HPE BladeSystem Reviews

We are running a biometric solution. This is the main solution for which we use HPE BladeSystem.

HPE keeps on releasing new BladeSystems. We started with G4 and have used G5, G6, G7, G8, servers. We find these upgrades very useful. As our business volume grows, we're able to find an appropriate HPE server to use.

They are reliable, and they hardly break down. They are fast, and they serve us very well.

For me, the product is okay, but I would probably suggest improvement in their services or technical support. They need to work harder in the preventative maintenance of the system. They need to improve in terms of how quickly can we get attention and how quickly problems are resolved. 

Its price could also be lower.

I have been using this solution for seven years.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. The entire banking industry in Nigeria is connected to this solution. Everybody in the industry uses this solution. We intend to grow and increase its usage.

Technical support is my main concern. They need to improve in terms of how quickly can we get attention and how quickly problems are resolved.

Its initial setup is very easy.

We used resellers.

It is expensive. There are no additional costs. We are able to get good discounts anyway from HPE, but if the price can come down, we'll be happy.

We considered IBM. We made a choice for HPE, and it has been working well for us.

My main advice would be to ensure that your technical staff is well trained by HPE and the technical staff receives HPE technical training because the support that you want may not come from HPE. If you have your in-house team properly trained, it should be fine.

I would rate HPE BladeSystem an eight out of ten.

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.

Valuable features include the speed at which you can deploy a system, the server profiles, and the ability to move those profiles around at will. We can also swap out hardware as needed, which is probably the saving grace for it.

Most of the issues that I have found have been addressed inside OneView. OneView 3.0 will allows us to do live migration of the Virtual Connect domains, so there isn’t anything big to improve at the moment.

We have used the product since it first came out and since generation one. We went from the P-class to the C-class because the P-class was not very good, and we haven’t had many issues since. Along the way, we went from pass-throughs to virtual-connects to FlexLOM and more, and everything has worked fine.

There were some issues with Virtual Connect not recognizing certain devices in OneView, but they have been addressed. Most issues are addressed quickly. We also use OneView to create the profiles on most of the new BladeServers that are Gen8 and higher. There are no issues with that.

It’s pretty scalable. I came from an environment that had 60 Blade enclosures. We went to Virtual Connect Enterprise for manageability, because the domains were locked to four when you did a stacking cable. There are some limits inside the Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager, but we couldn't find them.

HP support is very good. I've never had an issue with it. HP stands behind their product so they work hard to fix issues.

To pick a solution, we generally create a matrix and then fill in what we want out of the product. We pump in vendors and choose whoever meets the targets that we set. I would also note that the migration from rack mount to BladeSystem is not a one-to-one, so read the manual.

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 reliability. We're using VMware as the backbone on it. We have High Availability so if something happens to one it switches over to everything else. We've had it for about six or seven years with no problems. To me, that's the central core of our business, that we have that connected up to StoreVirtual SANs, but we also have it connected to other SANs, and everything works seamlessly. In fact we've got the C7000 and two C3000's running with two blades. So that gives us flexibility for each of our security zones.

For us, it's the flexibility. We have to look at every nickel, and what we've found is that with the virtualization, we can get a more bang for the buck. We're using everything to it's full potential, and for a number of years we had ProLiant DL380s in the racks and they might be using one application on it. If we can take that and move it into the BladeSystem, then we can run six, seven, or eight servers off of the BladeSystem, and then everything is a lot easier to manage. We've got blades in there and we've never had any issues with equipment. We like the flexibility of being able to make a change without having to go and buy an extra drive. The whole virtual infrastructure is wonderful.

There's some little nitty-picky things and we're still trying to figure out a couple of things in the background. For functionality and everything, it runs well.

There haven't been a lot of changes, and we like that. There are newer blades, and they work seamlessly with the others. We don't need to have somebody watching it everyday and all the time. We've seem systems in the past where you've had to dedicate a resource to watching your BladeSystem, SANs, or anything else. I don't want to say "Set it and forget it." It pretty much runs, so, we've been very happy there.

We can change anytime. We can add a blade, or add RAM. In fact we did a process last summer where we went and doubled the RAM in each of the blades. That was the one limitation we had, we don't have to go "Okay, well I've got a few Megs here, I've got a few Gigs here, I can move things around." Making the workload larger, or smaller everything works very well. We're not big on hyperconvergence, but we love the ability to be able to add and subtract if we need to.

We've contacted tech support on all three phases. I haven't always been impressed with getting some guy in India. I'm sure that's the biggest complaint everybody gets. They're very qualified guys there, but between trying to understand them is difficult. I did have an incident with my blade enclosure where some of it was telling me I had a critical error. I called over and the guy says, "Well, just receipt your onboard administrator." So I did, and it worked for five minutes, and they closed my ticket. But for the most part on other things, such as when a drive dies, we can call somebody and it's there.

We do have local guys that will come out and work on things if we need it, and we have taken advantage of that in the past. With any kind of technology, it's not going to be a hundred percent. But we've generally been very happy. We've got one guy in town that we kind of like a lot, except for when he screwed up one thing, but that's going to happen anyway. We've been happy with tech support.

What we had was many, many DL380 Proliants. I had a couple of them configured as VM hosts, and then we decided that to scale building, convergence, and the flexibility of what a BladeSystem could do for you made a lot of sense. It wasn't like I said something such as "Hey, I just want to buy a BladeSystem." But our vendor kind of walked us through all the benefits, and we were very happy with how it came out, and that's where we're going. Now we can't imagine doing business without it. We went from about twenty-five servers up to over a hundred. That would not be possible if I had to put a DL380 for each application. So just having the ability to have sixty servers in a two-by-two space is outstanding. That's been one of the biggest reasons why we went with it.

