HPE BladeSystem Reviews

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. 

We have a mix of generation eight and ten Blades in our HPE BladeSystem and we mostly use the system for virtualization.

One of the most valuable features I have found to be the enclosure. It is really easy to manage and everything is integrated. You are able to upgrade the software quite easily.

We sometimes have compatibility issues depending on the browser that you are using. For example, sometimes you have to switch between Edge, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, or Chrome to have things operating correctly.

We have a few Blades from previous generations that cannot have the updated firmware upload to them unless you have a maintenance contract with HP. This is a frustrating problem we have experienced with the support.

I have been using this solution for approximately eight years.

The solution has had a few bugs and glitches.

The solution is scalable, we have approximately 3,000 people that use this solution.

When we received technical support from HPE and it has been very good.

I would rate the technical support for HPE BladeSystem a ten out of ten.

The installation was very easy.

We have been satisfied with the price. However, there are additional costs for support.

We are currently evaluating and researching other options because we are looking for simplicity. We plan to replace our HPE BladeSystem with converged or hyper-converged infrastructure.

I would advise others this is a good system overall with great hardware.

I rate HPE BladeSystem an eight out of ten.

The density of the BladeSystem, that we can keep adding blades as we need more VMs. The longevity of the system that it creates as well. Right now, we only have our job site, but we'll eventually grow into our large building, and the scalability of the BladeSystem is pretty endless. Now with the new technology like Synergy, it's kind of an offshoot of that almost, and I'm looking forward to utilizing even the Synergy in that whole environment as well. Especially now that the management software can manage all of those platforms.

I like the BladeSystem. I've been a fan of the BladeSystems for a while, since when they came out way back in the day. My first BladeSystems I used were IBM and then HP. I liked the density. A lot of servers in one rack. There's the backplane. We get a lot of throughput in speed and the ease of attaching it to our networks is very good about the BladeSystems. It's less of everything. It's less cabling coming out of the BladeCenter, so it's easier to manage, it's just a cleaner system.

I was looking at the HPE Synergy. What I see there is it's the next evolution of that whole BladeSystem. It pretty much puts compute, it puts storage, and it puts memory all in one pool. It's being managed by the one management module and so it's basically the whole pool data center resource. It also gives the flexibility of utilizing it in a fully virtualized environment or, if you need a physical server, you can utilize a physical server as well. Then extend out to some of the older devices like the c7000 or something, can enter into that whole resource domain. That's compelling as well.

It's very stable.

In my past at a couple director positions I've held, I've utilized Cisco's UCS product quite a bit. I've had experiences with that from when that product first came out. They're both very good systems. I think Cisco makes a solid product there. It might be coming to its life's end now. As things like Hyper Converged is starting to really take off and I like the slant that HPE has with the Synergy platform. That's almost like taking a BladeSystem or UCS kind of technology and moving it to the next level. That's what I see HPE doing with Synergy.

It was very easy.

I had HPE do it.

Really look at it closely, but really look at the Synergy product as well. That seems to me like that's the next evolution of the BladeSystem.

• Ease of use in terms of setup
• No need for configuration
• High Availability
• Profile copying
• Auto-tiering
• One system can go down and the other is still fully functional, so you have redundancy
• Removes a lot of administrative hassle

It’s reduced, by about 50%, our administration time in terms of server maintenance. We have the ability to withstand an outage that we didn’t have before.

I would like to see, now that HP has acquired Aruba, all my HP devices connected.

I’ve used it for almost two years, we deployed our first system in Feb. 2014 and second in July 2014.

No issues encountered.

We have been extremely stable. That is the reason we placed these servers in our environment. We decided to go with HP because of cost, stability and ease of use, and we have been able to hire over a hundred people a year due to the stability within the organization.

No issues with scalability.

10/10.

10/10.

We were using IBM and they were horrible.

It was very straightforward, seamless and very easy. My team did not have a lot of experience, and within a day they were experts. They were able to figure out the system and deploy.

We did it in-house.

I would say it’s a considerable amount of dollars, we lose about $160,000 a day when we're down, and with the amount of time of downtime we’ve had being so little, we’ve saved a good deal of money.

It wasn’t expensive, and the purchase of the equipment was not bad at all. The total investment was under half a million, which is a drop in the bucket compared to what we’ve gained.

We looked at a ton of other options, some within HP, and some from Cisco. The HP Blades made the most sense for what we were getting.

