HPE BladeSystem Reviews

Reliability. I like the support that comes with it and the ease of getting it in production.

The reliability that is behind it, those efficiencies, that reliability makes sure that my customers have the services they need to support the business at all times.

Alerting the management could be better. I think OneView is new, I actually used HP SIM a lot in my day as an administrator. Now I'm in management watching my engineers use OneView. It still seems like there is still some room for improvement on that.

There have been issues but HP has always done a really good job at getting that corrected.

We run a virtual environment, a private cloud. As I need more computer power, we're able to add C7000 chassis Blade servers in, and just add those to the firm. It was relatively easy. It's getting it into production and then adding them into the cluster.

It was fine. It was pretty smooth.

We were using Cisco UCS and we recently made the change to HP BladeSystem. We changed because of the ease of use. The Cisco UCS platform was more complex to run, and I felt that with my experience with just HP stuff it was really easy to set up and manage and maintain.

It wasn't complex because I had prior experience using Blade servers at another company.

I would warn you to be prepared to be ready to talk about how you're going to be connecting your BladeSystems to the network. Especially if you don't have a total HP stack from top to bottom. For example, if you're setting those things up or connecting them with Cisco gear, being prepared in working with your partners with your vendors on ensuring that you're connecting that all in best practice.

• 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 primarily using the solution for a hypervisor.

The solution is very easy to use. It's user-friendly and simple to navigate.

The space conservation it provides is excellent. It helps compact the server.

The product is quite stable. Its performance is reliable.

The solution can scale. A company can expand it if it wants to.

The solution could use better management capabilities. The interface in terms of management could be much more intuitive.

I've been using the solution for two years at this point.

The solution is very stable. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution can definitely scale. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so with ease.

We have about 2,000 end-users currently.

We do plan to continue to use the solution.

While HPE Synergy has quite good technical support, on other HPE products, it's not quite as good.

That said, on Blades, we've never really used the technical support.

We previously just used normal HPE servers. Other than that, we've never used another solution. We've never used a Blade system.

We did not handle the installation ourselves. I can't speak to how easy or difficult it was to execute.

We have about 20 people that can handle any maintenance.

We hired a contractor that implemented the solution for us. We did not handle the process ourselves.

We paid for the hardware itself. I can't speak to the actual costs. It's not an aspect I directly deal with.

We're a customer, however, indirectly with HPE. We purchased the solution through a reseller. We don't deal with HPE directly.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. I don't have the version number on hand.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten overall. It's been largely quite capable.

The virtual connect side of networking and the manageability through that is by far the biggest win for us. The blades come and go as racks do, but the virtualization back of it means a lot less hands on and a lot more manageability.

The biggest benefit is the minimum downtime due to the programmatic nature of the whole thing.

There’s nothing that I don't already know is coming out.

We've had them for quite a few years now. Early on it was a bit hit and miss, but more recently it has become far more stable.

We have not gone full scale with it. We only have it in small areas of the data center at the moment.

We have not used technical support.

We knew we needed a new solution because our data center costs were rising on our racks and we just had to slimline down into a more compact solution.

The early stages weren't as smooth as they should have been. I was involved in the initial setup and it was complex because of the nature we wanted to use it in; a very virtualized network and storage capacity. It wasn't quite straightforward and it meant a great deal of complex planning to make sure we got it right in the first place and the initial setup didn't cause problems later on.

We also looked at Dell solutions.

When selecting a vendor, reputation and pricing are most important.

Spend as much time as possible planning before you go anywhere near it.

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.

HPE BladeSystems are used for computing workloads.

HPE BladeSystem provides good commuting performance.

The other similar solutions used different CLI commands than HPE BladeSystem. The HPE BladeSystem CLI commands should be the same as the other companies which would make it easier to manage. It would be better for the system administrators to manage HPE BladeSystem and other systems together. I wanted to configure this service with the CLI but the commands are different than the other solutions making it a bit more difficult.

I have used HPE BladeSystem within the past 12 months.

HPE BladeSystem is stable.

I have not used the support from HPE.

I have used HPE ProLiant DL Servers previously.

When comparing the HPE ProLiant DL Servers to the HPE BladeSystem, the HPE BladeSystems are compact and need less space for installation. They can provide the same computing as the HPE ProLiant DL Servers in the same unit and are a lot easier to manage.

HPE BladeSystem is easier to implement because of its size than other solutions. It's easy to install, easy to build up the BladeSystems, but the enclosure is too heavy.

I would recommend this solution for large enterprises. Medium-sized companies would find it difficult to afford the HPE BladeSystem's overall capital expenses.

I would recommend this solution to others. If they require a system for computing workloads then this is a good solution.

I rate HPE BladeSystem a nine 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.

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.