HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

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.

The scalability. We use it for our infrastructure because we keep up with the latest generation of technology and so the scalability, the form factor, everything plays well into our data center infrastructure.

It's helpful to have standardized platforms, and so from that standpoint it works very well for our environment at our company because we have a vast distributed data center infrastructure across multiple locations so it helps to have standardized platforms to reduce operating expense and extend the lifecycle of the product. It would just be ease of maintainability and standardization to minimize.

The number of CPUs and maybe administrative interfaces. Nothing that I would site as a concern now. It's the continued maturing of the platform. There's always room for growth but I can't point to more specifics.

It's scalable just based on the physical placements of the hardware and the white space involved on the floor.

We have others that handle any deployment issues.

The more we're able to standardize on a single platform, it lowers our long term cost and it lowers support cost. I think it can be expensive, but in our particular function, we don't get involved in that aspect. The funding aspects are a totally different group, so as long as the technical parameters are met, we don't address that.

They give us the storage requirements and then we coordinate with the teams to do it. As far as competition, I don't get involved.

HPE ProLiant DL Servers are easy to maintain. When we need to update the firmware or we need to log on remotely via the IO management interface. It's very convenient, easy. The supply chain is fast when we need to replace some failed hardware, such as hard drives or power supplies. Most of the time, it only takes a few days. The HPE ProLiant DL Servers services are officially certified for Red Hat usage which is a big advantage.

The solution could improve by providing more best practices from an architectural point of view. What are some recommended configurations for use, such as in a VM environment? HP provides some best practices but they are based on VMware, not on Red Hat. It would benefit for others to see the different use cases. How the HPE ProLiant DL Servers were used in the context of Red hat virtualization, and some configurations as an example to allow us to identify some points that we can improve in our platform. We could make our system more reliable and scalable.

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

The stability of the solution is good.

The scalability is good, but it depends on the virtualization software that is used. It does not only depend on the hardware.

All of our employees use this solution because all of our infrastructures are on HPE ProLiant DL Servers.

We open support tickets when needed with HP. They answer pretty fast and the HP engineers are knowledgeable. The agents answer specifically to our needs and we don't have any issue with them.

The solution is web-based making the installation straightforward.

The time it takes for the full implementation depends on the project. The time can vary if it is a small, medium, or large project. This time could also vary between the specific platform that we need to build. The time it takes is typically between three to four weeks.

We did the implementation ourselves.

I would recommend this solution to others.

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

• It works
• It's easy to implement
• It's really good in terms of maintenance

The new function, which is coming at the moment, with the online firmware updates - that's one of the problems we're struggling with, with our customers, to have downtime - these live online updates are really, really a benefit we're waiting for.

It has been consistently stable over the years.

At the moment, all the migration from the rack mount to the enclosure systems, the implementation of storage - all of this is growing. With HPE, we have no problems in this area.

Tech support is perfect. We have HPE engineers on-site, and also the delivery of parts, it works really well.

The problem with the updates is sometimes our internal customer with the validation and qualification of the system. But the tools which HPE offers are working. It's really a question of change management.

We have a good relationship with HPE, they offer the products we need. They come back with solutions. It's uncomplicated to deal with HPE.

They are simple, modular and great machines to work with. They offer the best management interface.

Their modularity offers good local storage and connectivity options. We can expand the disk capacity, processor and memory based on our needs. The solution is easy to maintain.

Boot times are relatively slow. Legacy BIOS options are tricky, but discoverable and manageable with experience.

We have been using this solution for around seven years.

There haven’t really been any stability issues, but we have faced server rebooting during high CPU usage periods.

There have not been any scalability issues. The solution is extremely scalable. Most of the software and peripheral devices on the market are tested and certified on these platforms. They are reliable.

The technical support level is good. The support engineers have the skills needed to troubleshoot the issues.

I have used UCS. They are bit messy with their fiber interconnect and have too many configuration and maintenance activities involved. They are expensive compared to HPE ProLiant servers.

IMHO, you cannot get a more straightforward initial setup.

ILO licensing is bought separately, but it is worth it. It gives you that extra power to manage the entire server remotely and do the following:

• Re-image the server
• Change BIOS and storage options
• Control devices
• Monitor resource usage

You can basically do all day-to-day activities remotely that you can do with physical access to the server.

There is very stiff competition from Dell in recent times. One could go the other way based on the purpose and ROI you are seeking.

You wouldn’t regret purchasing this solution. However, do your homework on your needs and talk to relevant guys for any info you are missing.

HPE offers three rack mount server categories and several models in each variant. Carefully choose the one that suits you the best. There are those that occupy 2U and others that occupy 1U. This could bring down the space and rack usage drastically.

