HPE BladeSystem Reviews

The reliability of the BladeSystem, as we've used them for a long time, and the chassis/blades are backwards compatible. I know they're moving to a new BladeCenter, but over time I've seen the reliability with it versus other vendors, so for me that's what it comes down to.

It's the density of the compute power that you get. We've taken the ones that we can, some of the ProLiant systems, and condensed them down into blades. This has helped to reduce are footprint - reducing power consumption and cooling consumption Also, just being able to manage everything from one BladeCenter makes administration costs go down.

I haven't seen it lately, but I know with OneView, there are still some limitations. It was because the product roll-out last year was still kind of catching on and still kind of debugging, but I think once that gets some maturity and growth, I think that's going to be continued on the right track.

We integrate multiple power supplies. We have redundancy on the back plane with different mezzanines and things like that. It's been very stable. I would have to say on the ProLiant side, where we do have something running that's critical, it's a DNS function on there, there's always a backup. What we can't do maybe through hardware because it's a one chassis, we'll do through software as well to bring clustering and things like that.

We have technical account managers, and we call them to handle any kind of maintenance agreement or things like that, and have had very good support from them. If there's something that they can't answer, they're always willing to reach back and get the right point of contact. We've had very good dealings with our technical account manager and technical support.

It was never really a big risk for us, because we've been on HPE for a while, so getting to the new system was pretty low risk, and when it came time to do the migration or the upgrades to stuff, it's always been kind of non-eventful. We've never tried to minimize what we're doing, but we take precautions like calling HPE ahead of time, making sure that there's support there, that they're aware of when we're doing a migration so if anything goes wrong, they're there to support us. We haven't had any issues with that.

If we could get the cost down that would be good.

I did a trade study on this, I think HP has a big offering in terms of the number of blades that they offer and the amount of blades they can fit in a chassis, so I think they're actually ahead of the game compared to IBM and Sun/Oracle, and some of the other ones I've seen with Dell. I would say HPE is probably at the top of that game.

• It's easy to perform an upgrade
• The failover solutions
• The blade enclosure system
• The way it's designed
• Failover for network connectivity
• Storage uplinks
• = it's a pretty solid system.

I really love the service. We have the HPE care packs - supported contracts are 24/7 response time. It's the piece of mind that if my hardware were to ever fail, I'd be back up and running quickly.

We've used it for a couple of years already and we're really happy with the product.

It's more about the redundancy. Like I said, their uptime has to be pretty much all the time. They can't really afford to have any down time. The reliability that HPE offers means the BladeSystem are a perfect fit for the company.

I believe there's a product called HPE OneView that I'm really interested in looking into. Right now we run off of iLO connections or we manage our servers through virtual connects. It would be nice to get them all unified into just one display and then monitor everything from there.

I've never had any issues with the BladeSystems. There's never been a situation where we were down completely. Actually, the experience has been pretty reassuring in that sense. I'm very comfortable with the product.

It's outstanding.

We've been an HPE shop for a while. We know the service that HPE offers, so there really wasn't a need to explore another company in regards to blade systems. We are happy with HPE, and for now we're going to stick with them.

The product is really simple to install. The way it's designed, you just slide whatever modules you're putting in there and it's pretty much done. HPE give it the iLO IP and you're ready to manage. Once you have it, there's not much advice I can give. It'll work and do the trick.

The BladeSystems come with 16 blades in one chassis. This gives us a central location to manage all our HPE blade servers. We already apply a virtualization hypervisor layer on it, like Microsoft.

I would especially like to see a hyperconverged solution from HPE. With technology becoming faster and faster, and everything going to the cloud, I think cyber convergence is very good.

I’m fine, you know. I think there is no need to improve it.

Honestly, it's very stable. There have been no issues with it during the past five years. It's very, very good. That’s why we would like to expand our data center now to buy many enclosures to accommodate the demands of what we have right now.

It is scalable. I think that it is like HPE Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager Software. You can configure the network from a central location for all enclosures. We have more than four or five enclosures. That is very good for us. 

That's why I would recommend having one stack of vendor products. For example, we have HPE blade servers, some network devices, and some switches. This way, you can integrate and monitor the health status for all enclosures from a single monitor. You are alerted if any failure occurs. That makes our life easier in IT; so it's good.

I wasn’t involved in the initial setup, but my colleague says that it was good.

We compared HPE blade servers with Cisco blade servers. Cisco is good, but expensive. I don’t have experience with them, but one of my friends has it. Later, they decided to go with HPE. 

