HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

We've got a whole lot of DL380's which are the standard 2U server. We've been switching more over to the blades using the BL460's. But, the ProLiant line all along just works, they're tanks. About the only thing we've ever had to fix is drives that go bad after a while, but usually that mostly happened after a heat incident. They just run. We've got some that have been out of warranty for four - five years and they're still running. G4s we go back to and love we have no reason to change.

For certain applications that we have to have for external connectivity it runs great. Our main security system has one of these little USB dongles that starts off the back end, I could make it on the blade, but then it'd block up one blade, so having a DL380 is great for us. It does everything we ever need.

I think we started buying HP servers ten years ago, and we've got a couple that may have been from that time that are still working. They're running great. Now we're not running it really heavy, but it's solid. I still like the 3.5 inch drives better than the 2.5 inch drives. They seem to last longer. Other than that, we've been very stable, very solid. You don't have to worry about, "Hey, is my server down today?"

ProLiant's a little tough. We realized that the other day, that we were running out of space on our C: drive. It's like, I can't just add to a physical drive. We ended up having to move that thing, making it a physical to virtual conversion. As far as other parts, if we need more storage on it, you can always add RAM. For the most part with the ProLiants, we generally buy it for a certain purpose and that's what it does so we don't have to do as much. On the SANs, we can always add an extra node, they'll allow you to connect that way. If we need to get larger, we can.

Most of them, we don't really have any issues there, but if you lose a drive and it's still on warranty, we get one. It works.

We were using Dell. Dell was the state recommended choice. Everybody said, "Oh, you got to buy Dell because we've got a relationship with them." They got my boss really mad over some stupid stuff. It was like two-hundred dollar set of rails, and so we said, "Okay, let's try HP's." We loved the first one, and we've been buying them, and Dell has been trying to get back in the door ever since and we just tell them to go away. It's like, "No, I'm not fixing what isn't broken. This works great, so we don't care what you've got."

We've been doing the ProLiants forever. It's getting a little tougher now. It used to be, you had everything on a CD or DVD, you pop that in, you run. Or you had the SmartStart disk. Now, you got their onboard administrator. They got the intelligent deployment guide or whatever the heck it's called. Sometimes it's a little less intuitive. Sometimes it's where technology can bite you, and it might be helpful to have a guy go on and say "Do this." Otherwise you pull it out of the box and go, "Okay, now what do I do?" We work through it, but some of my techs have had a little bit of trouble. I gave them a new server and said,"Deploy it.", and they're like "Well, how do I put an OS on it?" It took us a little while to figure that out. I know that somebody's thinking, "Hey, this is really great. It's all here, it's all inside." Great, some of us need a little more direction sometimes.

I think we looked around, but really it was Dell servers or HPs were about all that we had considered. Since we weren't going to buy Dell anymore, we said, "Well, we want to go with HP." We were never going to be one of those, "I'm going to go buy parts and make something." And, I know some guys do that and it's great, but we like to have at least the ability to go call somebody to get somebody to come and help. That's been probably chief on why we did that.

We've been extremely happy all along. I don't see a reason to go anywhere else. I don't see a reason to even try different things. For us right now getting adventurous is we bought a DL360 instead of a 380 and it's like, wow, that's a little small.

It's reliability, really. It just works. It's one of those we've been using for 10 plus years and I've been in the company for 10 years. We rarely have a failure; and it just keeps working. It kind of base builds, ready to go, whereas before you needed to add bits and pieces. We don't need to do that anymore. Just out of the box, plug it in and it goes.

It's been in for so long, it just works.

I think the big thing for us, which is unique, is a dedicated HPE Cloud offering in New Zealand. It would be quite cool. I don't know if that's actually feasible or viable for HPE. Cloud is something we're interested in, but the solutions in New Zealand aren't really up to it. So you have to go to Australia. You get latency issues.

Through 10 years of various iterations and a lot of cycles of a product every three years. We used to swap out but we're virtualization now, we're taking that in to account, so no issues. We have the odd drive failure, and that's about it.

