HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

It's pretty quick. It's much easier to maintain than other servers we had before. We believe that the 380s are more stable than the other HPE servers that we had before.

It benefits our organization, operation-wise, because of its stability. Operation-wise, we don't have to put out as much and there's less maintenance.

I would like more advice about drivers and servers, depending on the application we are using.

Stability is probably the most important feature, especially if you are running a production service. The stability of the solution is really good.

Scalability is pretty good. It depends on the model. The 380 only has a couple of slots you can use. You can put some other enclosures in there as well.

We didn’t use other solutions before. We pretty much use servers from generation 3 and now we are up to generation 8.

I was involved in the setup and it was straightforward. It gives you all the options that you want.

We select a vendor based on their statistics. We check if they work with other companies or other industries similar to ours. We see if they work with applications that we use, as well as the price. 

Right now, we have HPE from the service perspective. We do have HPE on our shortlist. We currently have IBM as well. 

We are looking into other service management companies. We have HPE at the moment, but we are looking at other service management options.

Depending on the applications they use, they should study the technical requirements, such as storage and processing power.

We find it very easy to train people to use them and their reliability is very high. It’s usually cheaper than the competitor. We don't have any one vendor that we always use, so we tend to go out there and look at the best solution based on metrics such as price, quality, reliability, and HPE usually comes out on top.

Our organization itself is in bit of a transition at the moment. So we're moving towards more up-to-date solutions for our infrastructure. Anything that we do to improve reliability and availability of our services is always good from an IT point of view.

We're looking at things like UCS just now and we are looking for what would blend with our UCS deployment. I know that HPE are heavily involved in that, so it's been a lot of consultation and a lot of fun to get all of that to work together.

Stability is excellent. I've used HPE for best part of 15 years now, including all their data center solutions, and never had any problems. Any problems that do exist are quickly rectified; that's all you need.

Scalability depends on what you buy into. We are scaling out our sales, so it's a bit of legwork to get it done. There are other options to buy into more of a hyper-converged kit, but we haven't yet done that. We're looking at that kind of stuff.

We get our technical support through a third-party.

We are willing to look at anything. Just now, we do have some Dell and some Cisco kit. We tend to go with major suppliers, rather than any bespoke vendors. We certainly don't have any of the kind of model hyper-converged kit, like SimpliVity, or Nutanix. So across the board, it's either HPE or Dell. We went with HPE because their technical support is of a higher grade. You would get more reliability and better support through HPE.

I've used them for over 15 years now and all data-server solutions and there have been issues, but they have always been solved quickly. Dealing with HPE as a company is always nice to do.

In a vendor, good technical support and product reliability are key. If you ask my head of finance, it will be money. Availability, support, reliance, and reliability are absolute.

Reliability and supportability are the most valuable features. We can upgrade our drivers and other software and smoothly to roll it out to the enterprise.

From my point of view, most of what we do with our servers is fairly common. So we could get the same solution elsewhere. It's about the manageability and the way that we are able to do it in the scope of the resources we have.

The ProLiant does what it needs to do. It's not entirely perfect. It could run at lower power, for instance, and it could run cooler. I guess all of that comes at a price.

These servers are very stable.

It scales in a kind of linear fashion so it's not amazing. We expected it to scale, and it does. But it's not like it scales very high. Each server is managed individually anyway so it's, maybe, not a fair question about ProLiant.

I think technical support is fair to good. Not outstanding, but fair to good. Although, having said that, we don't very often call them. So that is a good thing itself.

We've always had HPE servers, but as a proportion of our environment we have fewer HPE ProLiant servers now. We have fewer HPE hub servers than we did previously, because we're now a dual vendor. We started that about five years ago, but it's a double-edged sword. Now, we are in two environments and we have another vendor to manage. You drive down price, but it's two lots to manage. Learning how to handle this internally is quite difficult as well.

I was not involved in the initial setup. That's done by our engineering team.

We've got two vendors that have comparable products. We have essentially the same as the ProLiant with our alternative vendor. They have the same processor, the same type of memory, and the same memory speed. In terms of performance, we wouldn't really see that there's much difference between the two. The main differentiator is the manageability and getting it to and onto the floor.

My main advice is to standardize your internal offering. So, if you are buying something you're going to sell internally, which is effectively what I am doing, I'm selling a service, try to standardize it to a degree rather than having custom fixes for every internal customer. Then you've got some uniformity across your offering internally.

When choosing a vendor, there are two main requirements. One is for a solid, stable product. That's number one. The second thing is the ability to be able to make the deal. With our vendors, we have kind of a mixed bag. One of them doesn't really deliver on the stability and the manageability, but is excellent on service and cutting a deal. The other one is not too good at cutting the deal, but actually we know that that's the kit we want because it is very stable and very manageable.

