HPE BladeSystem Reviews

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

iLO (Remote Management) is probably the best in the market, their RAID Cards (SmartArray) are also very good.

1. iLO even in its basic form can get you out of hot water as you can just do a remote power-cycle. iLO Advance can get you to remotely troubleshoot the OS even if its in a defunct state
2. RAID I have found useful as its quite easy to remotely expand the array
3. Upgrading of firmware is very easy as well, even in a VMWare vSphere (ESXi hypervisor)

I believe they are ahead of the other vendors (IBM, Dell and Cisco). Probably what they can improve on are minor things -

1. Registration of licenses, this includes iLO advanced and upgraded support. This requires you to log on with HP and activate the key that has been given to the server. Its just a convoluted process that I rather as a technical engineer not have to do.
2. Access to updated drivers and firmware. They now require you to logon and have the device serial number to get to drivers. Even new devices requires this. If the device is 3 years old OK, but new devices just frustrates the customer and slows down deployments.

Full time the last five years but I have been around them for eight years.

Generally no. We did have issues where a RAID card would not work with array build until we updated the firmware. Even after getting HP to replace the RAID card, the replacement card came with the same faulty firmware. This was for a bottom end server though. All the mid and high range servers have had no problems with deployments.

If there is ever a problem with stability, generally firmware has fixed this, We've had a range of issues, probably the most common issue has been SAS cards and tape drives staying up (both in Windows and ESXi environments). We did have an issue where during a power outage, the BIOS lost the boot sequence on a sever that was using an SD Card as its boot device, a firmware update fixed that. Teamed NICS having dropouts also required updates.

No, these servers when specified can host incredible amounts of VM's. The CPU options and RAM expansions are very good.

Excellent, they are happy to trust you in raising the issue and supply you with replacement hardware with minimal fuss. They are also helpful if you require technical assistance for configuration.

We used to use IBM. I wasn't part of the decision for the change but to be honest I'm glad we moved away from IBM. They had moved to LSI for RAID and their UEFI Bios meant every reboot took 10 minutes. Also their technical support was rapidly going downhill.

Straightforward, 90% of all installation you can just refer to the server cover for RAM sequence, CPU installations or RAID expansion.

We are a reseller.

Its hard to say but if you count the improvement of remote access (iLO) and ease of upgrading firmware means we don't have to organise serious downtimes when we had previously dealt with other vendors.

We previously used IBM Servers and we may revisit this if Lenovo fixes the issues with the IBM servers. We also haved used Cisco UCS servers where the deal suited. I still believe HP is still ahead of both Cisco and IBM.

We are using HPE BladeSystem as a server in the education sector.

The most valuable feature of HPE BladeSystem is the ease of management. It is easy to communicate from the server to the storage.

HPE BladeSystem could improve the communication between the server and the storage.

It's very difficult to have a representative give training. It would be helpful to provide some training.

In the next release of the solution, it would be a benefit to have hypervisor capabilities on the system.

If we could have a backup and a hypervisor built-in with all the capabilities for HPE BladeSystem it would be helpful.

I have been using HPE BladeSystem for approximately four years.

The support from HPE BladeSystem is good, they are responsive. I had some issues and they assisted me with my problem.

After I had training in the HPE BladeSystem the initial setup was not difficult. I was able to do the configuration of the equipment with ease.

The price of HPE BladeSystem is less expensive than some other solutions, such as Dell. The cost of replacement equipment is expensive.

I rate HPE BladeSystem a ten out of ten.