HPE ConvergedSystem Reviews

The tool's most valuable features are stability and scalability. 

HPE ConvergedSystem needs to improve its price. 

I have been using the product since 2011. 

The tool's technical support is good. 

Positive

You need four resources to complete the deployment. Our deployment took two weeks to one month to complete. It is straightforward. 

The tool's licensing costs are yearly. 

I rate HPE ConvergedSystem an eight out of ten. 

Our HP infrastructure is used as the host system to run our VMware ESXi.

The biggest improvement that we have seen is with respect to our backups.

The best feature of this solution is the backup system. I have found it to be particularly good because we've been able to restore on a file by file basis.

The user interface, reporting, and management are good, and we are quite happy with the performance.

This solution integrates well with other products and applications.

The interface is not fully integrated with the ESXi, which is something that could be improved.

We have been using the HPE ConvergedSystem for about two years.

This solution is very stable.

We believe that this is a scalable solution, although we haven't had to extend it yet. One of the reasons that we would have chosen it, however, is so that we could scale when necessary.

The technical support from HPE is excellent.

The initial setup was complex, but that's the nature of this type of solution.

We had help from a vendor with our implementation.

We did evaluate other options before choosing HPE ConvergedSystem. However, I was not involved in the decision so I do not know what the deciding factors were.

This is a good solution and it seems to have everything that we need.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I work as an integrator and an end user.

It's a great solution that is very secure, and very easy to configure.

The storage, BladeSystems, Virtual Connect, and simplicity with hyper-converged solutions are the most valuable features of this solution.

When compared with SAP ERP, HPE is easier to deploy to their VMware solutions.

HPE ConvergedSystems integrates well.

We don't have any issues with the interface.

HPE ConvergedSystems doesn't upgrade as often as other solutions. For example, I have had to change the infrastructure several times for our customers who have SAP, they have gone from P4000 to P6000.

We are currently migrating our customers to SAP S/4HANNA. Their infrastructure has a five-year lifespan. After five years, they need to change it. They now have a new CEO, CFO, and CIO, and the new customers want to try new things.

Perhaps they will change the infrastructure. This firm has many customers with new CIOs and CDxOs, and they are considering changing their infrastructure. The infrastructure is better with what they currently have, but with new people, they want to look at other possibilities.

I would like to see monitoring solutions included, as well as brand support.

Customers' infrastructures must be supported at all times. In Colombia, for example, we meet many customers who have different brands, such as Dell, IBM, or HPE, which is either their headquarters or a branch. However, each branch has a single point of contact and a single support provider. The customer prefers to deal with only one branch and one support representative. I recommend that HPE provide support for various brands and Dell products.

I have been working with HPE ConvergedSystem for 15 years. I started to use this solution in 2007.

Our customers have two sites, and it is deployed on-premises as well as to third-party solutions for a third-party company.

Customers can scale up very easily.

HPE ConvergedSystem technical support is good, but they could do better in supporting other brands that customers have included in their infrastructure.

I have experience with several IT solutions such as HP, Dell, and Nutanix.

A warranty is provided to the customer. The customer can install the Enterprise ERP solution easily and has a good warranty, which includes HP's factory warranty and other conditions.

The pricing is sensitive.

The hybrid solution with Amazon, Google, and Azure, are hybrid solutions that the customers are considering.

Customers have evaluated other large brands similar to HPE, and believe that HPE SimpliVity or HPE Nimble can be the solution.

I would rate HPE ConvergedSystem a nine out of ten.

We don't do everything converged. We actually do converged infrastructure for particular servers. Everything that is software-defined, we do through our converged infrastructure. The core is converged but we don't do anything else besides that. We only do it to provision our servers. Our Infrastructure is actually converged at the server level, it's not converged at the network devices level and the like. We still go through hybrid and conventional for that.

It begins with a simpler installation. It provides a more advanced way to approach enterprise IT. It's still a nightmare, like every other converged solution out there. But we have done data center consolidation and data protection, disaster recovery for our services for DR. Desktops are globally backed up.

For the converged system, HANA for SAP. OneView is very good too. 

We don't have any problems with it at the technology level. I can't think of any improvements they can make. I think they are doing pretty much what any other converged infrastructure services system can do. Perhaps faster allocation of memory or storage.

However, I am sure we are not the only healthcare company that works with them. They need to work more as a team to solve common business problems.