On the ProLiant, we've opted not to go down the blade enclosure. We went the dedicated service of the DL380s and pretty much the scalability of that is around the network. We've got to look at some virtualization technologies there.

We've logged a few calls. They're amazing, really good. Over the years we've had a few hard-drive failures, yet it's all pretty seamless. We just put in a HPE Networking as well.

When I first started the company was looking at Dell, and I was a Compaq engineer in my day.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

The most valuable feature is reliability. We virtually have no problems with it. We run most of our applications on ProLiant DLs. We also run Exchange, and proprietary applications such as Attorney Information Manager and an accounting package called ProVantage.

It has improved our organization in terms of providing more speed and reliability while being low maintenance. We're totally dependent upon it as we move forward.

There's nothing that I would add to it, except maybe on the dashboard. There could be a little more analytics. I would like to see some proactive warnings about maintenance issues. If we were to have an issue, I'd like some more advanced warning. I’d like to see some alerting features. We’ve only a few issues, but I would like to see some alerting improvements.

In terms of stability, It's a perfect fit. We have had no stability issues whatsoever.

It's been very scalable. Maintenance wise it's a non-issue.

We have used their 24-hour tech support. They've been very good and responsive. They meet the deadline.

Before choosing HPE, we looked at Dell. Between Dell and HPE, I think you get a lot of similar bells and whistles but I think in the end HPE is the king.

HPE has excellent maintenance agreements. They provide on-site, 24-hour response times. They deliver agreements. We're not ones to readily replace equipment so they have good extended warranties, which we rely on pretty regularly. This was one of the more important criteria because I work for a law firm and they're not big on shelling out money, unless they absolutely have to. We get the biggest bang for the buck with HPE. Again, I think it's the warranty service that you receive from the HPE that makes the difference. It's reliable. You should always shop around for price. Vendors are always willing to compete in the marketplace.

We are system integrators in a fiber optics company. We use this solution mainly as high computational devices, but also we use it as a storage device.

The deployment is data center-based.

This solution is perfect. From the time of purchase, it was state-of-the-art, and still, after five, 10 years, they still meet our demands extremely well.

It is easy to use and it also has good performance.

The latest generation has made good improvements in power consumption. G6, and G7, which is approximately 10-year-old technology, have some issues with power consumption.

The installation could be simplified.

I would also like to pay less for the out-of-the-box product, but everything else is okay.

I have been working with HPE ProLiant DL Servers for ten years.

We are using generations six to nine. G6, G7, G8, and G9.

The stability of this product is very good.

We deployed it in our network, and our network is the backbone of the company. Through our backbone, we serve millions of end users, but indirect users are internet service providers that use our services, which is approximately 50.

I have never contacted technical support because everything worked perfectly.

The installation is reasonably complex.

The length of time it takes to deploy depends on the software that we are installing, but it can take a couple of days, approximately.

We have two engineers and one technician to maintain it.

We had the help of a system integrator.

The iLO (integrated lights out) license is very expensive, but the functionality you receive is worth it.

We are fully satisfied with this solution and I recommend it for others who are interested in using it.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate HPE ProLiant DL Servers a 10 out of 10.

They are good because we can isolate the customer's various stuff onto machines that have everything dedicated, rather than being a blade, where I share stuff with others and they do something dumb.

What would make it better from my point of view is if HPE spent more time on testing with the actual built-in Red Hat Linux drivers, as opposed to always trying to say, "Use our driver."

The stability is pretty good.

It's scaling where we need to go. The issues we have are more the application not scaling; application design issues, not hardware issues. The hardware will go further than our application will.

The technical support sucks, would be understating it, because the first line and the second line support tend to give out stupid suggestions that are completely useless, and they aren't listening to anything. It takes a lot of time to get through them, and that is every call I've been on with them. Oftentimes, I've got a very low expectation of HPE, and they go below my expectation a few times.

Initial setup was relatively straightforward.

We have some IBM machines, but we're mostly an HPE shop. I believe the only reason we bought the IBM was because at the time, HPE didn't have the feature we needed.