HPE BladeSystem Reviews

This solution is for medium to enterprise-size organizations. I'm the IT manager of our company and we are customers and users of HPE BladeSystem.

Modularity is key to this solution. It's the main feature and it provides energy savings because you have one enclosure, and one system for the energy and power supply. In terms of connectivity, Blade is more versatile than other solutions because of its three-tier architecture. I know the new trend is HCI technology, but that requires changing the whole node which increases the cost. On the SAN storage, I don't have to change anything on Blade. If I need to change the memory, I can do it blade by blade, and don't have to upgrade the whole node of the plate.

The connectivity speed could be improved. It's the major thing everyone looks for. When you upgrade your system, you want connectivity at the highest speed possible. 

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

Stability is great and it's a reliable solution. We haven't had a single serious incident and only a couple of minor issues. It's one of the reasons it's an expensive solution. Competitors would not be able to compete. 

I believe BladeSystem is more scalable than HCI. If I want to add more storage or more memory on HCI, I have to add additional notes. With Blade, if I need extra storage, it's just a matter of additional discs. 

HP are the best on tech support. I really appreciate that they never leave you in the dark. They always track your case and can be very proactive, sometimes telling me if I have a storage problem. If there's a power shortage or power fluctuation, they let me know. 

Positive

I previously worked with Dell and with IBM. Both are now good companies, especially when they merge their technology with EMC. I don't have recent experience with either of them. I think they've improved a lot over recent years and are probably at the same level as HPE.

When we initially deployed BladeSystem, it was a little complicated but once you're set up you don't need to think about it. The main difference between the HCI and Blade is that HCI is easier when it comes to setup.

HPE is not the cheapest solution but if you want to buy a Rolls Royce, it costs. They are the most expensive product on the market. It's been 10 years since we implemented it, so I don't remember the licensing cost. 

My advice is to grow slowly, but plan for your growth. Don't get an enclosure that won't have expandability and don't go to a cheaper all-in-one model because you might get stuck with it for four or five years. You have to make sure that your system is expandable and that you can grow with it.

Overall, I rate this solution nine out of 10.

HPE BladeSystem can improve by providing the latest generation processor engine, such as the I-Flex processor.

I have been using HPE BladeSystem for approximately 20 to 25 years.

I have found the HPE BladeSystem can be stable most of the time. 

I can see the BladeSystem is having some hardware failure issues. I can see this happening frequently in one of the customers. If they can increase all the bandwidth on the internal network backbone, they should increase it to 100 GPPS. Additionally, The HPE BladeSystem has internal storage, but we cannot populate it as shared storage across the load. If we can provide the local storage as shared storage across the load, that would help the customers.

HPE BladeSystem is a scalable solution. It is a composable infrastructure which we can manage our external services. This is the one factor which I can see the server is much more suitable for the OneView console.

HPE BladeSystem provides excellent technical support from their team.

The initial setup of the HPE BladeSystem is complex with the OneView console.  You can see a lot of tabs and a lot of settings. The configuration could be more user-friendly in OneView, which will be helpful for the customer to manage all the testing.

HPE BladeSystem does not require a lot of maintenance, because all the components are specific and the costs are less.

The licenses for HPE BladeSystem are perpetual.

My advice is if a customer is looking for a less-density server, HPE BladeSystem is a highly suitable solution. If you install or if you require the 12 servers in the rack, it will take the 12 to 15 space in the rack. Additionally, we have to think about the cabling.

I rate HPE BladeSystem a nine out of ten.

HPE BladeSystem is used to consolidate the server's footprint.

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

HPE BladeSystem can improve proactive monitoring.

I have been using HPE BladeSystem for approximately 15 years.

HPE BladeSystem is very reliable, it is 100 percent stable.

As our business grows the HPE BladeSystem is scalable.

We have approximately 400 people using the solution in my organization. We plan to increase the usage in the future.

I have contacted HPE several times the HPE BladeSystem, and I was satisfied with the speed and their response.