If you're asking me about the technology, I don't see anything that they can do, other than growing the hyper-converged. But I think things have grown as far as they can. However, in terms of their direction as an enterprise, I don't think they are very good. It was a very rough ride. The people they sent, I don't think they had experience in doing these kinds of implementations before. It was pretty painful. It's working now but it took too long.

As far as what we are doing now, there is no problem with stability. It's pretty flexible, it's efficient, and it is centralized management, cost-effective. I don't see a problem. The systems are good to go. It's just the people that they hired to do the implementation, I don't think they knew what they were doing. They were just learning with the clients.

No issues with scalability. We are good to go on that.

Tech support is good, no problem. You write a ticket and, for policy changes and stuff like that, they're pretty straightforward. Sometimes they say it will take eight hours and they do it in 15 minutes. There are many ways to do escalation of their tickets. From my point of view, I do not have a problem with them, they are pretty efficient.

Setup was very complex, in terms of communication with them. At a certain point, we had to fly them there.

Pricing is good. We have not calculated what hyper-converged infrastructure has brought us but I think there has to be some lower cost for us, compared to the public cloud. Obviously, there would be a lower cost, probably by more than half.

Regarding licensing, have the paperwork looked at by senior management and don't make any decisions until you have all of your corners covered. In the beginning, you might see that this thing has ears and a tail but you don't know if it's a mouse or an elephant. You need to try to have as much clarity on what the business needs are going to be because, later on, it's going to hurt to increase licensing or to understand how far they go, what their limitations are.

Ask as many questions as you can, don't take things for granted. In the beginning, you need to give them a roadmap. If you don't give them a roadmap, if you don't ask for the right things, that's not on their side.

When we were in the market, we went everywhere. When you're in the market looking for a solution, you don't want to go for the first pick. It was a year-long project to find a provider. We based our decision on cost-effectiveness and on what they told us: that it was going to be easier to manage the essential application, that we were going to have increased performance, we were going to have a reduction in recovery time. Promises and promises.

It's not that they are not true, it's just that they didn't seem to be true at the beginning of the implementation of the cloud. You get all of these problems at the beginning and you ask yourself, "Are we going to be getting this kind of scenario everywhere we go in this implementation?" In the end, everything worked out. I guess it's just part of this business. The transformation is not as simple as see it seems.

I don't think we are completely happy but we are not completely unhappy. We are right in the middle. It's not the system, it's the people behind the system. They have a pretty good technology, but they don't have people who know how to handle it. That's the problem. I am not saying I'm an expert on hyper-converged or on converged systems, but I have to say that for some issues, we had to roll up our sleeves and do it ourselves.

In terms of advice, if you are considering converged infrastructure, you should become educated first on what it is. To begin with, it is one that isn't going away. But it needs to make sense for your use case. Converged infrastructure can be perfect for virtualized data centers, but only after considering the logistics and financial implications.

You need to learn about the benefits. You need to know how the bundle will compute. You need to know how the storage is going to work into a single offering that can be deployed quickly.

Another point is budget. You are going to have an initial cost for converged infrastructure. You can prevent a lot of frustration when you are working with heterogeneous data centers. You need to know how to save money in the long term.

Don't be too fast in making decisions, don't pull the trigger without a converged infrastructure comparison; the benchmarking is very important. A lot goes into the decision to use converged Infrastructure. Some factors can be very subjective, others can be very straightforward.

Personally, I would say that, ready or not, converged Infrastructure systems are here, and they are here to stay. If you're still buying separate servers or you're still buying separate networks and storage, you might consider a converged infrastructure system. There is no other way.

One of the biggest things is, the fact that it can be a turn-key solution. With the ConvergedSystem system, you've got a small 2U platform that supports your storage, networking, and also has your compute in it. The other nice thing about it is, because it's a small form factor, you reduce footprint in your IT data center. It helps with power and cooling issues. The simplicity of it helps people who aren't necessarily IT specialists to use it. You can have it in your ROBO environments. We support Microsoft and VMware with this software.

My biggest pet peeve with the HC250 are the descriptions that they put on our parts list. For example, multiple times now someone asked me, they said, "Hey, they want to take this option off the quote," and I said, "No, it's required." Then they came back to me and they said, "You know the customer, they don't believe you," and I said, "Okay." Basically, with ConvergedSystem, if you're doing a VMware solution, you don't have to buy the software from us. If the customer has the correct licenses, the correct type of licenses, it's an option for them. The description for the software that's required, which includes the VSA, which includes our OneView integration, which includes all this other stuff, they call it the VMware software license. People think they can remove that and so, they come back to me and I say, "No. This is what this part number includes, but it's the description." There's my biggest pet peeve with ConvergedSystem.

