HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

The scalability, rapidness, and computing are actually very good. It's a Gen9 server that we've been working with, so it is pretty good.

The benefit is that they're pretty reliable. Reliability is pretty much what we need.

There is need to improve the iLO support. There's a management part of the server that they've improved and that was a big deal.

The product is very stable and the support is very good.

Scalability is very good. We were able to move from the servers and upgrade them very easily. It has worked very nicely and is serving generation to generation over the years, so it is pretty good.

The technical support was very good. We have a pretty decent relationship; we have a four-hour onsite repair.

We've tried other products and have had some issues in the past. However, HPE has been the most reliable solution.

We have different locations; in my location, I was involved in the setup. It was pretty straightforward.

We have used IBM and Compaq back in the day.

For us, an important factor while selecting a vendor is that the actual company backing the product. We know that we're a company that has been around a long time in the industry.

You would be foolish not to be looking into HPE. A lot of their products seem very interesting and they are very useful in our field.

I believe it is much easier when you are trying to install something or trying to figure out any issues with it. Even though the booting up process itself is a little bit slower, it is easier to work with the HPE 360s and 380s.

I like the way the installation process goes. It's much easier to understand what you're doing. It's easy to troubleshoot and if you are stuck with any of the hardware issues, HPE comes on site. They don't come with just one part which is affecting it, but they come with other parts as well. This makes it easy, because they don't have to make multiple visits and the solution will be repaired in just one visit.

The downtime on the systems is less frequent. If one machine is out of the cluster, we call HPE and tell them about any of the hardware defects that we have. They come up with the parts pretty quickly. The engineer who comes is really knowledgeable and knows what he or she is doing. The process is much faster.

I would like to see the booting process be a little bit faster. Instead of going through the circle loading image, it would be more interesting if it would show what it is doing during each stage of the loading process.

The HPE servers are really stable. There are hardly any issues with them. There are rarely any hardware related issues, such disk failures or a need to replace the memory on the server. They are much more stable than other servers that we have used.

We do scale and the scalability is good. We have thousands of servers.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10.

We have multiple servers, such as from Dell, in addition to the HPE servers. We deal with both of them. My personal preference is HPE, because they are hassle free. The selection of tools is done by solution architects. I don’t take part in that process.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but from what I heard, it was pretty straightforward. It was not that complicated. If it would have been, they would have called an engineer from HPE to help us.

The solution is worth it. You should invest in it, go for it, and have fun with it.

I would say it's well documented and you can find exactly what the configuration is easily as well as the drivers and other documentation that they require to get a junior staff member up and running on the platform.

It allowed us to consolidate our workloads. It allowed us to process the data more efficiently. To provide real time data for our end user applications.

I would say that for us, as we're moving to more of a cloud based solution, we're looking for ways that you can take machines that you can't put in a private cloud instance and how those can be managed from a single user interface.

Stability is excellent. It doesn't break.

This is something that we're going into right now with HP as we've built out a stack of these machines. In the future we're planning on moving to more of a cloud based architecture.

They want to add more sites and it's just not good for us to add in another rack of equipment for every site.

Technical support gets to the parts where we need it. Like any product, it fails occasionally, right? But we built the system to survive and HP is still there to support us.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I don't know why they chose HP in the end. I think it's just experience and it was the right company at the time.

We look for experience, stability and the ability to support our customers' requirements from a security perspective. Also the availability of documentation. Documentation that can be supported by even new staff members that have never touched the system.

Work with HP to pilot before you go buy it.

Reliability is a valuable feature for us. We use the DL380s throughout our data centers and they've proven to be very reliable.

We've been using them for several years, and because we've been using them throughout our data centers, they've been uniform. All of our techs are familiar with them, and I think it's just familiarity with the servers which has benefited us a lot.

We're going to the hyper converged area. I've seen OneView. I'm very pleased with how that interface looks. We saw SimplyView in a demonstration and Synergy. So until I get my hands on it, I don't know that I can say I'm looking for more improvements.

We've been using them for several years.

We are very impressed with the stability. The only time they've really failed on us is when the cooling in the area failed one time. Literally, the temperatures got so hot that they physically melted. That's probably the only time they failed.

