HPE BladeSystem Reviews

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.

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.  

Probably the most value there is the compactness and the density you can get into the data center.

It would be nice if it could have better monitoring in terms of iLO and things like that. Some more interoperability between the different generations of blades.

Most recently, with some of our blades in our VDI environment we've had some stability issues. I don't know if that's a problem of HP or if it's a problem with HP with VMware and the VM-HP virtual connect on the backend of the Blade Chassis, but we have had issues in that environment.

We used VMware as a hypervisor on top of our BladeSystems, on our Blade Chassis, and on our blade server. It made it much more scalable for us to be able to spin up new architecture fairly quickly. What we've done is rolled back or moved, relocated some blades from one Chassis to another that didn't have virtual connect.

It's just as they always have been. They've been pretty solid in terms of technical support.

Most everything we had prior to building up our new data center was single server DL380s or 360 single servers. It would take too long to provision a DL380 to give people the access to a single server to be able to then do their development or build a new production environment.

We have a gentleman who's primarily our BladeSystem expert.

Make sure that if you're using it as a hypervisor, that you're doing all the pre-work on setup such as knowing the interoperability between different product statures that you're going to run on it.

The features that are the most valuable to us are its scalability, performance, and cost. It's also very easy to use, which is a huge advantage for our IT department.

The biggest improvement to our organization is that we can now expand our IT infrastructure easily. We can seamlessly implement additional IT assets if we want, whether that's to execute different plans or to remain consistent in our operations. We can changes things as we need to as we go along. With blades, it's a lot simpler for us to deploy, expand, and virtualize.

It lacks a reboot service when the firmware breaks and needs upgrading. It also needs easier installation.

We have no issues with deployment.

We had a few past issues, but they were mostly the result of old firmware versions and our fear of upgrading them in time.

It's very scalable as we keep adding more blades as needed. With one enclosure, we can have 16 blades or just three. I don't think we'll ever go back to the old DL3x.

Technical support is good. We initially went with a partner for support, but we now use HP services for going live of some environments, especially around some light-wear blades.

The initial setup was complicated. You have to understand your environment before you let yourself expand through it.

We're an HP shop with hardware and software, so we stick with them for all our IT.

Plan, plan, and plan some more. Really understand what you want to do because it can be a great integration opportunity. Make sure you work with a partner who understands your infrastructure well. Understand also how products from different vendors like NetApp, EMC, Cisco, etc. work together, especially with different firmware versions.

I'd say it's the turn-to provision as a replacement server in our consolidated fiscal data center. It comports with our general rule of consolidation and flexibility quite nicely.

BladeSystem has allowed us to create our own service area or banking area. We're able to provide a platform where we can start offering services back to the various groups within our organization and our external customers as well.

I think some improvements could be made on the switching side. We just transitioned from the Cisco 3120 switches, which were at end-of-line, to the HP switches, but only because they were the only option for the HP blades. That gave us a bit of a minor challenge from a skills and networking team perspective.

We've used it for eight months.

Deployment has been issue-free for us.

It's a really good system. I've used it before with previous companies as well, and we've had no stability problems.

We're just about to purchase our second place in the primary site. I expect to be able to scale.

From previous experience, technical support is very good.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We also considered Dell. We had a big conversation over what to do and ultimately decided to get something that could cover a huge service area. The best thing for us, we determined, was to go with HP servers. They fit our needs the best.

It will change your operations. It's a good option you should consider.

We use these chassis with Gen8 and Gen9 servers, Blade servers for virtualization, VMware servers.

They are reliable, and it's relatively easy to manage them. They also regularly provide patching for the servers. It's quite a good product.

HPE has told us that the c7000 will no longer be part of its portfolio, so I don't think so they will provide any new features. But if I had to say something it would be some features from the Synergy. They could go to a converged system with the c7000, so everything would be automatic in the system.

It's reliable. 

The problem is that when want to expand with a new chassis, you have to do everything manually. It's not automatic.

We have good support from HPE.

I don't know what the previous solution was, but in our company every four or five years we have a renewal process for the older systems. That was probably the reason for the switch.

For me, when selecting a vendor, the most important criteria are that the system must be reliable, and the support as well. The support is very important because we have a lot of business-critical servers and if something goes wrong with the hardware we need the support.

If you don't want to go to the new technologies, like hyperconverged systems or converged systems, if you want to use only the old-school technologies, I can recommend this solution.

I rate it at eight out of 10. It's a good product, it's reliable, the performance is good. You can expand with the new servers as well. It has been a leading product in the market until now.

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.

The most valuable feature, of course, is its size as I can build a huge compute resource on it.

A couple of those HPE BladeSystem Enclosures can give you a stable and distributed compute resource for a virtual environment.

First of all, there should be a change in the disk bay. Currently, in the case of a disk failure there is a need to remove the whole bay and as a result, to disconnect all the other disks.

I have used this solution for maybe more than four years.

I have encountered a major issue with VMware on Gen8. There is no support for NetQueue, that resulted in network issues with the VMs.

There were no scalability issues.

I was not satisfied with the support. It seems that the support team does not know their products in depth. Their main approach is to upgrade the firmware/drivers and replace the hardware. They are struggling in giving any type of technical explanation for resolving issues. But, there are not many issues that were not addressed by the support team and I always received a solution this way or another.

I have used this HPE Enclosure as a part of the design; we are using this solution from the beginning and have not switched to it from any another solution.

The setup is not simple but if the low-level design is correct, then it is a straightforward implementation.

Their licensing program is pretty simple.

We evaluated other products such as Dell and Cisco Blade Servers.

Pay attention to the HPE's management solution as they are securing the management interfaces of their servers. You need to implement it correctly, otherwise, in a case of a failure, for example, an incorrect network configuration may result in complete loss of the management.