HPE BladeSystem Reviews

We use it for direct authentication of the network storage of our files. We also use it for running some application systems, such as the student information management system and the accounting system.

We have DL360 and DL380. For storage, we have HP 2000.

They are very fast and very reliable. They are working under very tough conditions.

We had a few hard drives that crashed, and we couldn't find them locally. We've tried internationally, but we are still struggling to get its spare parts. This is the main challenge that we have faced with this solution. Fortunately, the other drives are still working. There should be easy availability of spare parts. I should be able to request a quotation online from HPE for things that I am not able to get locally. Currently, I can order online, but when I type the serial number, most of the time, it is rejected. I don't know why it is happening. It could be because the company that sold us the system didn't buy it through the normal HPE channel. HPE should assist us as users to get the spare parts.

Its security needs to be beefed up. I would like some security features. It was also challenging for us to set it up because we didn't get enough training from them.

I have been using this solution since 2013.

It is a very reliable solution. I've worked with other servers, and I find HPE BladeSystem very reliable.

We haven't tried to expand the solution. We have around 3,000 students and 255 staff members who use this solution.

Normally, we just look for some technicians around Botswana, and they come and assist us.

The setup was a little bit challenging because we didn't get enough training from HPE for setting up the cluster servers.

Its pricing was good. We selected this solution because it was within our budget. We paid just once when we bought it. We never bought any license. 

I would recommend this solution based on the robustness of the machines. It is the best system in terms of the value for your money.

I would rate HPE BladeSystem an eight out of ten.

We like the wire once approach. We've had to do very little maintenance on the backend connectivity components. We really have been able to basically leave our fiber and Ethernet connections alone. I think in our ten years on two BladeSystem enclosures, we've done one infield upgrade, to raise our capacity limits on Ethernet and fiber channel. But really, the same enclosures have been doing fantastic for that entire time.

We had a lot of work to do from a management perspective as an administrator to ensure that we had the correct firmware and driver levels, and things like that, between servers. HPE fixed that when they introduced the service pack for ProLiant. OneView has expanded the idea of server profiles and added some additional management ease - including the ability to define firmware levels for blades - the way that a Cisco UCS blade does.

We've been a BladeSystem customer for over 10 years.

The ecosystem of software the comes with HPE blade has been lacking. HPE's Rapid Deployment Pack (was rebranded Altiris when I used it) is clunky solution for imaging blades and it may have been replaced. Sometimes the NPIV makes it difficult to find WWN in the fibre channel SAN when bringing a new blade online.

Early on, I would say that it wasn't stable. Today, however they test all of the firmware and drivers together now, so when we do a deployment or upgrade for firmware, that service pack has been integration tested across all of the different generations and hardware components, so we've gotten a lot more stability out of the solution since they made that change, and that's something I will say across multiple different solutions. Sometimes if they identify a problem like that as a partner, they tend to try to correct it. It may take them some time to get it corrected, but we went through the same sort of thing with StoreOnce ... Early on we had some issues with the software releases and there were some inefficiencies that in a couple generations they had it worked out and they listened to customer feedback. They try to integrate that into their solutions. That's one of the things that keeps us as an HPE customer, because we do feel that communication and feedback gets heard.

Multiple enclosures at scale can introduce challenges. That's one of the downsides of a ten year old technology. HPE is working on new solutions to really hit scale issues that they have encountered with BladeSystem, but it works fine for us. We are a small to medium sized enterprise, so we've not encountered any major issues with scalability where we are at, but we are running one enclosure per sight, so we're not really trying to do scale things.

7/10 - it can be hit or miss. We get better luck with our premium support levels. We have a named TAM for some of our systems, that works out well. Escalation managers are always good. There is good technical talent, it's just sometimes hidden by first level support. That can be difficult and frustrating at times, but over ten years working with them, I would say today it's probably a little better than when I first started. Actually, I would say it's probably improved a good bit since I first started working with them, but it's still got some room to go.