Understand your environment, and make sure it’s the right fit for you. You know the uptime you need, the type of compute you need, and a formal understanding of 'do we have what we need in the data center to push this.' This may not be the right solution for everyone, but know your business and whether this solution is applicable to you.

We are using HPE for the virtualization. All machines are virtualized, and we are using them in the clusters. They are highly available and set up on the default ones as well. For the DMZ, we use regular rack servers. Those are separate clusters.

The solution is very easy to use.

We find the product to be very stable.

The scalability is great.

Technical support is okay.

These particular blades are no longer being produced. If they produced more or offered support for them I would be interested in getting more.

It would be ideal if they had been offered at a lower price point. If they bring them back, I'd buy them at a lower price point. 

The support you get is dependant on the region. Some regions are better than others.

I have been here, in this company, for more than four years. We have been using the product since I have been here, so it's likely been more than five years that the company itself has used the product.

The stability of the product is very reliable. The performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution can scale well. It's not a problem if a company wants to expand it.

We have thousands of people that use it.

I've been in touch with technical support in the past. The level of service you receive depends on the region. We have two data centers, one in Frankfurt and one in Paris. When we were assigned to the Frankfurt team, they are okay, however, the local French team left us a bit unsatisfied.

Mainly we are using blade servers from different vendors. We have Cisco UCS, HPE blade servers, and Lenovo blade servers on the global team.

In previous companies, I used HPE and the Cisco blade servers as well - the Cisco UCS servers. In one other company, I used Dell servers as well.

It's my understanding that the initial setup is very straightforward and simple. However, I was not directly involved with the initial setup. It was two or three years ago.

I'm not sure exactly how long the deployment process takes.

We have five or six people on staff that can handle deployment and maintenance tasks. They are all engineers and one is a team leader.

The price of the product was a bit on the high side. 

You do have to pay for the hardware and a yearly licensing fee.

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been very happy with its capabilities.

I would recommend it to others.

The primary use case of the solution is specifically for application virtualization.

Before this, we were using rack mount servers. We utilized almost 30% of capacity on those servers. But, with HPE BladeSystem, because of it's small capacity, in comparison to rack mounted servers, it gave us the flexibility to utilize all the hardware that we have.

The virtual connect and network management port is a valuable feature. When assigning the bandwidth to servers and segregation between data storage and data connections, it is valuable. An additional benefit is the virtualization environment.

HPE has a new solution it's called Synergy. I believe it's the new generation of solutions. It has capability of sharing the storage. It has open blade servers within the same enclosure.

It is really reliable and stable. 

It is scalable and suitable for our organization. We have not reached the maximum that HPE Bladesystem can reach.

The tech support is very good, but we usually use our own staff, and revert back to HPE if we are in need of extra support.

We are constantly evaluating HPE BladeSystem vs Cisco UCS and  HPE Synergy vs HPE BladeSystem .

HPE BladeSystems is an old technology that cannot fit all of the dynamic organizational needs of our company.

The density of servers and their racks, just being able to fit as much as we can in as small space as we can. This is important because our data center space is at a premium.

We have a large DSX infrastructure for VMWare and having it uniform and having it compact is a good thing for us. As we're moving forward towards using OneView I think that'll save us some FT there as well. The older tools weren't as easy to use. I went to a session on OneView and it looked a little bit more like something we were going to be able to take advantage of and save a lot of time and configuration.

I think some of the stuff may be fixed but one of the issues we have is firmware on virtual connects. There's a little bit of overlap on the timing that causes, you know, if you're not careful it can cause a short outage for the Blade System. I think that may be fixed with OneView management.

We're working on implemented OneView. We're just barely getting started. I think OneView is addressing a lot of the issues that we have, we haven't been able to get fully into it yet due to limited resources.

It's very stable.

So really the main thing we've had was just the firmware with virtual connects can be a little touchy. There's another tool, I can't even remember what it's called, you can do a command line and avoid the issue, talking to our hospitalier but we haven't had a chance so what we've kind of done is made a whole chassis of failure domain which is kind of a waste of resources on occasion to avoid that.

Well to be honest, I haven't ever used another BladeSystem from another vendor. Our organization has an HPE Direct as far as technology goes, so I haven't really been involved in considering other platforms so.

I know they looked at Cisco a little bit but I haven't myself.