From our perspective in IT, you should look for the solution which fits your needs. It doesn't matter who the vendor is; but if you go with HPE, they have a lot of good experience in data centers. 

We decided to go with HPE blades and enclosures. They are very powerful and they fit our needs. HPE fits our needs, especially because they also have the back-end storage, like 3PAR. 

I recommend having a full stack with a single vendor, so you only have to deal with one company for support.

Now our company is thinking about buying new servers. It's called HPE Apollo, I think. It's in progress. It's very good. I hope we will get more experience with HPE, especially from a training perspective.

We were looking for stability. It's very powerful. It has huge resources. You can customize it as you like, and it fits our needs. Of course, it takes up little space. It's one rack in which you can put three enclosures. You can build your entire data center in one rack. It's very good. 

Since I joined my current organization four years ago, HPE did an amazing transformation of our data center. Everything there is an HPE product from A to Z. It's an end-to-end solution, including the hardware, networking, software, and everything. We are very comfortable with it. In five years, we haven’t faced any issues with it. It's very good.

The most valuable features are scalability, flexibility and deployment, as well as the ease of networking solutions within the chassis.

The low cost of deployment is the greatest benefit to our company. It saves us money.

The only thing we think is on the down side is that you can't push them anywhere near as hard as the pizza-box servers; the rack mounts. We knew this at the very start, but it is something that makes us not totally go down that route. We do have a parallel deployment using those for our more aggressive situations.

The BladeSystem is very stable. Being an architect, I think the down times have been all within the expected goal, so we have not had any issues with that.

It's able to scale very well. That's one of the benefits of it.

I do remember that we had some technical questions on Virtual Connect and technical support was a bit slow in the early days, but that has improved.

There was a company-wide decision, but we chose BladeSystem on the grounds that we had to do a rapid deployment. We didn't have an awful lot of time to get in to the detail, so we wanted something that knew was going to work. It's something we trusted would work. The scalability offered the fact that we could easily add to our installations in the various data centres that we have fairly quickly and horizontally scale out our applications.

The initial setup was fine. It was more that we needed to know some of the technical error ins and outs regarding that, because we were using multicast mechanisms across the WAN and wanted to know how good the traffic flows worked; the ingress on the chassis and to the BladeSystems.

We went with HPE because of the performance. We set it against Dell, and evaluated its performance, because we also buy their hardware products. But, to be honest, we found Dell's far slower. We just said, there's no way we're going to go for that.

In general, when selecting a vendor to work with, cost and performance are the most important criteria.

Regarding the connectivity setups, we've done it all now. We could smooth that path. Now it's very simple for us. If there are any difficulties, it's probably of our own making.

• 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.

• Scalability
• Performance
• Out-of-band management
• Support

Java version dependence for its out-of-band management. This is also an issue for other vendors, as well.

HP Proliant Servers have been used on this project for over six years. I’ve managed them since I came on the project, so for almost five years. We used the BladeSystem alongside the DL servers.

There won't be any issues as long as you have followed the guidelines to ensure that the firmware was up to date prior to deployment.

There was an issue before I came on the project, where a firmware update was not applied and had caused a few systems to become unstable under certain conditions, but HP support was able to identify the cause and provide a solution.

The systems scale well for our environment.

Mostly very positive. The only issue I’ve encountered has been with pre-sales support (i.e. getting accurate quotes to purchase systems).

It's excellent.

Before coming on this project I had used Dell servers. The performance of the HP server has an edge over the Dell systems I had used.

HP Proliant servers are rock solid and when you need technical support HP’s team is there to support you with answers, no matter how long it takes to properly identify the root cause and then propose a solution.

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.

HPE BladeSystem c7000 is a complex piece of engineering.

• I appreciate its simplified interface that gives the administrator the power to build a complete processing infrastructure remotely.
• I like the on-board administrator as it gave me a very detailed set of information that allowed me to manage every aspect of the infrastructure remotely.
• It allowed me to centralize the iLO remote access to every blade in the cabinet with very good performance.

You can view a Bladesystem like a modern car. The first thing you see is the body and the glossy paint, but under the hood, a bladesystem is essentially a group of servers (multi-core processors, RAM, Buses, storage, etc ), with redundant variable speed cooling blowers, redundant power suppliers, a large set of redundant connectivity options, and a big quantity of temperature and power consumption sensors, all of those connected and administered from a redundant administration module with many configuration parameters that you can accommodate in a bunch of ways to satisfy many different requirements.