BladeSystem setup was one of my first projects when I joined the company, there was a learning curve to it. It really actually was fairly straightforward except we were trying to do everything boot from SAN, and that added some complexity and learning curve. The actual hardware solution - it was fairly straightforward and made a lot of sense. Blades were brand new back then too, so it was a foreign concept, but it wasn't terrible. I would say maybe a a six out of ten or something initially, but if I had to do it now, it's probably a lot easier.

It really gets the job done well. It's dense compute. We replaced an entire rack of equipment with ten use, twelve use, I can't remember how many use it is, but with a single BladeSystem. It has been a long-sustaining enclosure. We have field upgraded the interconnects twice to add new capabilities as technology changed and those were service affecting but not very difficult. I have worked with Cisco UCS Manager and both have similar concepts. HPE Synergy is also due to launch soon, and althought HPE has a commitment to BladeSystem for the next few years, Synergy is really their next generation of blade technology.

It really gets the job done. The management is easy, it's been easy from an upgrade perspective and maintenance. So, it works really well for us.

We now have consolidated solution that can be managed from a single point. Converged infrastructure in one box.

There are a couple of features that are valuable. The first is the On-Board Administrator (OA), which offers the best consolidated solution where you can manage/monitor the blade systems, modules, and the chassis from a single point and is redundant when installing two OA modules. The other one is being a converged infrastructure in one box when having a Virtual Connect (VC) modules installed whether it is Ethernet or fibre offering more redundancy, better hardware utilization and more organization.

The solution was used for the deployment of a High Availability, Hyper-V cluster of 10 Nodes, it dramatically improved the organization services in terms of performance "having things done faster", availability "services are online 99.99% of the time" ,and scalability "add new and provide more services". Currently the system is able to handle all our organizational requirements, from running Oracle CRM system, a BI system, an ERP system, web-services , and a development/staging platform. The cross functionality and integration between the plat forms are more efficient, fast and almost no down time due to the internal communications backbone in the chassis.

The HP BladeSystem has been proven to be the best in the market in terms of blade systems, moving with every generation and you can see that when firmware updates are released. Any lags/issues are always resolved and more features are added and enhanced.

The only missing piece that would be great to add to this converged solution is an integrated KVM system that comes inside the blade enclosure, that will give flexible and easy access to the different nodes in less time.

On the deployment aspect and especially when installing any OS through the On-board Administrator USB port, the installation is slow. I hope they can upgrade the port to USB 3.0 for faster access.

I've used it for four years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

HP Technical Support is very good whenever a case is opened. The spare parts, when dispatched are received with no hassle and on time.

We were using HP DL 380 G4/5/6 then we decided to moved towards blade systems because it needs less space, while providing more. Also, it's easier to manage, as it's consolidated solution in one box.

The initial setup of a blade system is very straightforward. In less than five minutes from the time you power up the system, you will have it ready to be managed and the OS deployed.

We did an in-house implementation, and my advice is to be very familiar with the HP BladeSystem, and what it can offer as a converged infrastructure solution in order to have a successful implementation to meet your ends need.

The ROI is around 25%-30% and it will be higher considering the cost on the long term.

It would be very smart to know how your are sizing your solution, and what you need to reduce the cost in terms of licensing. In some deployments, it can be done without the need for extra licenses. And as well in terms of the blade units, no need to over size and pay more initially since they can be easily swapped, scaled, or upgraded in the future.

Go for it you will not regret it, and you will be moving to a better consolidated and converged infrastructure that is easy to manage and highly scalable.

For HP Blades, there are many products to choose from, so it is important to tailor your solution to fit your needs and goal in order to achieve an easy implementation and result.

We use HPE BladeSystem for our server needs. Additionally, we use other software solutions and professional models to meet the requirements of our clients.

The integration and price of HPE BladeSystem could be improved.

I have been using HPE BladeSystem for seven years.

HPE BladeSystem is stable.

The solution is scalable, offering flexibility and expansion options to meet changing business needs.

We used Microsoft SQL Server.

