HPE BladeSystem Reviews

BladeSystem provides consolidation of hardware into single or more manageable components. Everything from FlexFabric, Virtual Connect, being able to manage your environment holistically from a single pane of glass, in terms of vCenter, and blade integration. I think the other thing is with HP's OneView, having another standardized management console to be able to manipulate pretty much everything from a blade's infrastructure component point of view as well as networking. Anything in the HP product line, the infrastructure can be managed through OneView.

There's definitely great advantages in the efficiency of time savings, both from a personnel perspective as well as the ability to quickly deliver on new offerings.

At the time, we were trying to learn the technologies while we were setting up the data center, and that's why we used professional services. We ended up having to collectively learn on the fly in setting up some of the new features we had. This was three years ago when we set up two new data centers and moved our operation out of an outsourced line of business.

It's been really stable, we haven't really seen any problems.

We've been expanding most of it, going with solid state storage has been the latest set of upgrades that we've done to it, and continuing to grow that. From a backup standpoint, we're also looking if we can start to use a lower tiered storage and use that to house all of the backups that we'll do, so we can get off using tapes as part of our whole strategy. We've got nine branch centers that ultimately are consolidating into the data center, so we're trying to fan those down into the data center and back them up.

In terms of the overall support, you're dealing with enterprise infrastructure related support personnel. If you're paying for enterprise level of support, and again, being such a foundation of your infrastructure, when there's issues they're usually critical, and the expectation is that you get immediate response. The experience that we've had is that sometimes you get right through to a qualified individual from to start, otherwise sometimes you have to play that escalation game, which in an emergency situation can be a little bit of a headache.

I would say sometimes it's hit or miss in terms of the kind of support you do get. Traditional hardware replacement, usually isn't a big deal. HP's remote support is really responsive in terms of hard drive failures, things of that nature. I find that the level of technicians that you get when you're calling in for any kind of technical support you may need, really does kind of vary. As an enterprise customer who's paying for enterprise level support, when you call, you call because you're in the middle of a catastrophe or you have an emergency situation that you're working through, so having to work through multiple tiers of technical individuals who may not have the necessary levels of strength, does not help the process.

We had HP Blades at the previous location, so we just bought the next generation of blades, but it was the same enclosure and some of it we did actually move across as we bought some initial hardware to seat things, and then as we freed up from our managed site we could then bring some of that technology across and continue to scale up in the new environment.

We did use some technical support, like through the professional services. We actually found some good, and some not so good, in terms of the expertise that we had. They didn't know enough. When we came around to setting up our VMs with the network they had, we had some challenges. There was a bit of a learning curve on both organizations. Not all positive.

I would say that the licensing model is probably the one biggest caveat I have. A lot of vendors provide a licensing model whereby you have to license the different functionality and feature sets that you want, but I think that for a lot of customers that's a bit of a stumbling block because you may not always be able to, upfront, understand or know exactly what you want to utilize, and have to make that additional investment later, when the dollars may not be there, is a little bit difficult.

If you're looking for a unified management interface where you can manage multiple products through a single pane of glass, like OneView for example, it might make sense. If you're heavily invested in the HP product line, again, it might make sense. But really in this day and age, computing is computing for the most part, so I think it really depends on what influences your purchasing decision, whether it's politics or technical merit.

We're using different blades for different load purposes. We can decide if we want to use storage blades for storage or we can use compute modes for compute performance, and you can also upsize them. You can even combine different blades servers for greater effectiveness.

We're very satisfied with the system. I'm a Linux administrator and we quite enjoy the flexibility of the blade system.

I suppose new chips would be an improvement, but they do get new Intel chips every year. This provides better throughput on CPU workloads. 

Additionally, our network is constantly getting saturated, so I would suggest also a faster network of fabrics as another improvement.

We've been running the system for three years.

It's very stable. We haven't had any network issues on the flexed fabric ends.

You can get a blade that uses two slots instead of one. You can even put Integrity blade systems on the chassis as well, or the old Titanium systems. They can use up to four slots, actually. It's quite scalable.

We've been an HP shop for so long and that's why we stick with them. We previously used EMC.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

Go for it, you'll be happy. If you're a technical person, it's quite easy to manage and operate.

The tool is pretty good in terms of managing data, compiling the system, and expanding the infrastructure. We are involved in property management. We use it for database and web hosting, and use it for applications that run on multiple systems.

