HPE BladeSystem Reviews

• 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

• 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.

* High Performance

* High Reliability

* "Insight Management" of the hardware

* Compatibility with all of the major Network Operating systems

It has provided us with a platform on which we have been able to create innovative solutions for our customers at very reasonable prices.

It would be nice if they were a little lighter in weight.

I have used Proliant series servers since they were first introduced.

On rare occasions, I have experienced hardware failures out of the box, but HP, and Compaq before that, were quick to resolve the problem and get the hardware up and running the next business day.

On very rare occasions, instability was experienced due to driver incompatibilities or firmware maladies. HP provided updates or workarounds to get the system stable fairly quickly.

I've never experienced an issue with hardware scalability.

Customer service is outstanding.

Over the years, technical support has gone from outstanding to "needs improvement", and back to "reasonably good". Typically, I've had to push the front line support team to escalate the issue to the back line, and the issue from there was quickly resolved. For hardware failures, it's been necessary from time to time to convince the front line that all of the diagnostic steps needed to isolate and identify the failed component have already been performed, and that what is needed is to get the replacement part. That process has also improved.

The initial setup has been straightforward in that HP has provided "Smart Start" kits to assist in getting their systems up and running very quickly. These kits typically prepare the systems for NOS installation and provide the necessary drivers to successfully discover all of the hardware components installed.

I am a Value Added Reseller, working with the end-user to acquire and build the solutions.

I have evaluated Dell and IBM products as part of an overall review of possible solutions for the customer.

If you need assistance in deploying Proliant servers, please feel free to contact me.

We use HPE BladeSystem for many purposes, such as enterprise applications and Oracle transfers.

The most valuable feature of HPE BladeSystem is simplified management.

There is always room for improvement everywhere with the HPE BladeSystem.

I have been using HPE BladeSystem since they were released, approximately 25 years.

HPE BladeSystem is a stable solution.

The HPE BladeSystem is extremely scalable.

We have some clients that have thousands and hundreds of people using the solution.

The initial setup of HPE BladeSystem is straightforward.

The price for HPE BladeSystem can vary between $100,000 to $1 million or above. The price can be high.

The solution is simple and easy to manage.

I rate HPE BladeSystem a ten out of ten.

We use HPE BladeSystem as an internal cloud.

HPE BladeSystem makes it much easier since it's been there. We can set up the hardware once and just provision what we need from that.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the ease of management with the hardware.

We are very pleased with using this solution.

We are very happy with what we have, but HPE is not going to continue with BladeSystem. It will be discontinued so we will have to change to another product shortly.

I have been using HPE BladeSystem for approximately seven years.

We use the BL460 series and the version is C7000. We have a mix of Gen9 and Gen10 servers.

Stability-wise, it's been very good for us. 

We have had very few issues with it, hardware-wise, and even very few software issues with it. 

Overall, the HPE BladeSystem has been very stable for us.

For our purposes, it has worked exactly the way we expected it to. 

It has been very scalable for us. We have been able to add additional servers, add additional C7000 chassis, and it just continues to work. It has been very scalable and worked very well.

We have two C7000s, and a total of 17 blade servers. Most of the servers have the attached storage blade for increased storage, besides what's in the blade itself. 

Our initial implementation included a couple of NAS units, but they were very slow, which is why we went with the storage blade units. That gave us better performance.

We have upgraded to some newer NAS units from HPE, and they've worked very well for us, which is why we are starting to slowly shift in that direction. That may change now since we're going to have to go with a new platform the next time we do an upgrade.

I have contacted technical support once or twice, and it was very good. 

We were very pleased with the support that we received.

We went from individual servers, or individual racking at servers, to the blade system.

The initial setup was different than anything we had done before. It was a little bit complex to get initially set up. But, once it was set up, the ongoing management has been fairly easy.

If I had to do it again, it would be very easy to do, now that we're familiar with it.

We rolled it out over time. We modified our implementation a little bit as we went along, as we discovered different features and different capabilities.

I maintain the solution. It only requires one person.

I am not familiar with the pricing.

We will be evaluating other solutions since we discovered that they are not going to be making the BladeSystem anymore.

We have had good luck with them, and good success with them. 

We haven't had any issues that are major issues. We have been very pleased with it.

I would rate HPE BladeSystem a nine out of ten.

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 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.

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.