HPE ConvergedSystem Reviews

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.

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 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.

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 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. 

The excellent service that we receive from the HPE team is very good with their hardware. The best value was in the service because we receive the solution as a managed service from HPE, so it's a box somewhere in the data center that we don't care about. It's always running and so far, no problems.

Right now, all of our BI initiatives are running on HANA so we use that daily to create a new promotion for the marketing team that is in the field. So they can use it once and based on the behaviour of each customer, we can provide new promotions every day. That's the basis for our sales team.

Something that we think should be better in the HANA converged solutions is all of the monitoring of the solutions. I think there is improvement space there, to have more data available for the final customer. And from the service point of view, the HPE team that is supporting the solution, could do a little more and have more data to show to the final user, in our case, about the performance and trans with the box.

We have been running HANA for one and a half years.

So far, it's been a very stable solution. We had a problem six months ago, but support reacted very quickly and we were up and running again in one hour. It was a problem with one of the memory SIMs that was creating some problems. They changed in one hour.

This is the first implementation of it, and at this point, we don't have the need to scale. However, we do see a problem down the road because the exact model we have right now seems to be out of production. But we are remaining with the HPE team and they have said they will provide a new one and take the old one as part of the payment, so that's OK for us.

Initial setup seems complex for the technician who was doing the work, but for us as a customer, it was very straightforward.

We have an onsite team for setting up both applications.

We compared the HANA solution with Microsoft and Oracle, performed a cost-benefit analysis, and we decided to go with HPE.

You should consider the service, the stability of the solution and the cost for any solution that may benefit you.

We implemented a complete system and then 3PAR storage solutions. We are very happy with the implementation.

We had an old system, but it got to a point, because of age, and the data limitations, that backup times and operations were taking too long. After we migrated to this environment, everything changed. Our applications are performing at their best and the backup times have been reduced from about four hours to 30 minutes.

We would like the system to be even faster.

Everything is intact, everything is perfect.

We got it about three years ago. We have a policy that we don't scale. We use a system for about five years and then we change the whole system.

Our company policy is that every five years we have to upgrade our equipment.

Everything in our environment is HPE. Recently, some other vendors have been knocking on our door. We have done our research and what we found is that nothing out there is comparable to HPE. Since it's working for us, we don't see a reason to switch from HPE.

The initial setup was complex because it was the first setup for that implementation engineer. He really struggled. We got to some points where there was no way forward. We searched online and found solutions and moved on.

In our previous environment, we were using fiber switches where you just plug in.

I'm very satisfied with HPE systems. We don't have any issues with their hardware or their backup software.

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.