We have a vendor from here in Las Vegas who came up and helped put it together. I kind of watched over the shoulder and stayed out of the way, but that has been more or less my responsibility ever since. The setup was fairly easy. Ever since, any changes have been fairly easy to do.

We were moving from ProLiant, and we have a vendor who has a big HPE shop, and I think they sell more than anybody else in Nevada, and we've been very happy with them. They said, "Well, this is what you need." And we said, "Okay." The price was fair, and we thought, "Okay, we're going to do it." One of the troubles with our systems is we have to plan so far in advance on what we want to get that we kind of target something. We might look around a little bit right at the last minute, but in this case, the name HPE, the support we get from our people and HPE, and the price just made it that we had to go that way.

The ability to configure it in a highly reliable fashion.

We don’t have to worry about manufacturing it ourselves. We can take advantage of HP’s scale to achieve much shorter delivery cycles.

We’re just introducing it in the middle of this year, so in my labs I’ve got about 200 blades in many different chassis.

We’ve placed another order for a 20-blade system, and I expect by next year we’ll have hundreds of blades.

I would like to see them support G10 blades on the C7000.

It’s been very stable for us. We’re using KVM on top of the hardware, and it’s been very good and has done everything we need it to do thus far.

It’s scalable enough for our purposes.

We can put 2 chassis together in a rack, 16 blades per chassis. With this scalability, we can see that it provides all the capacity we envision needing for the foreseeable future. We’re also evolving our software to take further advantage of this platform's scalability (part of 4G LTE systems).

There are different kinds of technical support. The kinds of things we need in R&D are answers to fairly arcane questions regarding the product, and support has been so-so. It takes a long time to find the right guy.

We were using expensive, in-house-developed hardware. From an R&D perspective, there was not enough critical mass to keep the investment going. In addition to the expense, order to delivery was six months for our in-house solution. In contrast, HP can turn around in two weeks, which is a huge advantage for us.

Setup was fine. The installers didn’t complain.

It was a decision between the internally-developed product or HP. There was a synergy with other products already using HP, so we went with HP.

You need to look for high reliability, duplex power servers, and networking. If you’re looking for carrier grade reliability, the C7000 is an excellent choice.

We use this solution like a hypervisor to host our applications. We have secondary areas for our accounting and manufacturing. That is a separate legacy system. We also use it as a SQL server.  

It is very stable. Also, their support is amazing. If there is any issue, within a couple of hours, they will ship the box from another country and within a couple of hours, it will be here.  

  - Ability to connect storage bay to all servers inside the enclosure not only Adjacent server.

  - simplified High Availability Configuration to connect the enclosure to different external switches.

We have been using HPE BladeSystem for around 4-5 years.  

It is easy to scale. You can connect as many servers as you need depending on your account type.  

The support is amazing.  

I used to use a different solution but it was too different to compare. It was a very old system and it did not operate in the same way.  

Regarding the setup, it is easy for the blade itself, but the integration with the network devices needs to be done by someone who knows the product.   

The training takes something like five days and it is worth the effort to be able to do implementation and management by yourself. 

My recommendation to people considering this solution is to just make sure that the blade will be supported by the existing system. This is the only issue that we faced. It will be hard to integrate with some older switches. Usually, you will not be able to configure this solution with high availability if you are using older solutions. You cannot add it to a regular storage server. It is one of the limitations that you can not just add a storage unit for the blades.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate this product as a nine.  

We migrated our entire legacy landscape from old HP Superdome infrastructure to the new x86 infrastructure on blades. In terms of application portability, it was a seamless project from my side.

The main benefit has been in terms of the newer platform having much more computer power. You can see your workloads completing much quicker. Users with feedback in terms of workload performance have reported that a job that typically took 3 or 4 hours to run took a few minutes.

We're busy with phase 2 of the project. We classify the legacy landscape into simple, medium and complex applications. We've done the simple and medium. We're now going to tackle the complex and will make use of HPE professional services to see how we can either modernize the application code, for which we don't have the skill set anymore, or some subset of the applications.

In terms of platform stability, the legacy infrastructure was out of warranty and out of support. The new platform was much more stable and reliable.

We have not used technical support often. HPE worked closely with us on the project. It was a joint initiative. We never had any issues and customers didn't even know they were migrated.

We're a telecom company. We've standardized around HPE, IBM, Oracle Solaris Sun boxes and now we've got VCE Vblocks. In terms of percentage, HPE's still about 60% of our landscape.

We moved to an x86 infrastructure and we could probably move other workloads from IBM-related infrastructure across to an HPE infrastructure. We could standardize further, but from an x86 perspective, it becomes more or less agnostic regarding which vendor infrastructure is the underlying infrastructure; as long as the operating system and virtualization can take place on top.

It did take us quite some time to make the business case and to get the funding, but once we got all of that, the project went smoothly. We never had any issues.

For the technical part of the setup, we brought in professional services from HPE and they did the initial configuration and the racking and stacking of the systems.

We were looking at VCE Vblock, HPE, Oracle and IBM. We went with HPE because the HPE platform is about 60%, IBM is about 10%, and Oracle is about 30%.

We're based in South Africa and we're pretty much dependent on the OEM to help us and advise us. HPE is able to advise us, especially on the architectural designs they can actually vet the architectural designs and give input that has proven to be valuable to us.

We always try to check supportability of the platform post-project implementation. Trust me, before the project implementation, before they kick up, all the vendors will lobby. Obviously, when you’ve gone live and you start having problems after the fact, the vendors stay far away. So you need to make sure that in-country support is there and the skills are there. For example, we had an experience with Oracle where they didn't even have the skill sets at the right support levels.