It helps our company with backend capacity. It supports the infrastructure. It's performing well.

I would like to have a single console where we could manage multiple data centers. I'm expecting something like hardware visualization. I have different data centers where different BladeSystems are running.

Whenever there is an event, I need to get into that system individually and manage from different consoles. I would like to see a centralized console for BladeSystem management.

We have got multiple blade chassis, that are managed on an individual console. Having a centralized single console to manage all the chassis, would be easy for us to handle them in case of an event or for troubleshooting. For example, Cisco has UCS Director for managing multiple data center, similarly, if HPE can provide some centralized managing as well, then it will be great.

The tool is stable, although we have frequent failures in certain parts of it. This might be because we are using old generation servers, such as the HPE BladeSystem C7000 chassis and B400C Gen6 servers.

We haven't done much scaling. We are managing the individual BladeSystems.

I have used the technical support team and they are good. It is a straightforward process. I have been with them while they provided service.

Before this solution, we had individual rack-mounted server blades from the DL Series. Those are being consolidated into the BladeSystem now.

I was involved in the installation and it was straightforward. We had support from the local vendors as well.

We did not look at anyone else. We did not use any other HPE products, as such. We have bought into the Cisco solutions, as well. That keeps expanding.

I would definitely recommend this tool.

At a very high level, it gives us flexibility. Being on a virtual system, you can upgrade or downgrade, depending on the performance we need for all our different applications. We've had situations where we've had downtime, but our application state hasn't been affected because it moved on to the rest of the blades. And then we've switched the faulty blades when we've needed.

At a very high level, what it does is it gives us the ability to scale up. It gives us redundancy. It's cost efficient in that sense.

As I’ve mentioned, the benefits are flexibility and the fact that we can scale up our environment as and when we want to.

I'm probably not the right person to provide any information, but I guess I would like to see monitoring, real-time monitoring of the performance of the estate. We do basic monitoring of our estate. I'm not sure how robust it is, whether it can see into the future and understand where there are faults occurring.

From an application point of view, I want to avoid redundancy as much as possible, and I want to avoid downtime. I want general performance. Anything that helps that situation would be best.

I haven’t rated it higher because of stability and monitoring capability.

We've been using it for a while now. We've been using it for about four or five years, and we've probably had about three or four critical incidents. Over five years, that’s not too bad.

Blades have malfunctioned, so we’ve had to switch over. Physically, those blades have had to be replaced.

Every three or four years, we review our hardware estate. We're going through a process right now to increase the capacity in our estate. We do a complete application review and we understand what infrastructure environment is needed to support that.

We get good service from our reseller; I rate them 7/10.

Do your ground work. Understand not only what you need right now but what you need in the future because technology's changing and evolving. Do a fairly good due diligence about what your estate will be needed for the next couple of years, in the future.

Look around. Shop around with multiple resellers to get the best price.

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.

We have a "super contract" with HP, which combines HP hardware, HP service, and HP maintenance. It's all combined, making it easier for me to manage the system and network team.

I have bunch of parts and a local team from HP sitting five meters away from me. All the relevant people are there -- support, outreach, etc. It's very easy to have one interface that covers a very wide scope.

One way to improve would be in the monitoring and reporting. We get one report per server and it's ten pages long. But at the end, there's no aggregate showing the order of the infrastructure. So, I have no idea how large a percentage of my CPU is used overall in the infrastructure. I'd like reporting that takes into account all the servers.

There are also some tools missing. We started with the basics and moved up to more high-capacity resource management. The existing tools will help with this, but if we wanted to get more complex, we'll need some tools it just doesn't have yet.

I regularly get emails about incidents, disc replacements, etc., but so far we haven't seen any bug issues with the Blades. It's very stable.

We have a thousand servers and five thousand users, so in terms of scalability, yes, it's been scalable and we're able to expand more if necessary.

Most of the time they're responsive, we have a service contract that covers all areas. There's no ping-pong between service providers.

It's quite straightforward. This is also outsourced to HP, so we just send the requirements; we want this kind of server, it is to be installed in that place, and then it's all processed by HP.

If you have a big company, big enough to get these kinds of contracts, it saves a lot of time and a lot of money because it's all outsourced to HP. It's very practical.

We now have consolidated solution that can be managed from a single point. Converged infrastructure in one box.