HP’s blades are by far the most configurable of all the ones we’ve tried. We're a company that deploys less than 60 blades a year in the data center, so it wouldn’t make sense to have a stand up UCS because we’re only standing up half a chassis of blades every year.

HP’s chassis is modular, so it’s economical. The architecture and model make sense for us -- and for other small-medium sized companies like us -- to stay with HP.

It would be good to see the driver support improved as this has been the weakest feature of the system. Despite this, we are still 2 points better than anyone else in the market.

Also, the learning curve for configuring the first UCS blade is very steep. The difference is that with HP, if you understand the principles of how to get the blade to talk to the outside way, it’s difficult to not get it to work just by poking around the HP switch.

I’m glad HP doesn’t do configuration wizards, because they make a lot of assumptions of what you’re trying to do today (only works if they know what your model is). Keep the cookbooks going, because they work a lot better.

One word of advice for UI: don’t let the web devs decide what features you need.

If I were a generic IT support guy and had a complaint with deployment, it would be that it’s hard to get to the bench and pull somebody off it who can timely fix a detailed technical problem.

Stability, overall, is very good, and it’s kind of like an old jazz song -- when it’s good, it’s very good; but when it’s bad, it’s terrible.

For small/medium sized businesses, the C-series blade chassis are great for the reasons I’ve said (they come in the right-sized bites).

If you’re a small business, you don’t want a blade chassis; but if you’re enormous, then you’re buying them by the rack (so perhaps UCS makes sense).

But for us, we needed the right-sized chassis, for which HP is the right fit. We’re going to go heavier into it, and I’m leaning toward us standing up the next production database in blades.

Once, we had a machine fall over, and we were quickly escalated up to the appropriate level of support. The bad news is that they didn’t tackle the problem quickly. We couldn’t afford to have servers down, and HP didn’t deal with it quickly. They first said to upload the logs, which we did. We were told to deploy an updated package of software – which we did not want to do since we wanted to stick with a stable release that was working for us.

It was a bit of a struggle to get Level 3 support to pay attention to our problem. The field technician was eventually the one who fixed it.

However, it’s good that HP still has a dual support platform (one for IT professionals and one for non-IT), unlike Dell, where it sometimes feels like you are wasting time talking to support teams that don’t understand your technical experience.

We use both BladeSystem and RackMail System a lot. By utilizing the computing capacity of both systems, we have more cores of HP’s BladeSystem than anything else. Our company’s growing so fast that we’re age-ing stuff out and replacing it very quickly.

I am not interested in new and shiny; I need usability right now. We switch whenever we do a hardware replace, and we tend to prefer HP’s computer platforms as they’ve proven to us that it's best not to mix and match in the computer space.

So far, we've bought only small devices, so it's not painful to change storage devices. Because of how we grow (acquisition and internally), we own mostly Dell the vast majority of the time, and as those systems go out, we replace them with HP hardware.

Pretty straightforward. The tech talk documentation is very good (cookbook). They have standard scenario templates for blade chassis and they walk you through the whole configuration for whatever your needs are. They’re not brand-centric, so we can use whatever switch we’ve got, we can configure all the ports very easily, and it's straightforward to do so.

HP’s tech talks are significantly better than the market, especially Dell’s, and it’s easy for me to compute my blade chassis without too much headache.

We casually looked at Cisco UCS (we’ve currently got a running installation, both fairly young machines right now), which completely loses to HP on ease-of-blade configurability. We’ve also got some Hitachi blades that are even worse.

The hardware is perfectly good hardware, unlike Cisco where I don’t like some of the design, and Hitachi’s blades just aren’t economical for our growth and configurability uses. You only have to configure the amount of blades that you need with HP.

We often do a rack-and-replace on hardware at a site we buy, and we need products that can keep up with our growth rate. We replace anything that's rendered obsolete when we grow, often replacing them with HP products.

The other thing that keeps us coming back to HP is the ease of support (ease that we have in supporting the server hardware and maintaining it). Ease of configurability and configuration for VMWare are very important.

We’re in the process of buying 14 new HP products.

Remember to take into account your business size when looking at the solution (see above). First, I would listen to peer reviews and figure out what your sizing needs are, because architecture decisions are not obvious.

I want to see VARs think more analytically regarding company needs. HP could differentiate itself more effectively by getting its VARs to think more like consultants.