There are enhancements to the HPE BladeSystem. These enhancements are crucial for the installation and ownership of the product. They are similar and alleviate concerns regarding technical aspects and approaches. Additionally, they will contribute to improvements in broadband performance. 

The solution is expensive.

I recommend the solution.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Our IMS system, or internal information system, is run on the server. If we have some sort of issue with our student management system, then we run it on that server as well. 

The solution is very fast and the power consumption is great. 

Sometimes there will be a delay and it will take some time to restart the server.

The servers are a little bit huge, so it would be great if they could renew the size. Still, the Dell servers are comparatively large, but handling these servers, even just moving them or mounting them in the rack, is a huge challenge for us. If it is possible to reduce the size, that would be great.

We have been working with this solution for two or three years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. We have employees using this solution remotely and locally, so I believe there are more than 200 users. 

We have rarely had to work with the technical support team, but they are okay. We are satisfied with them. I would rate them an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The initial setup was not hard because our expert technicians handled it. It might be a little bit confusing to do the BIOS setup if you don't have much experience, but if you have expertise you can handle it. 

We handled deployment in-house with our own experts. We also have an internal team that deals with the maintenance of the solution, and it is very easy to maintain.

We have an annual license. 

We currently use both HPE BladeSystem and EMC from Dell. Personally, I prefer HPE because I have more experience with it. 

As a tech guy, I recommend HPE for heavy usage. If you need to use it for applications and multitasking purposes, I recommended HPE because you can simultaneously run different applications without any delays or issues.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of ten. 

I'm very happy with the product in general.  

I'm an engineer in different environments, I have seen HPE frequently; HPE support packs, et cetera. In terms of the hardware versions update, it's giving me very good support compared to other products. 

It is a stable product.

The scalability has been good.

Technical support is helpful.

I'd like to see an all-in-one packet in the future. Some solutions don't come with storage.

During deployment, they're providing different places for the .EXE files and whatever it is downloading. It would sometimes mess up. This could be adjusted so that it's easier to deploy without issue.

I've used the solution for the past 15 years. It's been well over a decade now. I've used it for quite a while. 

We are satisfied with the stability. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution can scale. It is a bit limited, however.

The support has been very good and we are extremely satisfied with them. 

Aside from some issues around .EXE files not downloading properly, the initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

In terms of deployment times, each blade hardly takes one or two hours to set up. It might take one or two days in total based on the already gathered requirements and whatever the company made already.

You only need about two people to deploy and maintain the solution. Once it's deployed completely, likely you only need one person to maintain everything. 

Vendors will come and they configure mostly hardware side. The remaining part, networking, et cetera, we configure, and everything is fine. Our clients mostly deployed it in-house. We come in to configure the WLANs and remaining stuff.

The licensing is paid on a yearly basis. 

I have recommended my clients to HPE. Rather than other companies, HPE would give good support, and I'm very happy with that. It is a good, high-end product.

I'm not completely an end-user. I'm like an administrator, in the server administration department.

The solution is more suited to the cloud in terms of deployment options. 

I'd rate the solution a nine out of ten.

• The space saving which has helped to reduce our cabling.
• It makes it a lot easier to bring up a new system. When a new blade comes in, we slide it in the chassis and we're done. I don't have to spend time wiring up a new server. It's just there, with my team spending less time racking something and getting it configured. We're just ready to go.
• It's the speed that which we can deploy new systems.

I would guess it crosses over as the reduced cost on real estate as if we've got less room, there's less cabinets we need to buy at a data center. I don't know that there's really a cost benefit from the hardware standpoint. A standalone server is going to be cost comparable to a blade, maybe even cheaper. I guess the business is going to save money by using less man hours to get it up and spend less money on real estate.

It'd come from a software standpoint - software support on the BladeSystem, particularly with Helion and OneView in that if you're using the Cisco fabric extenders instead of the HPE fabric extenders, there's a lot of functionality that you can't use. Because our network stack is Cisco, we can't do a lot of that automated provisioning of new blades because it's not supported. That's one thing that we'd really like to see HPE implement - true supportability of the Cisco fabric extenders.

