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The next real release of the solution has been replaced by Synergy in pretty much every scenario.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 most valuable features are that it:

• Is compact
• Integrates the infrastructure
• Is easy to configure
• Is easy to manage

It saves us a lot of space, supplies, and amenities. That is important for us. The performance of the system is very good.

We would like to see a more compact and more powerful solution.

We have not had any problems with stability so far.

The scalability is great.

We have only used technical support for the initial installation. They were very professional.

We were using a similar solution from other vendors, but we found that HPE is much better.

It was a straightforward installation.

What's most important is to have really good, reliable professionals. You want really good support. We were looking at a couple of vendors, but HPE at that time had a good local presence. They were very good at representing their solutions. They had really good experts, so everything was perfect. They are a good vendor.

Being modular and being able to replace parts as needed, is easy without taking systems down.

Less real estate - that's pretty much it. Manpower and time, and even resources, electricity. Bills go down because of BladeSystems.

Better pricing is always a plus.

It does its job, I haven't had any major problems with it.

It's scalable.

I haven't used it but my colleagues who have haven't had any issues with them.

It's pretty scalable, but then again, it's pretty old. It's not as scalable as the Cisco Blades that we currently have, but I'm not going to knock it because of that, it's just because it's old it doesn't have all the technology that Cisco has right now.

Do your homework. Shop around and look at other vendors. Don't just look at one specific blade system.

The most valuable feature is that we're also using HP software, so the BladeSystem fits together nicely with that.

We use a lot of HP products, in fact, and so HP is a big partner of ours. It makes things in our organization run more efficiently and with less interruption when we run the BladeSystem with our other HP solutions.

There could be some improvements that have to do with CPU architecture, but that's not really an HP part. There's some virtualization we'd like to do that would need better CPU design. It is, however, a little bit difficult to move reams above BladeSystem.

We're using the HP Blade C7000 and BL460 plates. As connectivity modules, we're using FlexFabric.

It's deployed fine for us.

The only thing that would be defective or would need to be replaced is just the discs. The plates just keep running and running. They're pretty stable.

We have lot of space to go with new blades and the whole environment is organized, so it's really easy to put in the new hosts, or new Blades in this case, into the new regular machines.

We switched because HP is stable and reliable.

The initial setup is always straightforward.

These are the servers I use to host my virtual desktops and virtual servers. They outperform the older Dell servers that only had one system on them. I have about 10 machines on each physical blade. The HP ilo Management Interface is very useful and user friendly.

Blade servers are fading away. I shouldn't have bought these. Overall value is less than traditional rackmount servers. Scalability is limited; restricted by the chassis.

These work great for what I'm using them for, but they are not future proof. XenServer has great features allowing me to have heterogeneous pools. Blades are a good solution for organizations that have limited space and don't want to virtualize.

Ease of use.

Our requirement is 99.9999% uptime. That is what we have experienced from these servers.

With the technology advancements, both the OEMs improve their products for best performance. I would also prefer additional improvements in thermal design and management of servers.

HPE Servers for seven years (HP ProLiant SL6000) and HPE Blade for five years (BL460c & Rack). 

All in working condition

No issues.

No issues.

The technical support is the best.

We have used SGI, Sun, and IBM and now Fujitsu. The procurement is thru open or limited tender only.

The initial setup is mixed between being straightforward and complex.

We have well-defined process for the technical evaluation of pricing.

We evaluate all the responses to our requirements. After the selection is made for two to three products. Then commercials are checked and the best price solution is selected.

Check the literature and reviews available for the product. Ask and clarify all the queries before freezing on the requirements.

I get the same level of service and perspective for everything. It is a generic experience with respect to what it's used for.

I would like to see all-around fulfillment availability from top to bottom in terms of features. I guess the answer is higher availability.

The stability is pretty good. I'd say it's on par with other vendors in the same category.

It scales fine for tens of thousands of things.

I can’t comment on things that I'm not supposed to.

We were using a multitude of vendors with comparable differences.

We considered the typical ones, the big three: IBM, HPE, and Dell.

I needed a solution because of my economies of scale. I had the demand and a business need.

I would advise colleagues not to rush into settling on a solution. When we were choosing a vendor, we considered price, performance, availability, and engagement.

One of the useful features is the Virtual Connect module as this approach allows me to utilize fewer physical ports to reach the total number of segregated ports that I need, especially for a virtual environment. Also, there is a server profile attached which is similar, but not yet full blown, to stateless computing.

This particular product allows us to mix up the environment - not only x86 but also the HP UX where the critical application were deployed. This particular architecture (BladeSystem) also allows us to have higher density which cannot be reached by traditional rack-mount servers. Currently, the latest trend (hyper converged approach) is still under observation.

The management is great but there are other competitors that are implementing a better approach. Even HP's own latest products have this composable approach, so if there are any changes that I would like to see, they are within this particular area.

I've been using it for two years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We've experienced no issues with performance. There are several versions that have issues with the hardware that we need to replace and update firmware to fully utilize the blade.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

7.5-8/10 because currently our company has a partnership that allows us to provide services and tech support. We get a great response from the HP team, and our local teams are also ready to help.

We chose this product because of the stability and their market share is quite large. This means that older products come from the same principals that makes it easier to integrate, and the second one is that this particular item is good to implement.

It is quite straightforward, as there is a wizard. I think newbies with simple documentation can perform the initial setup.

If the project is a complex one that includes any other items (storage, network, etc.) I would strongly recommended to hire a vendor team as it is their job to not only initialize the BladeSystem, but also to integrate it with the entire solution.

We also use Cisco UCS and IBM Flex servers.

Keep observing the market as new technologies have emerged, but not all are useful yet. It is good if we have a good relationship with the solution integrator as they may also give feedback.