HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

• They're incredibly reliable and we have no issues running them.
• We rely on the central management because we have a lot of remote locations where we have only limited IT staff.
• We only need to upgrade every five to six years.
• We can buy hardware from any vendor that will work with these servers.

Not only are they reliable, but the management interface is also great for us. Also, HP's support team knows the drivers of our system, so we can rely on them. We're confident that HP will deliver the latest drivers for the DL series to allow us to run the latest Microsoft applications.

We run many apps on it, such as MS Exchange, test development systems, and SQL servers. For development, we run RHEL.

There's always room for improvement somewhere.

I personally used HP servers since I entered the IT game back in '97, and then still continue to use HP servers in different companies.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We're very satisfied with the stability.

We have about 1,600 users worldwide. We have 2 ProLiant servers running all our EMEA and Asia mailboxes.

The technical support from HP is one of the reasons why we're still running HP ProLiant. Anytime we have a technical issue such as a hardware exchange, we just call HP and they take care of it.

The DL series it's quite easy to use. It's a commodity product and you can buy it at any reseller. If you have any technical reliability issues with other vendors, switch to the DL series.

Flexibility, scalability, and being a standard. I've used during my career. It's useful to know exactly where to go for information and where to go for support. It just works.

Just that support is really easy to get a hold of and when things are not functioning, they are able to get the right parts within the right SLAs and it just happens.

I would like to see an on-demand model. I think they are already going there. I would like to see something in which you can move your workloads to a cloud kind of offering. That would be something that would be ideal in the future.

From a pricing perspective, a consumption based model would be optimal. There are times when a complete purchase isn’t required and a short term burst of compute is needed.

The stability is really good.

The level of scalability depending on the product you choose. With the DL specifically, you can have as many hosts as you want or as much storage as you want. It is very modular. You can just keep bolting things on, essentially like LEGO.

I have used technical support, but not recently. In the past, they were really good when I used them.

I've only been with the organization a short time. The decision to go with this product was made before I started. The vendor, who did our infrastructure as a service offering, is an HPE partner. So we didn't really choose the solution, but rather, it came to us. And I wouldn't have chosen anything else anyway.

When selecting a vendor, I look for flexibility and support. Everyone has a good sales pitch. However, when it comes to actually executing on it and supporting it long-term, those are the really important parts that not a lot of people consider up front.

I was not involved in the setup at this organization.

Just make sure you look at the total cost of ownership and the long-term use case of what you're actually doing, versus the problem that you're trying to solve right now.

• Manageability
• Ease of maintenance
• Convenience
• Standardization

Ease of management and the low-cost ownership.

Since the management went from HPE SIM into OneView, the problem is that the older generations are not supported by OneView. The new ones are supported by OneView. We have two management platforms to manage these DL servers and it's kind of a pain in the neck. We like integration.

It's very stable.

It is scalable. The blade systems are very scalable. We just add blades as close as we need them.

I have used technical support, and they are good. Sometimes the telephone technicians go through the manual instead of with us. We already told them that we changed the stuff and we just need the part. It takes a little long sometimes.

The solution was already there when I joined, but it was the much older generation. We've been using DL380 since the first generation and we are now at Generation 9.

I was involved in the setup and it was straightforward.

HPE DLs are very easy to implement. There is a lot more manageability now than there used to be. The IDOL 4S is great at managing.

When selecting a vendor, we like to have an all-in-one solution, i.e., one company behind all the different products. We like to be able to have support when needed and a partner who can give us stuff as we need it.

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.

The nice thing that we have with the whole ProLiant platform is there's a lot of commonality among the platform. We buy enough servers such that we always have spare parts on hand. When we do need spare parts, HPE is quick to provide them to us. Likewise, when we have issues that require more technical support, the support from HPE has been pretty top notch.

The way that we have used the ProLiant platform within our business, being that it's such a widespread usage, it gives us the capability to develop in-house expertise with those systems, provide assistance to our 300+ divisions when they have issues with either their system or they need some sort of help internally. We have the capability and the knowledge to reach out to them from a global IT team.

I would say that it would be nice if there was a more streamlined approach to getting drivers or looking up system information from HPE's website. That's the one thing that I did appreciate on the Dell side, you put in a serial number, you see the exact build, you see all the drivers associated with that machine. That is probably the only thing that I see missing from the HPE side is a very easy to use method to get this. It does exist, there is a method to get the information, but it's not as streamlined.

I want to say if we've had any issues with stability, there's always going to be issues that servers encounter. The nice thing with the ProLiant series is that you also get alerting as to the health of the system. That has helped us to stave off any issues with those servers or services because we are able to get a transition to another host or we're able to repair it within a timely window before it goes bad.

Everything is scaled out exactly how we always anticipated it to.

We have used it a couple of times over the last year. We had an issue with some disk platform extensions on a number of ProLiant servers. HPE was able to quickly diagnose the issue and get us back up and running.

Within our IT group, we do have some older HP UX Blade infrastructure. We do have some other platforms such as Cisco's Unified System. Not much else besides that.

Initially within my company's IT space, I was not involved with the initial decision to go with ProLiant. I'll be honest, I came from a Dell background. The division that I had worked for prior to our globalization in our IT group was primarily Dell. There have been a number of elements to using HP's that have been more beneficial from my point of view.

I always have colleagues who are looking to implement new servers within their divisions. As part of my responsibility, I am the conduit by which divisions can seek out additional assistance for getting servers. I am in that space a lot. I typically go over the benefits that we see within our global IT group and explain to them the efficiencies that can be seen by going to the ProLiant platform. Showing how the system can provide good alerting, good stability, and explaining that within the global IT group, if they have additional concerns or needs, that we can support them because we use the platform.

• 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.

I am impressed with the tool’s stability.

I would like the solution to improve its storage and performance. Also, I would like to replicate data between on-premises and cloud in future versions.

I have been using the solution for 14 years.

I would rate the tool’s stability a ten out of ten. I never had any issues with its stability.

We are not concerned about the tool's scalability since our systems get replaced after three to four years.

I would rate the tool’s setup an eight out of ten.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The most common use cases for HPE ProLiant DL Servers are application servers, web servers, and screen servers.

HPE ProLiant DL Servers are customizable, but when you first deploy them, you basically have to rebuild configurations on them. This is true for large orders. But for small orders, you will be tied up with previous configurations of some other brand like Dell.

I have been selling HPE ProLiant DL Servers for 11 years. I configure HP ProLiant and SimpliVity products every day for the purpose of selling. I am not an engineer. I am a sales executive. 

HPE ProLiant DL Servers is stable. 

HPE ProLiant DL Servers is scalable. 

We are quite satisfied with the technical support. We have a direct contact with our HP support. They are always very useful.

HPE ProLiant DL Servers is easy to deploy.