There are a couple of features that are valuable. The first is the On-Board Administrator (OA), which offers the best consolidated solution where you can manage/monitor the blade systems, modules, and the chassis from a single point and is redundant when installing two OA modules. The other one is being a converged infrastructure in one box when having a Virtual Connect (VC) modules installed whether it is Ethernet or fibre offering more redundancy, better hardware utilization and more organization.

The solution was used for the deployment of a High Availability, Hyper-V cluster of 10 Nodes, it dramatically improved the organization services in terms of performance "having things done faster", availability "services are online 99.99% of the time" ,and scalability "add new and provide more services". Currently the system is able to handle all our organizational requirements, from running Oracle CRM system, a BI system, an ERP system, web-services , and a development/staging platform. The cross functionality and integration between the plat forms are more efficient, fast and almost no down time due to the internal communications backbone in the chassis.

The HP BladeSystem has been proven to be the best in the market in terms of blade systems, moving with every generation and you can see that when firmware updates are released. Any lags/issues are always resolved and more features are added and enhanced.

The only missing piece that would be great to add to this converged solution is an integrated KVM system that comes inside the blade enclosure, that will give flexible and easy access to the different nodes in less time.

On the deployment aspect and especially when installing any OS through the On-board Administrator USB port, the installation is slow. I hope they can upgrade the port to USB 3.0 for faster access.

I've used it for four years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

HP Technical Support is very good whenever a case is opened. The spare parts, when dispatched are received with no hassle and on time.

We were using HP DL 380 G4/5/6 then we decided to moved towards blade systems because it needs less space, while providing more. Also, it's easier to manage, as it's consolidated solution in one box.

The initial setup of a blade system is very straightforward. In less than five minutes from the time you power up the system, you will have it ready to be managed and the OS deployed.

We did an in-house implementation, and my advice is to be very familiar with the HP BladeSystem, and what it can offer as a converged infrastructure solution in order to have a successful implementation to meet your ends need.

The ROI is around 25%-30% and it will be higher considering the cost on the long term.

It would be very smart to know how your are sizing your solution, and what you need to reduce the cost in terms of licensing. In some deployments, it can be done without the need for extra licenses. And as well in terms of the blade units, no need to over size and pay more initially since they can be easily swapped, scaled, or upgraded in the future.

Go for it you will not regret it, and you will be moving to a better consolidated and converged infrastructure that is easy to manage and highly scalable.

For HP Blades, there are many products to choose from, so it is important to tailor your solution to fit your needs and goal in order to achieve an easy implementation and result.

Among the most important features, is the possibility to manage all the systems from a single web UI, the ease of working with networks through the Virtual Connect devices, and finally the huge information offered in relation to the monitoring of the different elements and alarm systems

The scalability of these solutions and its great adaptation to existing software models has allowed our cloud environment to grow easily. The physical volumes with data combined with its performance, has enabled us to reduce our pool of conventional equipment, and converge High Availability solutions in our cloud environment with powerful hardware.

We expected more processing power, with more CPU cores and a greater number of cores per CPU.

Our company currently uses hardware solutions from different manufacturers. In relation to the HP Proliant products used for our cloud environment, these are primarily equipment BL and ML generations G4, G5, G6, G7 and G8. Our cloud environments also feature HP 3PAR storage solutions. The HP Proliant solutions have been used in our cloud environment for over five years. It was the best option available on the market, and we believe that it now enjoys the best reputation for such solutions.

The only problems encountered in the implementation of these products is that there are always more updated versions of the firmware supplied with the products, which requires revision and updating equipment before putting into production. Some versions of HP Blade require additional drivers for installation or special software distributions designed for these products.

Our satisfaction with the Customer Service is high, both the attention and availability as the solutions offered have always met our expectations.

The service availability of technical support gives us great peace of mind because their response times are minimal.

We actually had different solutions, and still do. Solutions such as Cisco UCS, which has a very similar philosophy, beaome more complex and less effective. Solutions from manufacturers such as Supermicro, and Dell do not reach the expectations, and require more supervision and maintenance by our technicians.

The installation was easy. It's usually quite intuitive since their operations team, and our team both have extensive experience in this type of facility, so that did not involve a special effort.

I can not evaluate the return on investment, as I don't work in accounts, but I understand that if we continue to invest in these solutions, we will get good economic results.