The flexibility of using storage options would be one valuable feature. Another would be competitive pricing. And yet another would the quite high top speeds on the processor.

It's also the simplicity and user friendliness that's important to us. The only issues we've had were software related from our own side, but not from HP.

The provisioning is something you want to do regardless of the actual types of hardware that you use as you want it as wide as possible.

We use the DL380 mainly for our workloads, so it's a combination of having to use local storage but also having high demands in terms of top speed on processors. We're using the highest top speed possible in a DL380. With that on the local discs, we get lots of performance where other systems will connect to a traditional SAN-based storage.

You would lose speed there, so we use the product for these high workloads, but we also use products like the 380 or the 360 for workloads that are actually offsite. These are like our smaller data centers where we don't have virtualization. These are branch offices or could be used as a domain controller for Windows, those sorts of workloads.

We'd like to have a management platform that's not limited and that would give us a single view of all our systems. This full range of options is limited only to certain types of hardware.

Also, if you look at compatible infrastructure that was introduced recently, it will be like an image streamer in a compatible system. An image streamer won't be able to provision older types of servers.

It's my job to design the infrastructure of the RAM. If there's any operational issue, I would be the one calling HP for that.

We've looked at a lot of IBM systems as well as Lenovo and Dell. We also looked at converged systems like Nutanix.

Look for performance specs. There's a lot of high-end servers being sold in the market with quite low specs.

• 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 that 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 presales support (i.e. getting accurate quotes to purchase systems).

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.

Overall the HP Proliant servers have been dependable and fit nicely into the price vs performance that is required for custom application stack.

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.

We have a three-tier infrastructure and our primary use case for this product is virtualization.

The most valuable feature is the tech support. They have a high level of expertise and they are fast.

We would like to see remote monitoring capabilities added. We are currently improving our automated monitoring for HPE servers using InfoSight.

We have been using HPE ProLiant DL Servers for more than five years.

The ProLiant DL Servers are stable and reliable.

This is a scalable product. We are using HPE Nimble Storage with it.

The technical support is very good.

The initial setup is easy.

We collaborated with HPE for our deployment. We purchased the initial support service, so it's a coordinated setup.

The pricing of these servers is fair. It is in the mid-range.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to purchase spare parts. The reason for this is that there is currently an electronic parts shortage. Any replacement components, such as a new hard disk, is very difficult to order and will have a long lead time. For this reason, I suggest ordering spare parts to have them in stock.

In summary, this is a good product, I'm content with it, and I recommend it for others.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

It provides support for the organization in terms of the commodity hardware as compared to the other HPE competitors. It provides stability for the servers.

There is need to always keep trying for improving this product.

Stability is better than the other alternatives that we have tried. There are always issues but typically, they are resolved very quickly.

Technical support is excellent.

Experience, knowing which vendor, which division and getting the best results are factors that affected our decision to switch solutions.

Previously, we were using Dell; we had a different vendor, i.e., a lower cost vendor at that time. The reason we switched from Dell was because we felt that the HPE solution was far superior.

The overall value, cost of keeping things running and knowing the product are important criteria while selecting a vendor.

Probably, you should evaluate the total cost of operation before you try and take orders. Check a cheaper solution.

I think the high availability features that are built into the server as our systems require a certain amount of uptime. Having to buy less servers because of built-in redundancy, means I have to buy less pieces of iron. It's a line that I'm comfortable with. I think it's something that HPE has put the investment into for the long-term.

I think it's just the generations that are built on the ProLiant line of servers.

The biggest thing I don't like about ProLiant, and this will be very trivial, is the rails. Every generation, even within the same family generation, the rails are different. It's a pet peeve. It’s not a technical thing. We do rack-mounted servers. Having to deal with different rack - or rail kits - is a real pain. It's not a huge technical thing, but that's the biggest thing for me.

For us it’s been a success year after year, generation after generation. I've used ProLiant for 15 -16 years.

Really none. Again, that may be just familiar with the tools from its initial iterations.

Really none. Again, that may be just familiar with the tools from its initial iterations.

I've never had a problem with support, and dealing with HP is always seamless.

The setup is so easy. It used to be SmartStart, but now they've changed that whole functionality. It's seamless to us. I don't really have any complaints from a "stand-it-up-and-support-it" perspective.

We looked at Dell versus HP. Proliant versus the R-series on the Dell side. When you look at product to product, servers are fairly closely matched. The supportability, or the management of the HP, versus bringing in Dell into my shop was a cost, from an educational perspective for my staff. Understanding the product inside and out was more important than bringing in a new partner.

I rate the ProLiant line very highly because you see the commitment of them building on it, and to me that's important.