HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

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.

The DL380 generation 8 has slots for hard drives in the front. This really separates it from competitors such as Dell. I need that kind of local storage space for each server, which I can make from eight drives. This is like a RAID 6 set-up so that I don't have to worry about just one broken hard drive. We'll automatically get an SNMP problem error from the broken drive.

Very simply, we needed a stable server, and this is a stable server.

I'm worried that with the new model, HP will get rid of the processor ILO port that enables us to have a separated management network. I don't think it'll be feasible to have some models with the ILO port and some without.

I'd also like to see faster memory chips.

I also think that there's an issue with the Smart Array firmware, which is the RAID controller. It corrupts RAID 6 so that if you have an entire setup that's based on RAID 6, the whole RAID will also be corrupted.

We haven't had any deployment issues.

It's quite stable.

I don’t need to scale. Their cage is stand-alone boxes.

I haven't used them for these servers, but I've found them slow for other things.

We were using Dell, which were almost the same as the DL380.

It's straightforward. Putting that kind of server into the rack now is something like 50 minutes.

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.

My client is using HPE ProLiant DL Servers for virtualizing hyper-vision functions and sometimes needs to extend the servers for business applications. We are not dealing with financial applications, and in most cases, it is used for virtualization. I have extensive experience in this and have been searching for a solution for a long time without any issues.

Support is the most valuable feature of the solution.

The memory has room for improvement. I want the ability to upgrade the memory to avoid crashes.

The cost of the solution is high and has room for improvement.

I would like faster internet ports included.

I have been using the solution for over 15  years.

I give the stability a nine out of ten. 

The solution is easy to scale. We can always increase the number of CPUs to meet our customer's requirements.

The technical support is good. We receive all the parts we need quickly.

We are experienced in using the HPE servers so we don't have any difficulty installing new servers.

The implementations for our customers are completed in-house with our help.

The solution is expensive. I give the price a five out of ten.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

We are using HPE ProLiant DL Servers for all the databases and services in the bank I work at. We use HPE ProLiant DL Servers for service and for core banking and other computing systems, we use the HPE BladeSystems.

HPE ProLiant DL Servers are easy to use and the GUI is rather simple and intuitive. The Americans know how to make things beautiful. Their Japanese counterpart has outdated GUIs. There is a lot of other services and software that HPE provides for the server. The software can connect all the infrastructure to form a unified management or monitoring system.

In the HPE ProLiant DL Servers generation nine, there was a problem when the expansion cards were installed on the server. There was only a small amount of room for the top expansion cards that hand could insert or remove the cables inside.

I have been using HPE ProLiant DL Servers for approximately 10 years.

The stability of the HPE ProLiant DL Servers is very good.

I worked with HPE ProLiant DL Servers in different places and in different situations, I remember that there was a time we were having a disaster with high humidity in the room but we did not have any problems with the operations of the solution.

I have not used the technical support from HPE.

I have previously used the HPE BladeSystem.

When comparing the HPE ProLiant DL Servers to the HPE BladeSystem, the HPE BladeSystems are compact and need less space for installation. They can provide the same computing as the HPE ProLiant DL Servers in the same unit and are a lot easier to manage.

HPE ProLiant DL Servers have a higher price than Dell servers. However, the Japanese counterpart has the lowerest priced servers. The price of the HPE ProLiant DL Servers could improve, it could be less expensive.

I rate HPE ProLiant DL Servers an eight out of ten.

We've just found them so reliable and used them for so many years. We have found the quality and backup support reliable. They just tend to do what we want to do with them. So, they are very flexible, upgradable and versatile. Sometimes, you do have some issues but they tend to get repaired/replaced/fixed within a good time.

For us, it is more of reliability even though we have hardware maintenance.

Generally, we'll do 10 calls a month globally. With our offices all over the globe, 10 calls in a month are very minimal since we have 600 pieces of DL hardware. It's quite small.

A lot of where they can improve the product would be related to hot flexibility. If you want to change a DIMM, you have downtime to upgrade. It would be good if you could have hot DIMMs and hot CPUs, also for hard disk power supplies and bits. Hopefully, then there shall be no downtime. The biggest problem with our user base is downtime.

Stability is very good. Once the product is in, it seems to work. We do general maintenance. It's good.

Scalability can be a little bit difficult sometimes due to changing of CPUs which we try to over-spec. We don't need to scale up; we tend to replace after three years.

It gives us more because with passing time as technology increases, things get faster and better for us. There is more improvement.

We have looked at Dell and just recently looked at Dell FX2.

We will probably stick with HPE because of the long-time factor that we've had with them and other factors such as reliability and knowing the product. We know we're looking at HPE ConvergedSystem for our offices and that will be the next stage.

I've been in my company for 14 years. Initially we were using Compaq and now moved over to HPE. Thus, the setup took place a long time ago.

Have no doubts you'll be getting a product that will work. It will do what you want, as long as you follow the guidelines and best practices. You should speak to other people. The product will just tick along for its lifecycle. You will get the odd issue but it's fixable.

We've been more than happy with the DL product that we've used. We never buy them when they first come out; we always wait 6-12 months to buy them. Let somebody else do the testing during the first six months, even though they should be tested.