HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

This kind of product is mainly a cost product. You need to have a good price. It is not a question of big features because there are no main differences between products.

I think the main feature is that it works. We have good management for the product, HPE OneView, which might be a good feature of the product, where you can manage it. Instead of the hardware technology, that is it.

What we are doing with the product is, we are building services on top of the HPE products, so the main advantage for us is that we have a stable, reliable platform.

I would like to see better license management with the iLO. It is very difficult to manage the licenses for the hardware, as they can easily be lost. Then it is very hard to get it back. That must be better.

We have not experienced any stability problems; 100% stable.

It is a physical thing, so the main scalability issues are money and delivery time, and not the technology itself. It is difficult to evaluate scalability for a simple server. Scalability is determined by the software and we are not talking about Superdome, just a low-level ProLiant server.

If we scale, we buy more machines. No issues so far.

The standard technical support is fine. We also have support with Proactive Support and contact and sometimes you need it, especially for SAP HANA systems where it was average.

The HP ProLiant support was OK.

We have been buying HPE rack servers for years. We are talking every year about switching to another technology, and it depends on the performance and the price at that moment, for one year normally.

When we are looking at a vendor like HPE, the most important criteria are innovation, reliability, and good support.

We also considered Dell rack servers, Lenovo, and Fujitsu. In the end, we chose HPE because of price.

Have a deep look at the HPE products. They are a market leader, by the numbers. Have a look at them; make a thorough comparison.

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.

• It helps with work-load management
• It's a reliable solution
• It's easy to fix
• It's easy to work with and manage

I have never implemented them as part of an organization, but I worked with these rack servers while providing support for customers.

During the period of time I was providing tech support for this product line, I was able to see that its fault tolerance is really high, providing the capability of a reaction against a “disaster” and the failure rate is really low.

Obviously, you will still have hardware failures, but it is not something you can easily fix. This is more about the regular hardware failures that you may get on daily basis such as a bad HDD, NIC failure or regular hardware failures that may be present due to the normal workload of the server, meaning that they have or exceeded the lifetime or they are presenting a huge workload.

Regarding the normal functionality of the server as is, the only improvement I would say is to continue with the research and the development of higher workload capacities as the customer needs are constantly growing, therefore the demand for what the product requires to do will also grow, to avoid the demand to elapse behind the improving of the technology needs to be continued. It's tied to the needs of the end users and any new features that they would require in order to better manage their organizations.

I’ve worked with these products for over three years providing technical support for the HP ISS industry customers. I did not need to use them in a production environment.

I was part of the technical support team.

I used to guide customers with the installation, and the initial setup was always straightforward.

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.

Our customers are having additional VMware environments which we are converting into one because of the backup advantage. We can do the complete backup of VM within approximately eight to ten seconds.

The speed of the backups and having the system be immune to ransomware are the main advantages. Additionally, It is very user-friendly, repairable, flexible, and anybody can easily learn it.

When it comes to security there can always be room for improvement. If there was an option to build security into the system it would be an advantage.

The solution could improve by providing local support here in Sri Lanka, we do not have a local office.

I have been using this solution for approximately five years.

The solution is scalable.

We have approximately 500 customers using this solution.

The support structure from HPE is excellent. When comparing the support to Dell and Huawei, they cannot match the level of support HPE provides. I have experienced great response times and the engineers are very talented with precise information. When they give a solution to a problem we do not have to question if it will resolve the issue.

HPE frequently checks its competitors' capabilities to ensure they deliver the best service. This is something valuable this is why they are one of the best.

The installation is easy. The hardware installation takes approximately 20 minutes and the Windows installation takes another 20 minutes.

We have support engineers for the maintenance and implementation of the solution.

HPE ProLiant DL Servers are one of the best-selling solutions in this industry. There is not a license required for this solution.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate HPE ProLiant DL Servers a nine out of ten.

It's just a solid server. You put it up and it just kind of runs. It's not a whole bunch of jumping through hoops or anything to configure it. It's pretty straightforward. It's really all you can say about the ProLiant servers.