Everyone of this modules are an appliance (a complete computer itself), and you can have a duplicate of the OA and the VC, just for redundancy and high availability purposes.

Before this brief description, probably you would agree that this is a complex architecture.

But the most attractive part of that , is that you deal with this complexity through a web portal that concentrate all of the configurations options, easy this tasks and guide the user with several wizards.

To manage all the parameters related to the Enclosure or Chassis, security access, and monitoring, you have to enter to the "onboard administrator module" (OA).

To manage all the aspect about LAN or SAN connectivity to the server blades you have to jump into the "virtual connect Module" (VC), but don't desperate, you have an hyperlink from the OA, that open the VC portal, to give you a seamless navigation between modules.

At last, but not least, you have the blades servers itself. You can have up to sixteen of those servers, with processors, memory, Out of Band management processor (Insight Lights-Out or iLO) and I/O cards (NICs, HBAs, CNAs, etc)

All of those have several Firmware (BIOS, NIC firmware, Power Regulator Firmware, HBA Firmware, iLO Firmware, Onboard Administrator Firmware, Virtual Connect Firmware, etc ) and you need to solve incompatibility issues between all of those.

The best part is that HPE give you an utility (HP Smart Update manager) that can manage all those firmware in a consolidated way.

HPE works hard to provide a centralized administration and good experience with the software, and if you are an advanced user, also can use an add-on to access all the configuration parameters using powershell (the administrator's task programming language that come in every windows operating system).

The first goal was to use blades. This stemmed from a space problem in our data center. We needed to add more servers, but the space became short quickly. The first consolidation approach was a blades server.

• We administer all the systems remotely.
• The blade server standardized more of our configuration processes with less manual intervention.
• We also found that we needed less cabling. Now we can connect 16 servers in 10 rack units with 3 LAN and 2 SAN Fiber, instead of 48 LAN and 32 SAN fiber.

• Hardware management could be improved.
• Cisco UCS has a more universal approach. It treats the hardware as stateless and manages absolutely all configurations from the same console.
• HPE has an on-board administrator to manage hardware aspects and virtual connect to manage LAN and SAN connectivity between blades and the rest of the world.
• Firmware updates are complex. There are so many components and you need to account for the compatibility of all parts. Otherwise, you can have a blade that cannot start with the new firmware and then it takes extra time to solve the problem.
• HPE has a utility for firmware updates that tries to provide peace of mind. It takes all these variables into account.

We have been using this solution since 2008. We began mounting an 8 node VMware cluster. We began with one enclosure, a cabinet with 16 blade servers. We now have more than 18 of them distributed in different locations around the world.

We did not have any stability issues. The quality of the server itself enhances stability. Once the server is running, it runs for a long time.

We don’t have issues with computer power scalability. We just add more blades, configure, install and go, or add more memory to an existing blade.

HPE also supports mixing several blade models in the same cabinet.

You can have, for instance, BL460c G7, BL460c Gen8, and BL460c Gen9 working smoothly in the same C-Class enclosure.

In my country, the level of support is quite good. I recommend that you buy the server with a three or give year care pack to receive the manufacturer’s warranty.

I used rack form factor servers and switched to blades to gain consolidation ration. I also wanted to have better management control over the hardware infrastructure.

The setup is easy if you install only one cabinet, and you know what to do and what to expect from the platform.

When you plan to grow your infrastructure to more than 16 blades, it becomes a little bit complex. You need to think about how to manage Virtual Connect Domains, MAC virtualization, and WWN virtualization.

If you design your platform based on that, everything will go fine. You will know what to do when a problem arises.

We have only used HPE infrastructure. Previous to blades, we were using Standalone Rack form factor servers like the DL380 model.

If I were brand agnostic, I would probably select CISCO UCS, but this didn't exist when we decided to use HPE blades.

Now, with Synergy Composable Systems, HPE probably takes a leap forward in technology and puts itself at the forefront. Please keep in mind that technology.

• The product is good and strong. Nowadays, the software works fine. I chose HPE because of the existing vendor relationship and reputation.
• You can do all of the installation and configuration tasks. However, if you are not experienced, contract your first installation service to a partner with a lot of experience in that kind of equipment.
• Take the corresponding training, as it is very useful.
• I recommend taking the official HPE platform support. They have a BladeSystem course.
• I also recommend users strengthen their knowledge with a Virtual Connect course. With this in mind, you can have a good experience with this kind of platform.
• I also recommend that you progress further and think about automating the procedures, installations, and decommissions as much as possible.