Take the following steps:

1. Find out the compatible processors from the server specifications.
2. Visit Intel‘s web site and carefully compare all the details of the supported processors.
3. Base your decision on the number of cores, speed, cache size, your usage, and the processor that you would like to combine with the server.

The reliability of the hardware is a valuable feature. The way it looks is valuable as well, because when we have to set it up at a worker's terminal space, we can just see a nice face on the server and that’s important. It's easy to set up and you can get parts very easily.

The benefit is that it goes well with our customers. Customers are happy with that. We sell them, and that's how we make money.

I would like to see better support of monitoring protocols.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any crashes in over two years of deployment, so that's good.

Scalability is really only an issue for software. ProLiant is only hardware, so scalability doesn't matter at all.

I was involved in the setup and it was straightforward. I can just plug in a server.

We were considering Dell and some other vendors.

When selecting a vendor, the ratio between the price and quality is the main thing. I don't want to be spending too much, but I still want to get good quality. It just depends on what you are looking for. If you are looking for a very inexpensive, bare bones server, then you should go for a cheaper solution. If you are looking to buy a bunch of servers, then go to Dell, for example, because they're very aggressive with their prices. HPE is just in between. It's very good. It is a bit more expensive than the others, but the quality is where you expect it to be.

We like the reliability of the server. We also like the iLO abilities of the server ... that's what my guys like the most.

The hardware is very dependable. We don't have a lot of downtime. Whenever we do need to call support, support is always very fast and able to jump on things. That's what we like about it.

I think maybe just improving the manageability since we would like a single pane of glass. I think there may be a few features that my team might want to see added. We use it a lot for VMware so anymore things that they can tightly integrate with VMware would be great.

We've had other vendors trying to pitch similar hardware to us but it's something we don't even consider just because of the stability and the reliability of the HPE hardware.

That's a non-issue for us. They're easy to scale especially with the blade chassis. We stack several of them into a rack, stick in more blades whenever we need to.

We don't use them very often. Usually we have a minor issue, a hard drive or something like that so we really don't use it very often but when we need to, it's always very good.

The Dell servers were four to five years old. They were already getting close to end of life and end of support, so it was time to upgrade.

It was straightforward. At the time, we were a very small shop. I think we replaced six Dell servers that were there at the time with six ProLiants. Since then, our company has grown tenfold. Now we still have a few of the rack mount ProLiant’s but we have six blade chassis that we're now using.

I left my position as a system engineer at HPE into this company, and I knew the ProLiants inside and out. That was the selling point right there, and we didn't look at anything else.

I would tell them to strongly take a look at the HPE. Go ahead and do a bake off if you want to. If they want to prove a concepts with the Dells, Dells will give them a way to you to try them out. If you rack them up side-by-side, I think all the features set and just the reliability of HPE makes them come out ahead.

They are very easy to build and very reliable. On a server, that's the most important thing: reliability. Everything is locked together. They're just nice and quick and easy.

Servers are all about reliability and the HP ProLiant is well priced. You can get other reliable servers, but you're going to pay much more. These are very well priced for what they are.

I find the software for the servers can sometimes be a bit flaky. Upgrades can be flaky, too. For example, you get the HP easy set-up when you want to set up one from scratch. It's not uncommon that when you have to phone HP, they say, "Well you can't use the latest version, go back two versions," or that kind of thing. I would say where they control the servers, that's where they let themselves down. They let themselves down on their software.

They're very stable. With HP servers, you turn them on and you can forget about them. That's why we use them; that's why we like them. Very rarely will HP servers actually go down and give you a hassle.

Scalability depends which ones you buy. They are scalable and you can add to them the whole time. You can add drives and processors. You just have to make sure that the server you buy is scalable because there's no point buying a single processor server if you think one day you might need four processors. You've got to allow for scalability when you buy the server. You've got to be thinking forward.

On the whole, I would say their tech support is quite good. They always come back to you. The only people I can really compare them to in that price range would be Dell. You can't compare as the HP tech support is much, much better than Dell. It's easier to get through and they're more helpful when you actually get them on the phone.

At this price range we've bought Dell and we've bought IBM. We wouldn't go back to either of them. We would, however, go back to HP with no problem. If someone really wants a cheap server, they should go with Fujitsu because it's good value for money. But you can't compare their build quality to HP. HP build quality is much better.

Dell servers are very nice although sales service is diabolical. IBM -- just didn't like the build. Very fiddly, not easy to put together, wasn't intuitive. HP servers -- you get the parts and it's intuitive. You know exactly what you're doing; it's easy. Also, the IBM servers were very, very noisy. With Fujitsu, it just comes down to price.