It gave me more insight to our actual data usage on our disk arrays. Before that, we were using the P2000 G3 disk array from HPE MSA series; just not a whole lot of insights in that.

Providing areas with room for improvement is a tough one. We're running AMD right now, so we're not running the latest gen. We're running a gen 8, something DL series. I honestly can't provide areas with room for improvement until I see the next version of what that's going to be. I mean, it’d be nice if AMD got off their butts and provided a new chip for us to use, but right now it's all Intel.

I wish there was a clearer-cut way to back up the BIOS and restore other machines. That'd be really the biggest thing I could see an improvement on, which I think they did fix in gen 9 and 10.

I rack them and throw them in there. Once you put them on a rack, as long as you don't mess with it, they just run.

With the DL series redundancy line, just keep throwing them in the rack and plug it into your cluster and it goes. You're not stuck on a blade mid-planner waiting for all your blades to go out of the mid-plane on the enclosure with half of the access; that's why we moved to the DL series. They give us that reliability and we can do redundancy with it; unlike the blade enclosures, where you have to purchase two separate blade enclosures to get genuine redundancy, which is a very steep purchase.

The technical support leaves a lot to be desired. I find it amazing that I paid for extra for support for the 3PAR and I wait on the phone for 30 minutes. For that extra support, when I'm paying for the premium support; so it's US-side support, US-based support, I should mention. If I call the regular number without the extra support, I talk to someone instantly.

It's, "What care plan are you on? What care plan are you on?" That's the question of HPE, "Are you on the SA plan?" "Are you on this plan?" You got to dig through this matrix of plans to figure out which phone are we going to call. It's absurd.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

I do all of the implementation myself.

Stability is the most important feature. We use it for the infrastructure as a service. We need stable service.

I would like to see more standardized management. In the past, there was a lot of mixture between the software and the hardware features.

It is stable and has been for many years. We have used HPE for three or four years and we don't have a lot of complaints.

We buy the biggest one each time and we multiply it by two every year. We need a lot of them. We set them up in clusters close to us, so there are no scalability issues.

I have used technical support, but primarily with warranty questions. We have no issues with technical support at all.

I was involved in the installation. It was straightforward and not complex.

We looked at Dell, Lenovo, and IBM.

We do a mini competition a few times a year and we buy a lot of servers. This is needed in the Netherlands. We started to use HPE.

We are looking for basic functionality and see if the solution conforms with open standards.

When choosing a product, price is an issue. If two products have the same specifications, then we have to choose the one with the lowest price.

My advice is to decide if you want a cheap and bad server, or if you want a stable and good server.

I like the centralized systems, and I like the fact that they’re rugged. When they get delivered to you, there are no failures and they’ve already been tested and ready to go. For us it was important because we had to install about 20 of them in one week.

It’s more an Intel advantage. The fact that the Gen9 relies on the latest CPUs from Intel, it’s a very high density of processing power that serves our needs greatly.

By default on the Gen9 server, they remove the screenports and USB ports in front of the servers, and you have to purchase them. I didn’t know that beforehand. Now, when I troubleshoot things I have to connect things in the back. The new design should fix that.

Out of the 40 servers we’ve added, there’s only been one incident of a hardware issue in almost three years. It was resolved very quickly.

Very good. Our business model relies on high scaling of code and adding servers to support that. For us, we need that sufficient processing power, which has been very good.

If anything, they’re over-caring – they’ll chase you down if they see any problem. We had an issue opened and they really made sure it was resolved.

Growth – our biggest problem is spontaneous growth. We sign new customers and our processing requirement levels spike, and we needed to meet that demand.

Very straightforward – we got them out of the box, racked them and they were good to go.

Oracle Sun Servers and IBM. Based on past experiences (we’ve used both, and were previously a mixed environment), they weren’t quite as stable as HP.

It’s good, but the display ports are ill-designed.

We look for stability when choosing a new vendor. It’s extremely important to us. But, find a local partner to make sure that you make the right choice. I’m from Montreal, so I use ACCII, so build your order to fit your needs. Understand all the options available to you to fit your workload, not the other way around.