You can scale out by adding additional nodes, which will increase performance capacity for you. 

It would depend, but my advice would be that, if you're interested in a converged system, then go and buy it. However, it just depends on what the customer wants. You need to know what you want, because there are different solutions that support different workloads and things.

We sell Converged to government organizations. In the past year we've been working with the healthcare and education departments. We are partners, resellers and integrators of Converged, primarily a Hewlett Packard enterprise partner. I'm the director of the company. 

This is a beneficial system for organizations. Rather than having a separate processing system and backup system, Converged provides it all in one. 

The consolidation is an advantageous feature along with the duplications. The product reduces energy required by the system. It's also easy to manage. 

I think the MTG inside HP could be improved. It would simplify quoting for services. When you get a quote from HP now, they tend to quote separately for services and the product. This makes it difficult to try to quote for the client and to integrate the solution. 

For the future, it would be good to see integration with cloud services. Our customers want to share the solution, currently on-premise, to the cloud, and it's sometimes difficult to implement. It would be great if they could bridge the two. 

We've been reselling this solution for five years. 

It's very easy to scale this solution. Our customers are generally medium enterprise, at least medium for Mexico. They have plans to increase usage. 

 I think the technical support is excellent.

Our first customer evaluated Nutanix and Converged before going with Converged. HP has an advantage because they have hardware and Nutanix is software. That's the reason the customer preferred to make the fusion with the hardware because it reduced the overhead of the processing. Secondly, HP enables a backup in the same solution, and with Nutanix you have to integrate another product from another software and another vendor. 

Initial setup is complex but not because HP is complex, but because the customer has a lot of integrations or components. When a customer buys Converged they have to eliminate the storage, the switch, and other components. It's difficult to implement correctly in that situation. The last implementation we did took a month but an earlier one took three months. Deployment time really depends on configuration.

I recommend this solution, I think it's easier to implement Converged than other solutions. The solution doesn't require many people to manage or maintain, or involvement with the infrastructure. That's why I would recommend it. It's easy and that's one of the advantages the customer has when they buy a Converge System, it's easier than an iOS infrastructure.

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. 

One thing that we find peculiar is, when you buy ConvergedSystem, it seems to be behind in the versions it supports. For example, vSphere 6 is just now being supported. OneView 2 is just now being supported, even though they have announced OneView 3. We're already a version behind. I know they're probably working and testing as quickly as they can, but we always seem like we're behind the curve with these new features that we know are out that we can't take advantage of and that are supported on the blades individually. They're supported on the blade system individually, but once you get the ConvergedSystem, all of a sudden, they're not supported. I understand that we want a rock solid infrastructure that's well-tested, but I'm hoping they can speed up compatibility with newer versions of software and drivers and so on.

We still have some of the growing pains just getting the system in. There's a lot of miscommunication between us and HPE of what we actually wanted, what they delivered. It was sold as being more of a plug-and-play solution. It really wasn't that way for us, maybe because we did want to make modifications. I can't say it's all HPE's fault, because we did make modifications and made some of those modifications at the last minute. It was just growing pains with that relationship and getting to understand each other and what each other needed. We're fresh off of that; we we're just using it. I still feel like it's been a pain because it took so long to get us here. But I think going forward, it will be smooth. Our next system will probably be plug-in. We'll plug it in the way they advertised it. It's hard for me to say for sure, but I think we're at the point where it would be plug and play from now on and it would be easy.

I think it has been stable. We did have issues with the Dell blades, had some instability there. Again, it's brand new. Everything has been stable, though we've had an issue with the NICs reporting errors, but we think those are false reports. There's supposedly a patch, but the ConvergedSystem - as it was given to use and shipped to us - had errors.

I wouldn't expect that a well-tested, purpose-built appliance from HPE would report network errors. We're still trying to figure that out. I will say it seems to be false positives, possibly because the system is stable. But again, we don't have a big load on it because we're just now testing it, so I can't really speak to, when we scale it up, will it perform? Will it stay stable? But, for now, it's been stable.

I can't really speak to scalability yet because we have just a small test environment now. We're looking to move it to production later on, I think, the end of this year. We haven't really had to scale it that far. We've only done a little primary testing, not a large load of servers or storage or anything like that, but it's performed very well so far. There's so little data actually on it. I can't really speak to the scalability of it. I know it scales to 128 servers. We might need to scale past that. We'll probably need several ConvergedSystems, which is, maybe, not ideal. If it could scale past 128 servers, that'd probably be beneficial. For our needs right now, we haven't hit that yet. We probably will in the future but it's too soon.