I have previously used IBM and I was not happy with the solution. However, they no longer have the solution, they sold their portfolio to Lenovo.

The initial setup of the HPE BladeSystem was easy. The time it took for the deployment was approximately two days.

We used support from the vendor for the deployment.

I have seen a return on investment from using the HPE BladeSystem.

When you purchase HPE BladeSystem you have to pay for the support service. The first three years are covered under the warranty, and for any further support, you have to pay annually. When comparing the cost of HPE BladeSystem to other vendors, the fees are less expensive.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate HPE BladeSystem an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for our SQL Server VMware virtualization. We put this on our on SQL Servers and VMware virtualization systems on this product. 

The solution uses a smaller space in our data centers. It uses less feeder and network cable, which reduces costs. Troubleshooting is also easier than other options.

The solution saves us space and resources (like cables).

It's very easy to troubleshoot if we have issues.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The response time in terms of getting technical support assistance could be improved.

It's a bit expensive. They should work on bringing down the pricing if they can.

We have one older model, we've used for maybe six or seven years. We also have a new one, which is Synergy, we've used for two years.

The solution is stable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It's free of quirks and it doesn't crash or freeze.

The scalability is good. If a company needs to expand it out, they should be able to do so.

Our company has over 5,000 users on this solution.

We will continue to use the solution into the future.

The technical support is okay, I'd rate it seven out of ten overall. Their response times could be faster.

We didn't switch from a different solution. We had older models which we updated. We've always used HPE.

The initial implementation is not complex. It's a pretty straightforward process.

We deployed the solution over 100 servers, and it didn't take too long to deploy.

We have about ten to 20 people managing the solution.

We had a vendor assist us with the implementation.

I don't know the exact cost of licensing, however, it's my understanding that the solution is relatively expensive.

We're simply a customer. We don't have a business relationship with HPE.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using or if it's the latest.

I'd recommend the solution to other companies.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate it at an eight. If the pricing was better and they offered better support, I would rate the solution higher.

Probably the biggest thing I like about it is how easy they are, how easy it is for me to use them as building blocks for whatever system I'm working on. Whether it's another node of VMware cluster or another Microsoft cluster, it's really easy for me to be able to do. I can move them real easy around my data center. They're heavy compute but really easy and functional to use.

For me the benefit is the expandability. I can basically fit 16-blade Chassis inside of a 10U location as opposed to 16 rack mounts would be 32U in my cabinet. It's a lot more power, so I can really shrink my data center down a lot and still provide the same level of complement.

There's a cost saving, as there's a smaller real estate. It's not necessarily less hardware, but it reduces the power and the cooling requirements within the data center and the space is what I need.

They're physically big, about 240 lbs, but it's a minimal issue. I just started to get a BladeSystem that works, and I'd like to to work a little bit more with the ConvergedSystem.

They're not cheap, and for me to buy one is about $75,000 before I put any sort of server inside of it. I'd like the costing to come down a little bit.

We did look at a few others in the past, we haven't in a long time. Obviously we are an HPE shop. We did look at the Dell blades, the IBM blades, even Cisco's UCS system as well for a while, so we did actually do the proper comparisons across everything.

We chose HPE as everyone already knew the systems, knew how they worked. Ultimately, going through the other systems, HPE was the easiest one to go in and just start setting up and configuring right away out of the gate.

Part of it is really going to depend on what your use case for it is. If it's just running general server pools, then you get in there really fast, get it set up, run it using OneView obviously, which makes life a lot easier, because then you've got a single pane of glass to manage all your environments. That's the big reason I would use it.

• Centralized management
• Number of features
• Flexibility

High consolidation and density was achieved with a single C7000 enclosure and 8 BL460c G8 series servers that took over the workload of 8x .42U cabinets previously used for processing workloads. In combination with Flex-10 and Flex-Fabric technology we managed to reduce our 8x cabinets into just 1x 42U cabinet saving huge amounts on power, energy, while we became more flexible, scalable and efficient.