Right now, we're looking into some of the newer hybrid architectures, hyper converged. So we're looking at keeping our older servers but trying to scale them out. So that's what we're looking at now.

The technical support has been very valuable. We had a storage array go bad, and they worked with us to get that storage array up and running again. So, yes, very valuable.

Prior to what we were using, I think we were just using all of the firmware-based solutions for setting up our arrays.

If you use a different supplier or a different company for your firmware or your hardware, then it has a different interface. It was just complicated. If you're using HPE for everything, it just made it so much simpler.

I was not involved in the initial setup, although my predecessor was. I've stood up servers and storage arrays from scratch, and I think it's not that complex. I think the user interface that HPE provides is straightforward. It takes away the complexity. That's my feeling, anyway.

We've looked at moving away from HPE in the past, and we were lured away. But HPE, for the requirements of our customers, for our own requirements, especially security, was key.

I think security is one of the first things we look at, and HPE has that covered.

We evaluated Dell. We chose to stay with HPE but we almost switched to Dell.

I mean, look at what other solutions are out there, and look up what your requirements are. For us, it's met all of our requirements. I don't think that the others could do that.

Most valuable for us are ease of use, the ability to quickly view the system for health and how to get into the consols.

It reduces the amount of work that we have to do. In the old days we used to have to go downstairs and basically plug into a computer and do stuff like that. Now, we're at our desk and we just walk right up to a computer and if you know something is going on you can easily open the case with HP and have them come out and take a look at it.

I can't think of anything right now regarding improvements except perhaps the price. I think more involvement with us, the customer would be good too. They are doing better with that now though. We've had meetings with them and we really discussed the problems that we've come across. I'd say we're going in the right direction, that's for sure.

Stability is definitely encouraging. The other system was weak. We had a lot of problems with the memory. The memory would go out every time we did a patch. We'd have to reboot the server and as it came back up, 10 percent of the time, we'd have a memory issue but over the last year or two, it's been much improved.

Scalability is pretty good. I'd say it's a lot better than it used to be, definitely.

The technical support is very good. There's always somebody available. We have an on-call number.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

Mostly we look at reliability, maintenance and support. Those are the big ones to consider when choosing a vendor. Since we have a relationship with HP, that's it regarding any alternative vendors.

As I said earlier, look at their maintenance support. The number of companies that they actually support. Those are big factors. And disaster recovery. That's what I would say.

It builds very well, is easy to install, is easy to maintain, is easy to administer remotely.

It allows me to run a lot of virtual machines at the same time. It helps me do a lot of testing, so I can build a virtual machine and try things out on it. If it doesn't work, I can just recreate it.

I guess more regular automatic updates would be nice. Sometimes when you call support they'll say, "Well, what version of frameware are you on?" And you'll say, "Version X, Y, Z," and they'll say, "You need to be on A, B, C."

The stability is rock solid.

I have not tried scaling it.

Regarding the technical support - it depends on the day, sometimes it's good, sometimes bad, but I always know how to elevate or escalate to get to the next level if I need to.

The setup was straightforward. It's easy to mount the rack, it's got great rails. Power it right up, launch and then you can start configuring it.

The most important aspect when selecting a vendor is ease of use. Probably the most important. We evaluated HP, IBM, Lenovo. We have a better relationship with HP.

Get it because it will work very well for you.

We value the ease of management in terms of the firmware. The hardware is very toolless to work with, so when you have to do a part replacement it's very hands-on friendly. You don't have to grab any quick tools nearby to swap out modules and such.

The layout is quite nice as, for the most part, you don't have to tear the machine half apart to get to a piece. So, sometimes when they have on-site technicians to replace a part, we don't have to send a senior technician out there to do it. They can pretty much easily find it and get the parts swapped.

Parts fail, that's part of the IT business, but the ability to be able to get in there quickly and get parts swapped is a very big benefit.

I've already seen quite a bit here at the conference that looks good. Well, one of the areas that I really am excited about is the iLo 5 (integrated lights out technology) on the HP blade technology where they're allowing a lot of the firmware flashing to take place through the iLo, which means I don't have to go through the OS, so that beats a lot of our servers.

