

We're beginning to look at the Cisco UCS technology, with a domain fabric system. But at the moment we don't have an agreement with Cisco. My company is part of the Orange main group and we have an Orange agreement with HPE and Dell EMC. So we are looking at the HPE Synergy and the Dynamic systems.

Even if we are looking for HPE Synergy and Dynamic in the future, we're also looking for a hyperconverged solution like Nutanix or HPE Simplivity.

So in the future, we will have both technologies, hyperconverged and the classic chassis Blade technology. We have two different needs. We have needs for virtualization, so hyperconverged is enough at first, and Nutanix or HPE Synergy is okay. On the other hand, we need to continue to consume metal-as-a-service, so HPE Synergy or Dynamic as a work product. HPE C7000 is limited in terms of having a real metal-as-a-service. From my point of view, the best approach for metal-as-a-service is HPE Synergy or Dynamic.

The most criteria when selecting a vendor are reliability, and their capabilities for the future: the right research and development for the product to be able to come out with new features in the future. They should also have strong support, of course, and have the right functionality to be integrated into modern information systems.

I rate HPE BladeSystem at eight out of ten. It has strong reliability and, for a mid-range company, it's a very good product.

Single point of management, redundant management components, reliability, easiness of setup and installation.

Like all the blade systems, they save rack space, power and cooling requirements, cabling complexity and are adding features like the single point of management.

It's quite an old product already having it's successor HPE Synergy, which is in every aspect better than the c7000

Seldom

Firmware dependencies with older generations of HP servers.

Satisfactory.

No, it was the first blade solution.

No

Go with HPE Synergy instead

Sure, the IBM and DELL alternatives.

To go with HPE Synergy instead

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 BladeSystem with the manageability and the reliability of the BladeSystem. I used to work for HPE and with the ProLiant line so now we're pretty loyal to HPE servers, and have been for several years.

The hardware is very dependable. We don't have a lot of downtime. Whenever we do need to call support, support is always very fast and able to jump on things. That's what we like about it.

We pretty much use the blades for everything that we can. The only reason the rack mounts are still around is because we have some fax servers that need fax boards that don't fit in the blades and that's pretty much it.

We've had other vendors trying to pitch similar hardware to us but it's something we don't even consider just because of the stability and the reliability of the HPE hardware.

That's a non-issue for us. They're easy to scale especially with the blade chassis. We stack several of them into a rack, stick in more blades whenever we need to.

We don't use them very often. Usually we have a minor issue, a hard drive or something like that so we really don't use it very often but when we need to, it's always very good.

We kind of got in on the ground floor when the blades were first coming out. We decided to make the plunge just to save space and from there, we just fell in love with the blades. A lot of people have, with the space saving and they're just easier to configure than the rack mounts. You put in the blade chassis and you slide in the blades instead of having to rack 12 servers.

We looked at Cisco UCS but the manageability of it and learning a new product wasn't something we wanted to do. We also felt like these were still a superior product.

I would tell them to strongly take a look at the HPE. Go ahead and do a bake off if you want to. If they want to prove a concepts with the Dells, Dells will give them a way to you to try them out. If you rack them up side-by-side, I think all the features set and just the reliability of HPE makes them come out ahead.

As a company, as a service provider, we primarily use the solution in order to give service to other companies.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's an easy process. 

Technical support is pretty good.

The solution is quite mature.

The stability, in general, is good.

I have noticed that the solution does provide a very good ROI for companies.

I've dealt with the product for about 20 years at this point. It's likely been two decades. I've spent a lot of time with it overall.

The performance is okay, 

The scalability is okay.

Technical support is good. They are going a good job overall. I would describe them as helpful and responsive. We're satisfied with the level of support that is on offer.

I have not found the initial setup to be overly difficult or complex. It's straightforward. The process is simple. 

The solution is one of the best in terms of providing an excellent ROI to its users.

We are HPE partners.

We mostly deal with eh latest version of the solution. I can't speak to the exact version number. 

I'd recommend the solution. It's a good choice for the right use case. A company needs to look at it and decide if it's right for them and their purposes, however.

Overall, I would rate the solution at eight out of ten overall. We've been mostly happy with its capabilities.

The HPE BladeSystem c7000 is very convenient for virtualization. We have virtualized about forty Blade servers. It is easy to manage and has ideal server density.

HPE Blade system has the ideal server density that saves your data center space and reduces cable traffic in cabinets.

With just one cable, for redundancy it's around two, you can feed sixteen servers in a single c7000 chassis.

The only side that must be improved is the active-passive interconnect module architecture. This blocks interconnects so that they can be upgraded simultaneously.

The scalability is very flexible. You are not limited to any spec like server type, network, or fiber module differences.

HPE's customer service is almost perfect, they are number one, at least in this class.

The initial setup is not so complex, but regardless I strongly advise you to get vendor support.

For anybody planning to use the c7000 for virtualization, I strongly advise you to use half-height servers. This gives the advantage of using sixteen Blades in a single chassis.