Number of supported VLANs on virtual connect technology limits the number of VLANs you can deploy in your network.

I've used it for six years.

No issues encountered.

Absolutely no problem. Only some HDD failures which were replaced in under 4 hours due to our Care Pack program signed with HP.

No issues encountered.

Excellent, provided you end up having your support issue handled by a good HP services provider partner.

Very easy to setup and maintain, one to two days of training is sufficient for an expert to understand the philosophy. In case the level of the user is medium to low, some extra training might be required which is more to cover the basics of networking, consolidation and interfacing in an efficient way various systems together.

We have two in-house engineers trained on HP solutions that perform the implementation and maintenance. Our experience shows that the implementation is really straightforward provided you have a plan in place already.

The ROI was within 2 years, as the electricity bill was about 60-70% more efficient while our computational and storage capacity increased by at least 400%.

Yes, IBM Blade Center with HS22 blades and DS series storage. We preferred HP due to a combination of facts involving better prices, better support and better interoperability with other systems.

Be careful with pre-Sales and Sales team of HP, they do make mistakes so do not hesitate to engage a third party experienced person or firm to get some extra advice.

When it comes to the BladeSystem, what we love about it most is being able to actually manage it using OneView. It's one feature that allows us to fully manage all of our infrastructure using just one application.

We were able to deploy a lot of different operating systems such as VMware and Red Hat Linux, Oracle, Oracle Solaris; also Microsoft's Windows server. All of these are fully supported within the HPE BladeSystem. It allows us to be able to implement and deploy different operating system using one HPE BladeSystem.

I would like OneView to go over the current limit of 40 instances.

It's very, very, stable. We've got over 40 HPE BladeSystems and so far we've had very, very few hardware problems. Whenever we have a hardware problem, HPE call us right away about our problem, and somebody works on that problem within four hours of generating a call for any type of hardware or software problem.

You cannot really scale a BladeSystem. If I were using it in conjunction with VMware, then we are able to upgrade or get a higher CPU or memory on a virtual machine or move a virtual machine in a different blade that has a higher CPU and memory. If it comes to that, yes, using other software, scalability is very good.

Technical support is very good. I've opened a lot of calls over the web or by phone with HPE, and I would say that 99% of the time, they respond to the ticket within an hour of opening an issue.

There is no complication at all when setting it up, either setting it up as an experienced user like myself or having HPE set it up for you using their services. No problem at all.

We were based on different hardware vendors. We selected HPE due to the cost of the hardware; also for the scalability of the materials, and the different models that could be inserted or interchanged in a chassis; also the easiness of the deployment. That's how we selected HPE BladeSystem. We also considered Dell, Cisco, IBM, and Oracle.

It's because we've been using it for so many years now. It's been very reliable for us. I would say consult your hardware vendor and discuss with them your needs. Sit down with them. Elaborate what services do you need and decide together. That's how I would say it.

The interface and dashboard are excellent and user-friendly. Configuration is also straightforward and similar to installing Windows.

There are limitations in writing exploiter features because of the sanctions.

Because we use this solution in Iran, I am unsure about the rules in Iran. Because Iran is a sanctioned country, we don't access any features and must use a program for our routine. We don't have access to add to anything in the HPE.

We would like to see OneView software features as an additional feature. It would be great for IT technicians, IT specialists and IT assistants.

We have been using HPE BladeSystem for two years. Is it a software system, we have many servers, and we use them daily for our banking, infrastructure, and government customers. It is deployed on cloud. Last month we switched our cloud, and we route the solution to connect Synergy Server and cloud services.

It is a stable solution.

The solution is scalable.

There are limitations to the technical support due to the sanctions in Iran. The HPE services have very good documentation, but we can't use it. We can't use this documentation without a VPN or proxy. In government organizations, we don't have any VPN or proxy, and support is very important.

The setup and installation were easy.

I rate this solution a ten out of ten.