Technical support hasn't seemed to be that simple or that easy. I still feel like our calls get redirected to a specific team, which is fine. It is one number to call. What I've found frustrating is that sometimes when we call in, I don't think they know how a ConvergedSystem works. The whole point is you have one number to call and that person should know what that is and about what you have. It's not just some blades and some servers and some storage. You actually have a purpose-built system that they're supporting. There's been a lot of confusion with that. I don't understand why it's not known when we call that number what we have and what kind of support we expect.

We used to use Dell blades and we didn't have Virtual Connect, so configuring the networks and all of that for our servers took a lot longer. It's easier to provision the server now that we've moved to HPE and Virtual Connect, and how the ConvergedSystem is architected makes it easier. Just ease of configuring networks and configuring your server.

We wanted a converged solution. We wanted something that came as an appliance, with basically everything configured and Dell didn't have an offering that met our needs. We looked at different vendors and we narrowed it down to HPE. We went with the HPE solution.

We were looking at FlexPod, the NetApp solution; Hitachi had a solution; and EMC's solution. None of those did as well as HP's. Some vendors were too strict. EMC was too strict. You couldn't touch their hardware. "This is how you're going to get it. You can't change anything. Take it or leave it." HPE was a little bit more flexible. "This is our ConvergedSystem. This is how it is, but you can make a couple of modifications if needed to fit your business." That's why we went with them. They were a little bit more flexible.

I think it's too soon to accurately rate the product. Based on experience so far and what I expect out of it, I'll give it an 8 (four stars). That's based on what I expect in the future and what I know it's capable of, not really our experience so far because I know we've had some bumps in the road. Again, I think some of them are our fault. I don't want to blame HPE for that. I think it's a solid product. I've used HPE blades in the past at a previous employer. They've always been rock solid. I believe in the hardware. We've been using HPE storage at my current company for three years. I used it for six years before that, rock solid. No issues. I believe in the hardware.

It's tough. One because there's now the Composable Infrastructure, the Synergy platform, which is newer. Again, this is the problem: you go with a converged solution because you want it rock solid, stable. The problem is you're always behind the technology curve when you do that because now there's a new product out that offers new features. I would have a hard time telling someone to go out and get a converged solution. One, because, well, just because it's behind technology-wise. But if they work for a company that doesn't care about the latest and greatest features, and they just want stability, sure, go with a converged solution. But if you need the latest features, and you need to stay on the bleeding edge, I couldn't recommend the converged. I could recommend the blades probably. They probably want to look at Synergy and the newer product line but it's kind of funny that the converged system already seems to be legacy hardware even though it's still new.

High Availability (HA) and the ability to add Serviceguard on top as a solution. HP offers the extra layer for failover.

Experience - HP has been doing it for a long time and they are not a new supplier. It’s a bit more expensive, but it’s safe. They have a lot more consultants trained on HANA already.

Evaluating - we looked at the IOPS. It's very much integrated with SAP as opposed to other vendors. 3PAR is strong and their appliances are strong. We already use the blade solution.

Migration - smooth and safe because we already know it.

I would like to see a full flash array added and the pricing improved, as HP is expensive.

ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA- It's currently in the proposal stage. We've already purchased licenses and we'll be implementing it within a year to a year and half.

It's stable, which was the main reason I chose it. The CIO said that I was completely responsible for the solution and that I need to be comfortable with it.

Expensive, but scalable.

It could be better. Every company has tech support outsourced, which is frustrating.

All of our SAP consultants realized that we need to go to with HANA. R3 is over and every one is doing a migration. It’s hard to move out of Oracle, but we feel we have no choice.

We are currently getting proposals. Either directly from HP or a reseller. We want an end-to-end solution and migration help. Proposals from other vendors don’t even come close to HP.

Cisco, of whom we are a customer, Flexpod, Netapp, and Nutanix. They promise a lot but they are not yet ready.

We chose HP for the expertise. Over the last four years we had a 99.9% uptime. Hard to leave something that is working so well to go to another vendor.

Look for a full solution from end to end. You also want mission critical support. We also needed a vendor with a lot of experience with the product who can help us with the migration. It's hard to find the good ones.

Be sure to dig deeper than hardware. Resellers take advantage of flash storage, but they don’t really have expertise. Nutanix has a great presentation and pricing, but don’t deliver.

HP is on the right track and is the way to go.