The other thing is the support. With our initial purchase, we bought three chassis and maybe 15 or 20 blades. Out of that, we had probably a 20% failure rate within the first few weeks. It was really high and enough to make us concerned. We spent a lot of money on the chassis. We're married to them at this point since we don't want to throw the chassis away. The chassis were fine, but the blade servers themselves had a high failure rate, which didn't give us a lot of confidence.

Since then, everything's been fairly reliable, very few problems as of late, probably on the same frequency as we do with the rack mount servers. Whereas previously the rack mount servers never had a problem, Blades servers come with loads of problems. It could be completely anecdotal coincidence.

We haven't had to do a lot of technical support beyond that initial failure rate as it was resolved very quickly. If it's a bad memory issue or similar, the guys are out the same day, and have replaced the broken piece or the entire blade.

Deployment is easy. We just slide the blade in and put an OS on it and we're done. It's a lot easier than dealing with the rack mount servers and it is a lot faster.

The reliability, has gotten better; initially it was bad. I don't think there's anything bad to say at this point beyond those initial first impressions.

We looked at also using the Cisco UCS platform. The UCS I felt was more complicated than what we needed. Perhaps another customer might choose it over HPs, but the features that UCS had didn't appeal or apply to us. If you're standing up dozens and dozens of chassis on a daily or weekly basis, then maybe those copy/paste features in the Cisco systems would benefit. But for us, I like the simplicity of the HP BladeSystem. I liked it; all of our staff are already familiar with HPE hardware, so they knew they could take it apart and do whatever maintenance they needed to do. With the Cisco, it was learning curve that we didn't want to have to ramp through. We still use it because Cisco requires you to use their play systems for the phone products.

If you're somebody who's undergoing rapid growth and not standardized on a platform yet, then I'd tell you that it depends on your environment. If you're already an HPE customer, then I'm going to say your engineers already know it. If you're not deploying 1,000 chassis, then the simplicity of using the HPE blades, it's so familiar to rack mount, the management interface, it's almost identical if you know iLO then it's already there. It's easy to set up and it's much lower cost than Cisco.

These are rack servers. 

We have data for banking services. We use Windows servers, mostly. We install applications and banking applications mostly, otherwise like some E-discovery services servers are there. We have almost 25 servers. Some of them are in a data center, and some of them are in-house.

We can enhance the processors and increase the RAM. It's easy to do. It's very easy to upgrade.

The solution is issue-free and works almost flawlessly.

It's simple to set up if you have some experience with the product.

The solution is very stable. 

It is scalable. 

If you've never used the solution before, the initial setup can be complex. 

The pricing is high. If you compare it with Lenovo systems, the pricing is too high. At this point in time, we are looking for some servers and when we have compared the prices we found Lenovo is the lowest option, even though they have about the same level of services. 

We'd like them to be more scalable.

I'd like to be able to implement a single test system.

I've used the solution for a few years. 

It's a stable, reliable solution. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is good.

They can scale if it is required. 

We have more than 1,000 users on the solution right now.

Technical support is good. They are helpful and responsive.

Positive

Depending on your knowledge, the solution can be very easy or a bit complex to set up.

These are rack servers, so most of the time goes into acquiring them. Once you order them, it takes around four to eight weeks to get them. Once you get those servers, they can be deployed in a week or five days' time.

How many people you need for maintenance depends upon the technical guys as well as the applications themselves. If you're maintaining, then you just need two or three guys. However, it would take more resources if you talk about connectivity and application maintenance and other parts. It also depends upon the number of servers we have installed. 

The cost of the solution is high. There are other cheaper options.

There is no licensing. You pay for the solution once. 

We are currently comparing the solution to Lenovo.

We use it in-house and in a data center.

They need to make the product more scalable and price-efficient. 

I'd recommend the solution to others. 

I would rate the solution seven out of ten. It needs to be a bit less expensive.