HPE BladeSystem Reviews

I think the thing about BladeSystems is the quality of the engineering that goes into them. They have a long history of being valuable and viable products that are out there. Customers trust them.

It's interesting because I think, as infrastructure becomes more and more invisible and application becomes more and more important to the business, just not having to worry about that infrastructure is the value on a business level.

Customers are always looking for more performance, just trying to get more out of them. I don't know whether they have a blade or whether, but it's a rackmount server, and they're just trying to get more horsepower out of them. Continue to make them more scalable inside the box in terms of CPU, memory and I/O etc. It's just, customers are always looking for more density.

From the folks that I know that are using them, typically you're not seeing stuff at the infrastructure level. You may have some brittle pieces of the application and the integration, but the platform themselves are solid.

Architecturally, there's no problem adding more of those as the environment needs to scale.

I'm not that hands-on too much on the setup piece.

I think it's the advice that I'd give to anybody that would ask for it. Start with your application, find out what the requirements are, think about what it's going to need in the future, then begin architecting your solution there.

The small footprint that they have, the reliability and the ease of use are key factors. We've been using them for probably 12 years now. I've been very happy with the product. We have them in a data center, so we have to pay for the power and space. That's two key factors, as far as pricing going, as far as why we wanted a small footprint.

We don't have to hire as many IT people because of the ease of use. That's key. With the smaller footprint, less power consumption, that saves money, and that's the bottom line.

I guess with its ease of use, as far as the configuration of the virtual switches, and things like that all need work. We just upgraded to 10 Gig on a couple of them, and the learning curve for me was a little tough on that.

It's easy. If we need to add servers, it's very simple. We don't add and subtract a lot of servers. Our environment is pretty stable. I'm not looking for hyper-quick deployment of servers and things like that. I will look into being able to get into where if a server fails, that profile can quickly go over to another profile on another server. That would be nice to have that feature.

We looked at Dell and Cisco, and we actually just re-evaluated them again last year. We decided to stick with the HP because we were happy with the product. I guess because I was the decision maker, and I've been happy with HP. Unless there was a real business reason to switch, and there wasn't, so we stuck with HP.

If you're considering it, you want to try out all the 3 big players. Then kind of just go with what feels right for you. I've tried out all three of them, and I've been happy, and the HP is the best. You just got to try it out and see what you think.

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.

Institutional memory-- we used it previously and stuck with it.

I want to see a standardized interface for managing blade chassis when they’re not virtual connect. Also, I'd like to see a return to the program in which you can purchase different skews for your chassis needs. That was a great program, which they should bring back. I'm disappointed that the current purchase program isn't quicker.

I use everything from G5 to G9 and ProLiant blades.

I’ve had some recent issues when doing hardware and simple memory upgrades. When I pull out and put back a blade, they system has a tendency to shut down random blades in the chassis. When working on our production system, this issue messes up our clustering and systems.

The scalability is great.

It’s been decent. When we’ve had our issues, they tell us how to resolve them. They always tell us to update the firmware, but in our production environment, it takes me many months to get that done.

We were previously affiliated with the government, and they were using HP.

I’d say that setup complexity depends on the type of system you get. We went for the blade chassis, and they were great. We recently dropped virtual connect and initially went with more traditional blades from Cisco, and they seemed to be fine. They were very clunky to set up, however, and I was disappointed. But setup for HP blades were fairly simplistic.

Dell, Cisco, ans briefly Hitachi. HP came out on top primarily for its knowledge in our organization. On the server front, everything is similar, and there was no real need to jump ship.

We looked at our what our guys already knew.

Single point of management is important. If you were to step back five years ago, HP was very strong in that, when Dell and Cisco weren’t quite as good. Now, they’re all pretty good, so central management of my blades is fairly important for me. I’m running hundreds of these servers, and it’s important for me to be able to manage them all centrally and quickly.

I Use this solution for my main production server, we use this for VM-hosts, and connected to HP MSA Storage as VM Data-stores via iSCSI targeting.

This product saved the data center space (only use 10 U Spaces for max 16 servers) and has better performance for the VMware, vCenter, and vMotion.

I really appreciate the integrated Onboard Administrator, the iLO (Integrated Lights-Out) modular network, and the SAN Switches.

This product needs a wider range of firmware compatibility matrix from the oldest to the newest blade server. Because the blade chassis (C7000) has a 16 blade servers bay (slot), it will be better if we can mix the first generation (G1 Blade server) with the latest Gen (G9 Blade server). E.g.: G1 only can be mixed in same chassis with G8 (max), if we have a new G9 blade server, we need to eliminate the old blade server, or if you don’t want to get rid of the old server you should buy another chassis. The new chassis is so expensive.

So, it will be easier for scalability purposes, and a greater value for
a company with a limited budget, if HPE Blade System has a wider compatibility matrix range.

There were no stability issues.

There were scalability issues. If we want to upgrade, the oldest version of the blade server cannot be mixed with the newest one. This is a problem of the firmware compatibility matrix of the on-board administrator.

Customer Service:

The Customer service is great!!! As long you're covered by the warranty or maintenance aggreement. the response time is under 1 hour after you raise a ticket.

Technical Support:

It have great technical support with quick response, if you have maintenance contract with HPE (HP Enterprise)

We used Rackmount, but we switched to this solution because it is integrated and saves space.

The initial setup was straightforward. Just follow the steps in the manual and you’re ready to go.

It's quite expensive for the initial purchase. The chassis itself, with no blade server inside, so expensive. The C7000 model costs around $100,000.

If your company scale is small to mid-enterprise, you could consider the QNAP TDS Series. This can act both as a physical host and hypervisor. There is no need to buy additional VM licenses if you want to create a VM environment.