Run Unix in a form that we can't reboot them more than twice or maybe less in a 30-minute maintenance window. The fact that I can flash a lot of the hardware from the iLo and not have to go through the OS means a far reduced outage time maintenance window, so that really helps take the pressure off us.

We have machines that go back quite a long time in terms of almost back to the mid-nineties on some of the servers. So stability-wise, yes we've had some pretty good results even in the old, old hardware from HP specifically. So yes, we've been happy with them so far.

Scalability has been pretty good. We just buy more. We just buy a lot of everything. So scalability hasn't really been an issue for us because we have pretty sizable data centers, but yes, certainly it has been a good product overall.

I have used technical support quite a few times. It has been quite useful.

HP has been very helpful in terms of getting a technician on-site, and parts available if we need them. They have always offered us a technician to actually do the repair, so that takes a lot of the workload off us.

Sometimes on some of the higher-end systems where there is a lot more money involved in the hardware, it just helps to take the pressure off to where we don't have to really put our hands on that equipment, especially when you're talking about a server that costs over $20,000. I'd rather have the HP guy work with it just for liability reasons.

We have a different team that does all the initial setup.

So the two biggest competitors are primarily, obviously Dell and HP. If I had to compare the two - I was at the Dell conference not too long ago just for investigation purposes - I would say that HP, in the long run, from my experience as I've worked with companies that have both, HP is just more stable, in the long term.

Like I said before, you want to avoid hardware fails, right? That's just a part of IT, but how the customer is being handled is important in terms of if we have a bad blade or we have a bad motherboard, because every now and then we get a blade that's just bad out of the box, right? The fact that the customer or the vendor, whoever that is, if they come out and do the right thing, just swap the part out with very little hassle, that's all right.

I don't have to go through a purchasing program where I have to do a repurchase or return process, and that's really helpful in terms of just doing the right thing, getting the parts swapped out, reducing our downtime, and that's our biggest paying point with the customer. Because we have customers too that scream when our stuff goes down, right?

If they're not using HP today, I would highly suggest them to take a deep look at it, in the long run, even just as a starter. I'm not saying that Dell or others are bad, it's just, in the long run, I like the hardware layouts better in HP.

The server hardware is valuable and it works. It's a server platform. It's comparable to everything else on the market. It works in a pretty reliable fashion.

As a cloud service provider, we have to provide compute to customers with reliable hardware support.

I can't think of any new features I would like to see. I'm really happy with it. I know that they're moving towards OneView.

It's a server. You plug it in and it does what it is supposed to do. It’s compliant with the HPE server line because they assemble all of the drivers that they install. The drivers have typically been extremely buggy, but we removed them from our builds. I would be nice if those drivers weren't causing critical system failures every other version, but it doesn't affect us anymore.

The platform stability is good. There are some drivers that are extremely unstable.

It's a server platform, so it's not getting more or less scalable than anything else. It's not like Flexpod or other architectures.

We've called technical support for broken programs and things like that. It really depends on who you get. There are some HPE support staff who are really, really good and there are some who are atrocious. It is really hit or miss, depending on which product you call in for. For the 360s, the support has typically been pretty good and the engineers will come on site are helpful for us.

We do a lot of server cycling, every two years or so, and we evaluate it. Our work platform allows us to standardize. It's been HPE during the time when I've been here.

They used the DL client before I started. I've been with this company for four years. As a service provider, we install the product for our customers.

We are doing another evaluation cycle right now. We will be evaluating Dell, Super Micro, and UCS.

When choosing a vendor, honestly, it’s the support that I’m looking for. Everyone gets their hardware from the same couple of places in Taiwan or wherever. What really matters is being able to get the hardware delivered on time. We've actually built relationships with the manufacturers and vendors for support. If we can't get things replaced in a timely fashion, then we have to get our heads around it and say, "I know we're a five grade data center, but we may be down for another 12 hours, or whatever, because we can't get the part in". They chose HPE before I got to the company. We've continued to work with HPE because we've had a good relationship with them. Maybe 80% of our servers, our server hardware, our storage hardware, and switches, etc. are HPE.

It is solid hardware. I'd give them a list of the drivers to rip out before the builds. I've done that before, actually, because most of the drivers that I'm talking about cause hard crashes. The will cause a blue screen, and that impacts customers. Some versions are safe, and some versions are not safe.