Or, 

If your company scale need below 16 servers, you should consider the siblings, the c3000 model, it has 8 bays rather than 16 bays, so it won't overkill your budget.

Prepare the budget and be ready to persuade the board of directors as to why you should buy this solution. Don't forget to prepare the data of TCO.

BladeSystem is a way to consolidate in a datacenter the maximum system in a small space because are company is in the middle of Paris, so space is a premium.

It is also good way to run VM, that is the way that we are using BladeSystem. 

It's also a way to manage with our specific tools, to run with it.

It's improved the factor, increased the number of VMs easily.

I would like to see lower consumption of electricity and there are some problems in our computer room regarding the cooling. The power supply and the power unit could, perhaps, be improved, but it's very stable is the main point.

It's really stable because we have been using the C2-7000, for a long time. Of course we increased the version of the blade itself, but the rack is still the same. It's a good value.

We can have, if I remember correctly, 16 blades or something like that. We can have a half blade or full-size blade, so it's a way to manage our rack with the maximum scalability according to the power that we need.

We're using it. It's really good because the engineers that support our infrastructure are really good and, fortunately for them, there aren't problems very often.

It was not really complex. Straightforward.

We considered Cisco but it's not really a good idea for us because we have worked with HPE for a long time. Hardware is one thing but support, and the people behind the support, is another thing. We are happy with HPE.

It is a good solution. Reliable, stable. Try it and you will see.

• Easy scalability
• Modular design
• Easy configuration

Before we introduced the solution, we had 24 cabinets, filled with classic rack servers. We had continuous issues with cooling capacity, power consumption for the data center, high availability, and redundancy.

After implementing the BladeSystem environment, we went down to four cabinets only for servers, since it's a perfect platform to host a high-end VMware farm.

Coupled with HP 3PAR SAN devices and peer persistence, I managed to create a 99.99999% uptime environment.

Currently, we have enjoyed an increase in price/performance of 500%, compared to several years ago.

• The web interface is Java based and we had issues with different version of Java. We sometimes need to host dedicated machines with old versions of Java just to run the web administration.
• The LCD panel holds minimal data about the overall BladeSystem and blade server health and error events.
• I would like to see an error reporting feature in the LCD Panel.

I have used it since 2011.

We have not had any stability issues. We haven't had one instance of downtime due to hardware issues of the BladeSystem itself.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. It's extremely scalable. If you run out of resources, just get another blade server and you've added another x amount of RAM and CPU to your environment.

Technical support is good and quick. The engineers sometimes need to consult with experts. I wish the experts would be the front-line support.

This is the first time we have used BladeSystems.

The initial setup was complex because of our HA requirements. The installation of the BladeSystem itself is easy and straightforward.

The modules are hot-pluggable. OA and iLO are easy to configure.

The most complex part was configuring the Virtual Connect module with VLAN tagging, shared uplink sets, and general network configuration.

The web UI is good, but it lacks tips and it's a bit complicated.

For first time users, only buy two BladeSystems and fill them up. They are expensive. Apart from that, you get more than you paid for.

We didn't evaluate others, as we were forced to buy this solution by governmental policies. We are part of the Ministry of Health.

Get to know the product. Spend time studying its ins and outs.

You will be surprised by its capabilities. I would not recommend a touch and go strategy, since that won't bring the systems to optimal capability.

Modular Design: Everything is modular and redundant. Nothing is built-in, from the PSUs to the fans to the modular VCs and SAN modules

Bottom line dollar is a big thing for a company like us. The ability to manage more infrastructure with less resources. When you get in a blade environment, you can do so much more management administration across a bigger scale.

BladeSystem was a huge improvement over rack. We gained an awful lot of productivity when we went to BladeSystem, because we can set up so much infrastructure in one swipe. Then you've got networking capability and storage capability. It really made life simpler.

The stability is key, because I'm talking about the server space. On the workstation space, we have dabbled with some lower cost providers in the past like Acer. Reply, which is probably a company you've never heard of, but I've been in my company a long time. We started out with IBM which was micro-channel architecture. We looked at other architectures, and we found less expensive ones. It ended up being a failed experiment after three to four years, because there's other costs involved. The stability and HP's ability or any big provider, HP's ability to bring us new product in a timely manner is very important in choosing your technology partner.

When we buy an enclosure, our company puts a seven-year life span on it. We expect to have two iterations of blade servers in that enclosure before the enclosure itself goes out to the scrap heap. That's another way that we look at it as a good, long-term investment.

We try to keep a blade server on a three-year lifecycle. When that one's ready to come out of that slot in the rack, you can pull out a G64-60, and you can put in a different architecture as long as it's a single form factor. I like that scalability real well.

I'm not real happy with their tech support. I wish I had better access. For the level of customer that we are and the amount we spend with HPE, I wish I had better access. I feel like I'm going through the same telephone portal that somebody with a home laptop with an HP logo on it, I don't feel like I'm treated as a valued customer.

We've certainly looked at other providers in the past. We know Dell's out there. We know IBM's out there.

We were Compaq users before HPE really got into the server space. That acquisition was 10 or so years ago. Due to our relationship with Compaq, we inherited HP as our primary provider of server hardware in the X86 space.

It's a good product. As I said, the support isn't the best, but it's a good product. We run them to death. We're supposed to run them for three years, but we have server hardware that's been running six years around the clock.

Also, I'd go back to my earlier case on total cost of ownership, return on investment, and things like that. If I'm talking to somebody that's from a company on our scale, I'd say absolutely go for it. HP products may not necessarily make sense for somebody in a small business environment, but for all the reasons that make sense for a company the size of mine, I'd absolutely recommend it.